Experience Aesthetics is a framework developed to create a taxonomy of everyday aesthetic experiences. It is used to form a foundation for delving into human experiences that are intertwined with design matters.
This framework serves to broaden and deepen design questions by prioritizing aesthetic encounters within the design process, aiming to enrich lives and augment the value of design endeavors.
Researcher
Auldyn Matthews-McGee (Professor)
2 months work in progress
Experience Aesthetics framework, Figma
Inspired by philosopher Yuriko Saito's book, The Aesthetics of the Familiar, this framework intends to create a mental field of familiar experiences that evokes emotion and feelings. How we perceive, process, and structure sensory information in a qualitative way is at the core of this thinking. The goal is to build an experience map from your story to create a structure of feelings and emotions related to your narrative.
One consideration to take into account would be the amount of cards. Currently there are 27 core values and over 200+ subvalues. This lengthy process could potentially deter the proper usage of the framework.
With this timeline, I interviewed 10 people from different backgrounds who all had experience with the design process, and hosted 2 workshops with 30+ students.
While the overall framework helps them develop a final goal of what they want their project/product to be, many struggle with the size of the deck. However, they also understand the trade-off of categorizing values would limit their experience when ideating.
Some potential benefits would be the inclusion of visuals and removing text as the amount of scannable information is lacking.
As this is an ongoing project, some next steps include workshopping and more interviews to discover patterns and insights. I'll also be conducting more research such as mapping core values to Max-Neef's matrix of needs and satisfiers to ground the validity.
Another pattern that I've discovered was how people used the card and what information leads them to their decision. With this in mind, I'll be iterating on the design of the card to better suit its purpose.
I'm very thankful for Auldyn as my advisor for this project as she has helped me immensely from understanding the framework to supporting my ideas when it comes to testing and insights. I'm looking forward to the outcome in hopes that these physical cards will be used in academia and/or industry in the future!