Yes, of course. The limiting word is aesthetic. Define that word and then find correspondence in design examples.
I realize that your question presumes a deconstructive answer, one that feeds the hopelessly rigid and vain hope that a stable universalist definition can suffice for a subjective and infinitely variable subject. Why do you persist in this elementary quest? However, logic notwithstanding, there is a vague sense that the human brain does have 'aesthetic preference' for certain kinds of patterns that one might say are efficient, that is, lacking excess. The basic human aesthetic standard is probably the human body because an attraction to it is essential for eros and propagation at least. So what is an aesthetic design for the human body? It is amazing in a way that with the human body few inches this way or that, a bulge here instead of there, and so on can elicit a sense of either aesthetic delight or repulsion. We can easily find historic periods where one sort of aesthetic body was valued over another that today is found repulsive but these socially constructed bodies need to be balanced by the longer term preferences for a standard form, one that was actually measured statistically by both the ancient Greeks and the Italian Renaissance sculptors, among others. For example, a stout or heavyset 19C American male image was considered a sign of prosperity, authority, manliness whereas today it is scorned. Similar reversals can be found for images of women at different times. When the notion of 'efficient' is applied, a leaner, more supple, graceful , healthy, unexaggerated body form is the most prevailing human body image and is thus probably an aesthetically pleasing image to most people at most times (yet, again, always in balance with changing social constructs). Designs that conform to a preferred human body shape, however abstractly, may be as close to a universal definition as we can get for the 'aesthetic' (or beautiful, using the traditional definition of the word). wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, June 26, 2012 12:48:54 AM Subject: Bad Aesthetic Design? Is there such a thing as that anymore?
