On Beauty
Some thoughts about the nature of aesthetics
Humans have long searched for an objective measure of beauty; a repeatable, predictable methodology more reliable than the beholder’s eye. In a creative era where every aspect of a design product (in the broadest sense) can be challenged with telemetry, this seems more urgent to those naturally concerned with the aesthetic imperative in the man-made world. Those who wield the data seemingly hold the power.
Does it matter? Even the most empirically-minded of us would need to acknowledge the aesthetic — what our senses consume in order to understand the world — response. We make decisions based on our preferences. We like the look of this watch over that one, or one piece of fruit over another at the market. We must be sexually attracted to our mates. The reason you’re reading this likely has more to do with the attractive accompanying graphic than the content of the article. If the difference is dramatic enough we’re willing to sacrifice utility for beauty. Sometimes even against our own best interests. The danger lies in diminishing the role of emotion, and of beauty on it. We aren’t as rational as we like to think we are.
One evolutionary theory that Darwin himself acknowledged later in life, suggests that aesthetic response has as much to do with evolution as natural selection. Consider the way a Satin Bowerbird obsessively arranges human detritus to attract a mate or the elaborate markings of the male Great Argus. Beauty, it would seem, holds incredible, innate power. And where man finds power, he will wish to harness it.
There are few numbers more recognizable than 1.618 — The Golden — Divine! — Ratio, man’s attempts to harness beauty through proportion. The problem with numerical data however is that it cannot take the whole system into account. Nature, we know, is almost wholly unpredictable to us, yet consecutively and consistently beautiful. The power of beauty may be within reach, but it eludes the grasp. There must be more to it.
Over time there has been a general, empirical agreement that simplicity, symmetry, balance, clarity, contrast, and proportion are the foundations of the beautiful — that more that we seek. Even so, simply adjusting the volume of these quantities does not ensure beauty. The Golden Ratio may provide a guide, but it is mono-dimensional. How do we harness seven dimensions at once? The Parthenon, often held up as irrefutable proof of mathematically derived beauty, is beautiful for far more than its proportions. Humans want to do so predictably (but do we really?) however, is it even possible? We’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. We’ve applied proportions that purport to define beauty to our own bodies. The mathematician George David Birkhoff determined that beauty could be determined by the formula M=O/C, where Beauty (M) is a measure of the relationship of Organization (O) to Complexity (C). This is something we constantly debate — how much is too much simplicity? Where is there to little friction or dissonance to spark fascination?
As a young designer I was obsessed with uncovering the rules of proportion and complexity in graphic composition. It wasn’t something I was trained to do; rather, I felt it in my body, a certainly that there was a there there that I could unlock. I would intensely examine the work of other designers trying to discern a rule for the number of graphic devices, their density and relation to one another. How much consistency must there be in order for me to see the system? How much complexity must there be in order to appreciate it? I’ve since concluded that the rules I was after do indeed exist, but do so far outside any means I have to lasso and tame them. The external search, I feel, is a distraction. The formula for beauty lies within, in our gut. More productive is the hard, humbling work of understanding our emotions and the mental models that drive them. We are a seamless part of the world we exist in, and do not stand apart from it, as isolated in our bodies as we may be. The aesthetic response to beauty is within us, but we’ve long lost the ability to recognize and trust it. We know beauty because the universe is beautiful, and we are the universe. The search to understand beauty is also an unlearning.
Ultimately, beauty isn’t subjective, its math is simply too chaotic for us to understand. It’s only magic because we don’t yet understand it well enough, but we have clues. Fractals are a mathematical representation of beauty, of simplicity and complexity, of form, scale, and pattern. For our purposes, you could consider the forms of strange attractors as similarly beautiful. The rules of beauty are evident, if not explicit. Should they be? There is so much human joy in the unexpected discovery of beauty. What value would beauty have without its mystery, when all aesthetics become banal — an entropic aesthetic end-state? I think beauty cannot live without some amount of mystery. Surprise, then, is yet another vector of beauty for our concern. Now we have eight things to worry about.
Another clue lies in the limitations of our ability to comprehend the world around us. Out of the 11 million bits of information our senses consume every second, we only consciously process 40 bits. The majority of our experience is largely unknown to us, but it is nonetheless sensed. So how do we know what’s important to focus on? Our emotions are our guide, more than we know or may want. Emotions are how our subconscious communicates with our consciousness, the result of an almost instantaneous synthesis. The experience of beauty is not so different from falling in love. Both urge you to fill your senses with more.
The art in design is in the rendering of intent or, more accurately, the closest approximation of it. The tragedy of man is that we can never really know the world, but the senses give us our best access to it. Aesthetics exist whether we intend them or not; the objective world exists (probably), we use our senses to access it (whatever it is), creating aesthetic value when we’re either consistent with the mental model of the receiver, and sometimes even when we challenge it. But we must do so by design, not by default.
This makes it extremely important for us to choose wisely what we present to the consumer of our designs. That’s the craft — it’s not about a rote allegiance to details, but the ability to focus with intensity on the right things. When it’s gotten right, beauty is created. To both the creator and consumer, this feels like flow, the weightless sense of time and space that occurs when something holds our attention completely. We feel beauty. Not just in our heads, but physically; beauty is an emotion. When we go with our gut, we’re really saying we’re letting our emotions drive. Good instincts are these gut feelings filtered through deliberate personal reflection.
The most powerful center of authority in the brain lies within the subconscious. This is where we process the unknown that we sense, those other 40 bits. The mental models we create to comprehend this information trigger emotions — messages in bottles tossed into the current of consciousness. We my not be able to control this process, but we do have choices of what we do with it. These choices then either reinforce or balance the architecture of our neurons; our nature is to be plastic and always changing. We may evolve aesthetics, but they evolve us just the same.
Beauty is a living thing. Beauty is a dance. It isn’t just timeless, but also very much of the moment. Our mental models about beauty change with time. Beauty is a zeitgeist as much as it is eternal. We gravitate toward the novel. It gets our attention, but it can’t hold it for very long, at least not without substance. It does change us however, informing our reaction to the next zeitgeist, and the next. We develop our sense of beauty over time.
Aesthetics connect us, and they have the power to unite us. The models of the world we create are wholly ours, and cannot be shared (at least, not yet). But we can find patterns and make some hypotheses. The danger is in being too rational, too reductive. The universe exists to be sensed. Beauty exists in the only world we know (the subjective), and the world we don’t know (the objective). It is both measurable and mysterious, as it should be. But perhaps only for now. Beauty most fully exists in the ambiguity of boundaries, where there is diversity, creativity, and innovation.
Beauty balances complexity and simplicity. It is subjective, but only along certain, detectible axes. Context can be understood at a broad scale, and hypothesized more granularly, but it cannot always be known. And maybe that’s where the beauty really lies — with the joy of its discovery, and the changes it therefore ignites within us.
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