Abstract
Cognitive psychology has, to a considerable extent, investigated the capacity of humans and other living creatures to categorize objects and events. The formation of categories enables us to apply previous experiences to new ones, to make inferences, to make predictions about the future, and they provide efficiency in communication - just to mention a few examples. Important questions, however, are how categories arise at all (i.e. whether, or to what extent, they are the result of environmental features or constructive processes on the part of the categorizer), and how they are represented in consciousness. Numerous cognitive psychologists have, following the psychologist Eleanor Rosch's initial work (1975; 1978; 1994), attempted to investigate the nature and acquirement of categories in general, most notably that of taxonomic categories. In this paper, I intend to give an outline as to how psychological categorization research might have implications for understanding some significant aspects of our preferences for instances of “design”. More specifically, I shall argue that matches and moderate mismatches between instances (and/or types) of design and beholders' mental representations and schemata may lead to hedonic effects and thus may have a bearing on their (aesthetic) preferences.
Keywords
Aesthetics, cognitive psychology, psychology of art
Citation
Ranta, M. (2006) DESIGN: Category Formation, Prototypicality and (Aesthetic) Preference, in Friedman, K., Love, T., Côrte-Real, E. and Rust, C. (eds.), Wonderground - DRS International Conference 2006, 1-4 November, Lisbon, Portugal. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2006/researchpapers/86
DESIGN: Category Formation, Prototypicality and (Aesthetic) Preference
Cognitive psychology has, to a considerable extent, investigated the capacity of humans and other living creatures to categorize objects and events. The formation of categories enables us to apply previous experiences to new ones, to make inferences, to make predictions about the future, and they provide efficiency in communication - just to mention a few examples. Important questions, however, are how categories arise at all (i.e. whether, or to what extent, they are the result of environmental features or constructive processes on the part of the categorizer), and how they are represented in consciousness. Numerous cognitive psychologists have, following the psychologist Eleanor Rosch's initial work (1975; 1978; 1994), attempted to investigate the nature and acquirement of categories in general, most notably that of taxonomic categories. In this paper, I intend to give an outline as to how psychological categorization research might have implications for understanding some significant aspects of our preferences for instances of “design”. More specifically, I shall argue that matches and moderate mismatches between instances (and/or types) of design and beholders' mental representations and schemata may lead to hedonic effects and thus may have a bearing on their (aesthetic) preferences.