The Shaping of Form: Exploring Designers’ Use of Aesthetic Knowledge

Observations

The first author followed the three projects from the beginning to the end. S/he attended 79 meetings, during which s/he took careful notes and pictures of people and artefacts. S/he also attended 17 additional meetings (see Table 1). Finally, s/he had several informal conversations with managers, designers, engineers and clients. Lacking a design background, his/her participation in the projects consisted of the performance of various roles (e.g. collecting information for the project, writing down minutes and taking pictures during meetings). Drawing upon overt involvement, but not performing the role of a team member stricto sensu, he/she managed to balance the roles of participant (‘going native’) and observer (remaining objective) (Spradley, 1980).

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Table 1.

Data sources and use.

Data source	Type of data	Use in the analysis
Observations	Field notes from project meeting attendance (79 meetings: 24 from Project Car, 35 from Project Chair, and 20 from Project Store Window). Extensive and detailed record of social interaction, conversations, and practices observed in the three projects from the early stages until final presentations.	Develop an ethnographic story of the design process at Continuum, identify designers’ common practices, and understand how designers relied on their intuition and aesthetic knowledge when defining properties of new objects and spaces. Triangulate interpretations emerging from interviews.
	Field notes from organizational meeting attendance (17 meetings). Brief account of the content of 1 ‘brainstorming day’, 3 practice induction meetings, 6 ‘visual library’ meetings, 5 ‘lunchtime series’ project stories meetings, and 2 ‘lunch with the founder’ meetings.	Familiarize ourselves with the organizational context, gain trust of informants, and understand designers’ practices and the outcomes of these practices.
	Informal conversations. Informal talk with managers, designers, engineers and support staff, ranging from brief exchanges to longer talks before and after meetings, and during work breaks.	Informally discuss insights from observations, clarify uncertainties regarding project-related decisions and support emerging interpretations.
	Pictures. Visual documentation of material and textual artefacts produced during work meetings (boards, thumbnails, sketches, etc.)	Keep record of the outcome of designers’ practices, and share it with the second author
Interviews	Preliminary interviews (17) with all senior and middle managers, to investigate Continuum’s history, culture and work processes.	Familiarize ourselves with the organizational context.
	Debriefing interviews (15 – 5 with team Car, 6 with team Chair, and 4 with team Store Window) to discuss insights or observations gathered during project meetings; we interviewed key informants for each project twice, at the beginning and at the end of the projects.	Integrate observations with informants’ accounts, to improve our understanding of how aesthetic knowledge, knowing and intuition interact in shaping the design of new objects and spaces.
	Focused interviews on past projects (20) understanding the main activities performed by designers, the most recurrent challenges they had to face, and the conditions facilitating or hindering the phases of the creative process.
Archival data	Company-related documents. Guide for newcomers, internal presentations of the three groups, guidelines for project managers, maps of the development process.	Familiarize ourselves with the organizational context.
	Project-related documents. Design briefs, meeting minutes, project updates, correspondence with stakeholders, clients’ presentations.	Support, integrate and triangulate evidence from observations and interviews.

Semi-structured interviews

The first author also conducted 52 semi-structured interviews: 17 were preliminary interviews with senior managers, 15 debriefing interviews with members of the project teams, and 20 retrospective interviews focused on some past projects (see Table 1).

Archival data

Intranet documents, including the guide for newcomers, internal presentations of the practices, guidelines for project managers, maps of the development process and so on, were helpful in familiarizing ourselves with the organizational context. Other archival data, such as presentations, case studies of past projects, meeting minutes, project updates, correspondence with stakeholders, pictures, design briefs, as well as objects produced and/or used in the course of the projects supported the interpretation of the dynamics we observed.

Learning and definition

At the beginning of each project, designers agreed with clients on a common definition of the main goal to be achieved through a specific design, what they referred to as the ‘design intent’ – i.e. the fundamental goal to be achieved by the project through design choices – and the ‘design attributes’ – i.e. the emotional responses and symbolic associations to be elicited by the formal properties of an object (see Table 3). For example, Project Chair’s designers, together with their client, defined the design intent as to make the chair ‘the new reference point for patient room aesthetics’, and the desired attributes as to ‘promote the recovery and wellness of patients’ and ‘inspire a sense of optimism in users’ (both patients and caregivers) (see Table 2 for other projects).

After having defined the overall goal of the project, designers engaged directly with prospective users to develop an understanding of their latent and unarticulated needs. The envisioning of the new hospital chair, for instance, was preceded by one month of field research, which they referred to as ‘in-context research’. During this period, designers interviewed and observed patients and nurses to understand how these two types of users interacted with hospital chairs. As a designer involved in Project Chair explained:

Sometimes, I don’t know about the product necessarily – especially if it’s a medical device. So the research that we do and being able to experience the product by myself are very important, not only to understand something new, but also to feel more comfortable with the use of the product – how the product would be used, how the product would be sold, how the product makes people feel – so that later on, when I design, I design towards that. (Adam, industrial designer)

These observation and first-hand experiences led designers to conclude that most current chairs looked ‘institutional’, ‘corporate’, ‘dull’, ‘cumbersome’ and even ‘discouraging’ (see Table 2). This conclusion helped them refine the intended design attributes, by specifying that, in order to facilitate patients’ recovery and to support their wellbeing, the new chair needed ‘to look welcoming, to feel warm and soft, and to communicate positive emotions (joy, optimism, etc.)’, as explained in an early internal presentation.

Designers also conducted what they referred to as a ‘competitive survey’ of the form of existing products: they visited stores to purchase competitors’ products, and they browsed books, magazines and websites to develop deeper insights into aesthetic trends and user tastes. They reviewed existing ‘design languages’ (a term they used to refer to coherent sets of visual properties that characterized objects and spaces) and they mapped current ‘design landscapes’ (visual comparison of the most common design languages to highlight relationships between formal properties and the meanings they conveyed) to inspire choices about how to express the design intent in formal properties (see Table 2). As Figure 1 shows, in creating the design landscape of Project Chair, designers did not limit themselves to reviewing existing hospital chairs, but also studied the typical design language of office and airline chairs to identify ways to differentiate aesthetically and symbolically the chair under development from these other chairs.

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Figure 1.

‘Design Landscape’ of Project Chair.

Designers looked for inspiration on materials, colours, textures, finishes, etc. in objects or spaces that were not strictly related to the project. As another designer involved in Project Chair explained after a meeting:

When I get a project, I start to have thoughts of how that [project] relates to other things that I have seen, references, you know, like in other areas that are similar, like architecture or even fashion, and I might start collecting and finding examples of forms or other details that I feel instinctively or intuitively attracted to … If you look at some of the sketches that are up on the walls [showing the armrests of the chair], you can see some details that have been inspired by some of the pictures here [showing a picture of a throw draped over an armchair]. (Greg, industrial designer)

Designers attempted to more vividly express the knowledge they had gathered during this preliminary phase in large assemblages of artefacts called ‘boards’, which used visual images and samples of materials to illustrate design attributes and languages. Designers also used boards to articulate visually desired attributes that were difficult to explain verbally. As a designer explained:

A lot of our clients tend to look for certain visual or brand attributes in their products, whether it be they want it to look powerful, rugged, or businesslike, so we need to create visual boards around those attributes for each project that help us design to those words. (Jennifer, brand designer)

So-called ‘mood boards’ tried to capture the intended aesthetics and symbolism of new objects or spaces and align it with the mandate and the characteristics of the client. Another informant thus explained how they used visuals to fill words with meanings and direct subsequent design choices:

We think of the words that they have in their brand, and this is usually words that they give us that they use already … And we would analyse these words, and how these words relate to their brand in terms of how the company works, as well as the products, the advertising, so it’s like to keep things consistent within the brand ... And then from those words, we look at what they have in their company already in terms of like marketing, products, things like that, and at the same time that we do that, we look at what we call analogous products, products that carry the same attributes or maybe speak the same language, but you know they don’t have to look the same, but they have to have the same feeling or they have to achieve the same things as those attributes. And then, from there we start developing ‘mood boards’ ….because we would first align ourselves with what the company is about, and what they want to achieve. (Michel, industrial designer)

In the case of Project Chair, designers created two mood boards: one with visual references communicating the design attributes and languages of existing hospital chairs (as a result of the in-context research and of the competitive survey conducted) and the other with images conveying the desired attributes of the chair under development (see Figures 2 and 3).

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Figure 2.

Design Attributes and Language of Existing Hospital Chairs.

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Figure 3.

Design Attributes and Language of New Hospital Chair.

These boards were usually generated during so-called ‘visual library meetings’, visual brainstorming sessions aimed at generating and collecting a set of images conveying the desired attributes. Before these meetings took place, the project manager communicated the words around which the visual brainstorm would be about, and asked participants to bring images that in their opinion were related to those words. This excerpt from our field notes illustrates a typical interaction during one of these meetings:

Mike, Project Chair manager, opens up the visual library meeting by explaining: ‘This chair is going to go into a particular environment [hospital rooms], and it is supposed to promote health, to be warm, playful, light, inviting and welcoming, and make you want to sit in the chair.’ He had sent us an email before the meeting with a list of words related to Project Chair and he had asked us to bring ‘anything that in our opinion visually expresses these words’. Everyone shares their images and explains why they picked those images. For example, Greg shows a picture of some colourful balloons, explaining that for him balloons embody the idea of lightness and playfulness at the same time. Maddy shows a picture of a white feather conveying, in her view, the idea of warmth and lightness. Damien shows a picture of a mother and her son wrapped in a red blanket to express the notions of warmth and welcome. After we all have shared our images, we discuss which ones are the most effective, and we select a subset that we will use for the mood board.

As exemplified by this excerpt, designers in a team differed in terms of the aesthetic experiences they had been through and in the aesthetic knowledge they had accumulated, as reflected in their different take on the intended attributes. These meetings helped them translate in visual terms relatively abstract, project-related ideas and aesthetic experiences that they found difficult to express verbally, and to share and exchange personal interpretations of these concepts (we return to this point in the next section).

The learning and definition phase typically ended with the creation of a ‘design brief’, a document outlining the main elements of the project – such as current market trends and preferences, the design problem to be solved, possible areas of opportunities, project requirements and objectives – as well as a project ‘design vocabulary’ summarizing the main concepts designers used to describe and interpret their project (see Table 3), which guided them in the following phases.

Creative exploration

In a second phase, designers individually developed a number of possible creative interpretations of the revised mandate formalized in the brief. Initially open and unconstrained, although within the boundaries outlined by the ‘design vocabulary’, this phase aimed at creating a high number of ideas without worrying too much about the details and the execution.

In this phase, designers produced sketches and drawings that incorporated the desired design language and addressed the intended attributes. Again, these sketches and drawings reflected in part the distinctive aesthetic knowledge of team members; yet, as the project progressed, we could observe a gradual convergence around the desired attributes and how to achieve them, facilitated by the visual material designers produced, exchanged, retained, assembled or discarded.

In the case of Project Chair, the previous phase had led designers to refine their understanding of the intended design attributes as to convey ‘optimism’, ‘warmth’, ‘welcoming’ and ‘lightness’. In order to express these words, designers selected and used visual imagery of colourful balloons, a blue sky, a yellow kite, a white feather, a red blanket, orange socks, etc. (see Figure 3). A designer explained how these images were important because ‘they will always be in the back of our minds when we design this chair, because every single line, every single detail, every single feature we design should promote that word, that feeling inspired by these images’ (Damien, industrial designer).

When the object under development required a high level of interaction with the user, designers also produced rough, small-scale mock-ups to directly experience what they referred to as the initial ‘look and feel’ of the concept. By ‘look and feel’, designers referred to the main properties of the appearance, surfaces and interfaces of a new design; from a user’s perspective, it described the sensory experience triggered by interacting with the object or space. Very early on in the development of the hospital chair, for instance, designers built a three-dimensional model, which they called ‘Buck 1’ (see Figure 4). Buck 1 was initially a rudimentary chair, composed of different parts directly received from the client and mainly used to test the functioning of the reclining mechanism. As the creative exploration proceeded, discussions centred on what materials to use and on how to design the edges of the chair so that it would be experienced as ‘warm’ and ‘cozy’. As a consequence, Buck 1 was progressively modified and enriched with details aimed at conveying the intended ‘look and feel’: a fabric of a certain colour and with a certain texture, armrests and headrest of a certain size and of a certain shape, and so on (see Figure 5).

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Figure 4.

Early Version of Buck 1.

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Figure 5.

‘Look and Feel’ Version of Buck 1.

Concept development and refinement

In the next phase, designers refined and prototyped the most promising concepts, and presented them to their clients. The selection of concepts produced by the interaction of different team members required an evaluation of the coherence between the design intent and the ‘design execution’ – that is, the actual shapes, materials, colours, finishes and so on of the final design (see Table 3). During meetings called ‘design critiques’, designers discussed the different concepts and selected those that best delivered on the project’s goals. Reference to the project goals helped designers resolve disagreements among team members about appropriate aesthetic properties; in these circumstances, the project leader played a pivotal role in steering the discussion and facilitating the integration of different ideas.

In Project Chair, the final concept emerged from the combination of formal elements embodied in the sketches of two designers who attempted to convey the ideas of blanket and pillows (two elements of the visual imagery associated with the design language, as shown in Figure 3), as well as lightness (one of the intended attributes of the new chair). The following excerpt from the field notes illustrates the initial convergence of team members around some ideas for the design of the new chair:

Today we are meeting for a design critique. Mike, the project manager, explains what our next step is: ‘In one week from today our task is to select from all the sketches we have individually worked on the ones that most strongly communicate what this chair is about. It’s crucial to emphasize all the different aspects of the design that we think are important to communicate to the client.’ At this point, he invites Damien and Greg to illustrate their sketches. Damien puts his sketches in the middle of the table to let everyone see them, and points to those portraying the shape of the legs of the chair. Then, it’s Greg’s turn. He explains that he tried to convey a sense of stability and continuity in the shapes, and to hide the engine of the chair. Mike likes Greg’s sketches and emphasizes the importance of smoothly connecting the back to the seat: ‘I like the idea of elegantly associating, but separating them, as if there was a blanket over them!’ He goes on and says: ‘I like this pillow thing as well; it’s very welcoming, but at the same time it can be something difficult to clean; we need to keep that in mind.’ Then, turning back again to Damien’s sketches he says: ‘I like these gestures of the legs’ pointing at a drawing portraying the chair with elegantly curved and winding legs, ‘and I think that we should keep the edge thin, but put all the parts together in order to try to minimize the gap. I can even see this chair in warmer colours,’ Mike adds. ‘Think of the sense of richness that it would acquire and transmit to the users. And I think we can combine both your sketches in one single design. That’s great, Damien and Greg! Good job!’

Once they had agreed on one or two promising concepts, designers shared them with their clients. During so-called ‘concept sharing’ meetings, they described the different concepts, both in terms of their formal properties and the messages they intended to convey. They showed clients pictures and sketches, and they invited them to interact with the physical models.

In the case of Project Chair, for instance, during a meeting, one of the clients pointed out that the current shape of Buck 1 did not look ‘welcoming’ like a maternal embrace (a metaphor often used by designers to invoke the idea of welcoming), as the back of the chair looked too masculine and aggressive. Based on the feedback received, the project manager used some black duct tape to reduce the size of the back of the chair to make it look ‘more feminine’ and more welcoming (see Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Redefining the Shape of Buck 1.

Finally, designers focused on the selected concept to guarantee coherence across different aesthetic details – materials, finishes, surfaces, colours, textures and so on. In the case of the hospital chair, the final ‘design execution’ was based on the use of warm and positive colours (green, orange), soft and cleanable fabrics, smooth surfaces and feminine shapes (see Figure 7). Consistent with the initial design intent and the desired design attributes, the team selected this set of material properties in order to make the chair’s appearance ‘more residential and playful, and contributing to a sense of comfort, well-being, and mobility’ as stated in the final presentation to the clients.

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Figure 7.

Final Design Execution of the Hospital Chair.

At this stage, designers typically built a more refined prototype to fully convey the agreed ‘design intent’ and ‘look and feel’ of the object. This stage usually required multiple iterations and different versions of the same model, until designers reached the desired result. In the case of Project Chair, designers eventually opted for green fabrics to represent hope, an adjustable headrest to increase patients’ comfort, wide and pillow-friendly armrests to make the chair look ‘homey’, and a narrow back and harmonious legs to make it look welcoming and inviting (see Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Buck 2 Embodying the Final Design Execution.

Second-order findings: Aesthetic knowledge and the shaping of form

In the previous section, we have described designers’ work in the terms that informants used to interpret their own reality. We now draw on our ethnographic observations to produce second-order interpretations that address the more general theoretical issue of how designers use aesthetic knowledge – individually and collectively – to shape formal properties of new objects and spaces.

Table 4 summarizes how designers’ different reactions and practices are observed in different phases of the design process.

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Table 4.

Practices of co-construction and use of aesthetic knowledge in the design process.

Phase	Acquiring and deploying aesthetic knowledge	Sharing and co-constructing aesthetic knowledge
Learning and definition
• Defining the design intent and the design attributes		Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design intent’, ‘design attributes’) helps designers discuss and articulate intended emotional and symbolic responses to the formal properties of the object under development.
• In-context research: observing users and uses	Alertness to own primary emotional responses triggered by exposure to aesthetic stimuli directs designers’ attention to visceral aesthetic experiences (pleasure, excitement, boredom, etc.) elicited by specific formal properties.	Both in the field and during meetings, designers share their aesthetic experiences by expressing visceral responses to what they observed and by sharing the sources of these responses with the rest of the team (through pictures, etc.) to induce similar reactions.
• Reviewing the existing design landscape	Conscious processing of formal properties of objects helps designers identify patterns and trends. Secondary emotional responses enable them to link patterns and combinations of formal properties with symbolic associations.	Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design language’, ‘design intent’) structures the analysis of current product aesthetics and symbolism.
• Defining the desired design language	Conscious processing of formal properties of visual imagery to express desired aesthetic experiences through mood boards; alertness to secondary emotional responses guides the search and selection of appropriate imagery.	Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘design language’, ‘look and feel’) helps designers translate the goals of the project into desired formal properties. Using metaphorical language helps designers converge around an understanding of the emotional responses associated with the intended design attributes. Cross-mode shifting, e.g. between verbal design attributes to visual imagery used to exemplify them (and back), helps designers share their individual aesthetic experiences and knowledge, and more easily reach consensus about the desired design language.
Creative exploration
• Development of creative concepts	Mindful adaptation of tentative design of objects and spaces based on emotional reactions to doodles, sketches.	Feedback on one another’s tentative solutions in the form of metaphorical language and expression of visceral responses. Induced aesthetic experiences help illustrate tentative ideas in terms of the outcome of the preliminary phase. Legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘design language’, ‘look and feel’) structures the interaction among team members. Cross- mode shifting facilitates intra-team communication about each other’s tentative solutions.
• Rapid prototyping for direct experience		Expressing visceral responses to communicate aesthetic experience of exposure to prototype. Legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘look and feel’) structures the interaction around the prototype.
Concept development and refinement
• Selecting most promising concepts	Mindful adaptation of tentative design of objects and spaces based on emotional reactions to more elaborate drawings and prototypes.	Expressing visceral responses and using metaphorical language facilitates the exchange of experiences and convergence around a provisional solution. Inducing aesthetic experiences helps connect with the outcome of the preliminary phase. Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘look and feel’) structures the interaction among team members. Cross-mode shifting between aesthetic discourse and sketches facilitates reaching consensus about most promising concepts.
• Defining the final design execution		Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘look and feel’, ‘design execution’) guides the definition of the desired formal properties of the new object or environment. Inducing aesthetic experiences helps designers collectively fine-tune the desired look and feel.
• Developing a more refined prototype of the chosen concept		Expressing visceral responses and inducing aesthetic experiences facilitate exchange between the design team and the clients. Building a legitimate aesthetic discourse (‘design attributes’, ‘look and feel’, ‘design execution’) structures the evaluation and interaction around the final prototype.

The theoretical framework emerging from our analysis (summarized in Figure 9) foregrounds the interplay between designers’ aesthetic knowledge and the formal properties of objects and spaces they are exposed to and/or designing. Design scholars often mention the ‘intuitive’ nature of designers’ choices (Lawson, 2006; Michlewski, 2008); our framework explains this intuitive nature in terms of the aesthetic knowledge and experience involved in these choices. Moreover, it links individual-level use of aesthetic knowledge with collective-level collaborative efforts by highlighting practices that help designers overcome aesthetic muteness, and the dynamic interaction between individual-level processes and collective ones.

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Figure 9.

Aesthetic Knowledge and the Shaping of the Formal Properties of Objects and Spaces.

Acquiring and deploying individual aesthetic knowledge to inform design choices

Our ethnographic observations, informal conversations and follow-up interviews confirmed the centrality of aesthetic knowledge in what designers described as intuitive choices they made about the properties of objects and spaces (represented in the bottom left part of Figure 9). Many informants pointed out how these choices were guided mostly by their ‘senses’ and ‘gut feelings’. As a designer explained:

What I rely on is kind of my senses and my intuition and what I feel is going to look good and what I know might work better than others. It’s kind of [using] your knowledge and your intuition as a designer. (Mike, industrial designer)

Designers considered this peculiar knowledge – about how to elicit a desired emotional response through the design of formal properties – a distinctive competence, a know-how partly resulting from their training and education, partly from the aesthetic stimuli they had been exposed to over time through learning by doing (see also Lawson, 2004). As another designer explained:

A lot of our understanding of why the idea is right is based on these intuitive reactions or emotional reactions … but it’s not something that comes just out of the blue. It’s something that’s built upon the learning – the data, I guess you would call it… (Kristin, design strategist)

Designers linked this know-how to a more general aesthetic fluency and literacy – an understanding of product aesthetics and symbolism – that the project-specific knowledge that they accumulated as they moved from one project to the next constantly enriched. Another informant explained how ‘every project is very different: today I might be working on a baby stroller, and three or four months later, I might be working on cars; therefore, every project that we work on is like we’re building our knowledge base as designers’ (Peter, design strategist).

Designers, in this respect, differed from one another. The different aesthetic experiences they had undergone in their career had endowed them with different sensitivity to aesthetic properties of objects. These differences partly manifested in their different takes on how to pursue a project’s goals and intended attributes. For instance, team members who had worked repeatedly with a particular client in the past usually possessed a more nuanced understanding of the aesthetic properties that were more likely to fit the client’s preferences, desired brand positioning, and product portfolio.

These observations are consistent with research in cognitive psychology, which distinguishes between declarative knowledge (or ‘know-that’) and procedural knowledge (or ‘know-how’) (e.g. Ryle, 1949; Stillings, Weisler, Chase, & Feinstein, 1995). The former refers to factual information about the world stored in memory, while the latter has been defined as the knowledge exercised in the accomplishment of a task, thus including knowledge which cannot be easily articulated by the individual, since it is largely non-conscious (or tacit). In the case of designers, these two types of knowledge were manifested respectively in their knowledge about objects, their aesthetic properties, and the relationships among objects and properties (declarative component) – which was occasionally articulated in visual libraries, mood boards, design landscapes, etc. – and knowledge about how to infuse objects with the aesthetic properties required to trigger the desired responses (procedural component) – which was manifested in the design choices they made.

The importance of aesthetic experiences for building and refining designers’ aesthetic knowledge (represented in the top left part of Figure 9) was evident from the first steps of the projects. During a debriefing interview, for instance, a designer explained the importance of being alert to direct sensory experiences and reflecting upon them as a source of inspiration:

I do a lot of window-shopping. I go out all the time and I look at what stores carry, what the buyers are buying … When you go into a retail environment like that, it’s great because there’s so many different ones out there. So if you go into a mall, for example, and you look at what all the retailers are doing its kind of cool to be able to see, for example, what someone’s doing in their windows as a display, and what the season’s colours are, what the trends are, and that’s stuff that you can open a magazine and look at, but you don’t get a sense of it unless its something physical in front of you. I like that better… to be able to touch things, buy things and kind of feel and understand what it is. (Claudia, brand designer, italics added)

Emotional responses triggered by sensory stimuli mediated the acquisition of project-specific knowledge and directed its deployment in subsequent design choices. They did so by directing attention to relevant aesthetic properties of objects within a given domain. As another informant explained:

Magazines are more widely used than books because a lot of times people just need inspiration, and for that inspiration they want to look through whatever the newest magazines are on as a way of just pulling kind of quick emotional reactions to whatever architecture turns them on or product design or furniture design … That’s how design develops: design is not just pulled out of a vacuum. It’s pulled out of our environment; it’s pulled from objects that people respond to… it might be a car, you know, it could be a chair, it could be everything. (Alan, industrial designer, italics added)

Research indicates that emotional reactions to aesthetic stimuli can be of two types, referred to as primary and secondary reactions (Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004). Spontaneous primary reactions – or visceral reactions (Norman, 2004; Rindova & Petkova, 2007) – manifest as feelings of attraction or repulsion, pleasure or discomfort, triggered by the sheer aesthetic properties of an object (see also Zajonc, 1980). Designers experienced these responses as they deliberately exposed themselves to a flow of sensory stimuli, seeking inspiration in possibly unrelated domains (see Table 4). In this respect, a product designer illustrated how the feelings sparked by the experience of some designs could guide the generation of conceptual sketches:

When I have to generate ideas on paper, I usually leaf through books and magazines … It influences the kinds of forms you put down on paper, because you’re going through a magazine and then you respond to certain forms, certain colours, certain gestures, and you recognize that you’re responding to those things, and then you try to figure out how to recreate that same feeling in what you’re doing when you’re sketching. (George, brand designer, italics added)

Another designer reported the excitement sparked by the set of images and pictures collected during the in-context research and pinned up in a project room:

A project room with all these visual aids available … the moment that you walk into it you’re immediately visually stimulated. … When we go to meeting rooms, it’s when we want to focus, when we want to get to the point … If I want to have a focused conversation, then I’ll find a room that has clean walls, that does not have all these busy images… and when I want to have visual stimulation, then I come to the project room and I’ll look at all these visual aids. Besides visual stimulation, they evoke some emotions … you know, when I look at some shapes, some colours or some materials I feel excited, I feel confident, I feel like there’s no boundary, that the possibility is limitless, because apparently other designers came up with all these solutions, so it allows me to feel like I could come up with something different and what is on these walls now is just some of the possible solutions. (Heather, design strategist)

Secondary emotional reactions, instead, are mediated by a conscious processing of the aesthetic properties of an object, and stem to a large degree from the symbolic associations that these objects evoke (Pratt & Rafaeli, 1997). This second type of response was manifested, for instance, as designers processed aesthetic properties of objects or spaces more consciously, by comparing them and assembling them in the design landscapes and mood boards described in the previous section (see Table 4). These efforts would help them identify formal properties that would make an object look ‘safe’, ‘approachable’, ‘domestic’ or else, inducing users to feel reassured, attracted or comfortable.

These visual artefacts helped designers organize part of the aesthetic stimuli they encountered by more consciously linking formal and symbolic properties of objects and spaces through the emotional responses they triggered. As an informant exemplified:

We want to see how people want this product to look [it’s a hair removal device]. So we don’t know if they want it to look very safe and medical, because it’s a laser, and dangerous, and it’s in your home, or they want it to look more familiar, more like a beauty product because it helps you feel more beautiful. So we have a whole bunch of illustrations of what it could look like. It could look very technical, very safe and then there were some in between and then it could look just like something that’s in your bathroom already. [We asked ourselves] What makes something look safe? What makes something look medical or professional? … We looked at professional lasers, and they all have big displays, they all have dials, instead of, like, the microwave buttons that are very smooth and easy to use … So if you want to make something look medical you take some of those details, and have a dial – instead of, you know, a nice soft button – and you have a display. Little details. For example, they also have metal; metal is a very serious material, so in one of those illustrations we had metal feet and made it very serious. It was very geometric. While the more beauty product was more rounded, it was a whole-ball shape, a nice soft green, no hard edges. (Julia, industrial designer)

As we discuss later, these practices helped designers surface part of the aesthetic knowledge that they had acquired and make it available to the team to deploy in the project. These practices did so by helping designers render part of this knowledge less tacit, by codifying it in a combination of visual and verbal expressions that could be shared with the rest of the team (see, for instance, Figures 2 and 3).

These responses also influenced the examination of issues of harmony and balance of shapes, as the application of formal principles of design (see for instance Lidwell, Holden, & Butler, 2003) to a particular object was really shaped by less conscious feelings of pleasure or discomfort triggered by exposure to current or evolving designs. As a designer working on Project Chair explained:

When I look at that chair behind you, I see something that is so kind of odd … The seat and the back have nothing to do with each other. You’ve got this back that has one colour and one texture and then you have the seat that’s another colour and another texture, and they look like they came from two different chairs. It represents the most primitive non-design. It’s literally just a utilitarian series of parts that do a job, and are really dead visually. And then, you have this [he points at another chair], which is maybe a step up from the wheelchair, because it does look like someone might have been tempted to design it, trying to reach some sort of harmony. But it’s still not there yet. (Greg, industrial designer)

Even at later stages of development (see Table 4), during project meetings, the first author frequently observed designers doodle and sketch ideas on paper or fiddle with materials available in the project rooms while having conversations with the other members of the team, sometimes with no apparent plan or direction, but with the aim to stimulate the generation of ideas, as explained by an informant in a follow-up interview:

We all have like a process of how we help our brains go through something … a lot of people draw to do it. I need something in my hands like clay or something … like we all have these weird manual things that we need to do in order to work through it. (Susan, industrial designer)

Importantly, despite the initial effort to articulate aesthetic knowledge and experiences relevant to the project in mood boards and design landscapes, designers’ sketching or the construction of physical prototypes was only loosely guided by conscious understandings of linkages between aesthetic properties, emotional responses and the symbolism of objects and spaces. A designer referred to this process as ‘emotional exploration’ to highlight the importance of his own emotional responses to the forms and shapes gradually emerging from his open-ended efforts.

These observations suggest that the process through which designers imbue objects and spaces with formal properties is only partly conscious. New ideas did not develop from the carefully planned and deliberate application of design principles to address clear problems, but from the relatively free engagement of designers with matter. What followed was a mindful adaptation of design choices to the designer’s own emotional responses to tentative formal properties. These responses alerted designers to the relative fit of tentative solutions with the design intent, thus guiding their intuitive attempt to induce the same responses in users interacting with the same object or experiencing the same space.

Sharing and co-constructing aesthetic knowledge at group level

While designers acknowledged the importance of ‘gut feelings’, they routinely found themselves with a need to explain ideas that reflected personal aesthetic knowledge and experience to their teammates or their clients. In these circumstances, designers had to confront the tacit nature of the aesthetic knowledge they relied upon, or, as an informant put it, the fact that ‘there are things that you just cannot explain with words’ (Richard, model shop manager).

Research on organizational aesthetics uses the term ‘aesthetic muteness’ (Taylor, 2002) to refer to the difficulty of representing or communicating aesthetic knowledge verbally, as sharing this tacit knowledge requires the ‘translation of holistic aesthetic experience into the more discursive signal system of language’ (Taylor, 2002, p. 823). Aesthetic categories (e.g. the beautiful, the grotesque, the comic) represent an attempt to codify a range of aesthetic experiences in linguistic form (Strati, 1992). Some scholars, however, argue that these categories may defy articulation in that they may lack clear semantic content and are essentially ‘defined by the emotions that aesthetic experiences evoke’ (Whitfield, 2005, p. 11).

According to Langer (1942), different forms of knowledge require different forms of representation, with tacit knowledge being represented more effectively through artistic forms, rather than discursive ones. Gagliardi (1996, p. 576) similarly remarks how expressing aesthetic experience requires ‘allusive, poetic language’ to attempt to evoke similar reaction in a listener. Strati (2008) also points out that organizational actors are able to describe and articulate their aesthetic knowledge by using ‘evocative terms of metaphorical language pertaining to aesthetic understanding and not in logical-analytical terms’ (2008, p. 235). Research on intuition came to similar conclusions about the difficulties of articulating verbally feelings associated with intuitive judgements:

Individuals may be unable to communicate the somatic aspects of their intuition or their tacit knowledge in conventional, precise, literal ways. However, it may be possible for them to convey, through the use of metaphor, the feelings that accompany intuitive judgments and the tacit elements of their mental models. (Sadler-Smith, 2008, p. 502)

Indeed, designers frequently used metaphors to express actual or desired aesthetic experiences, as they discussed design attributes (see also Lawson, 2004; Seidel & O’Mahony, 2014). As mentioned earlier, when developing the new hospital chair, for example, designers would constantly use aesthetic metaphors like ‘blanket’ or ‘pillow’ when talking about the intended look and feel of the product under development. The main purpose of these metaphors was to qualify better the intended aesthetic experiences by evoking aesthetic associations stored in their team members’ minds by using analogical thinking. Islam, Endrissat and Noppeney (2016) show how perfumers similarly use metaphors in order to communicate the intended mental associations that they want a new scent to trigger.

While useful, however, according to Hodgkinson, Sadler-Smith, Burke, Claxton and Sparrow, even metaphors are limited as ‘a translation into symbolic means of an affective state … is not the equivalent to the affective state itself, the latter by definition begin purely subjective’ (Hodgkinson et al., 2009, p. 290). Also, the inherent polysemy of metaphors makes them prone to multiple interpretations (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Indeed, our observations revealed four more practices that designers used in order to ‘transfer’ and ‘share’ the aesthetic knowledge underlying their proposed solutions to the rest of the team or to collectively co-construct a common, intersubjective knowledge of relevant aesthetic properties. These practices were characterized by the more or less effortful attempt to articulate tacit, pre-linguistic experiences in verbal, visual and/or material modes. Borrowing from research in social semiotics, by ‘mode’ we refer here to the visual, aural, spatial or linguistic resources used to communicate (Jewitt & Kress, 2010). In our context, these resources were represented by the artefacts designers collected, used or produced, as well as by the conversations that unfolded around these artefacts. Typically, these practices unfolded during team meetings, when the design team would meet to illustrate the aesthetic solutions generated by designers along with the reasons underlying their choices, to obtain feedback from their colleagues on how to improve their solutions, or to build common consensus around emerging new design directions (see Table 4).

At a most basic level, designers relied on the simple expression of their visceral reactions. As exemplified in excerpts from the field notes displayed in the previous section, when designers evaluated different concepts, it was not uncommon to hear them express their liking or disliking of objects or images collected in a preliminary phase, or of some of the numerous sketches and drawings produced at a later stage (see Table 4). Despite designers’ attempt to better qualify their opinions (‘I do not like this shape because it is not harmonious’ or ‘I feel like that is not going to work given the goals of the project’), most of these expressions were the result of their subjective personal taste. Often, these comments would not even elaborate on the response, nor try to articulate what formal properties generated what affective response, but they merely expressed primary visceral reactions in a succinct verbal mode (for a similar instance in a different context, see the flutemakers described by Cook and Yanow, 1993). As a junior designer lamented:

It’s hard because when you’re designing something you have someone from marketing, or you have your senior designer coming in and saying ‘Oh, well. I don’t like this curve.’ So, you’re like ‘Why?’ And he’s like ‘I just don’t like it….’ (Brian, design strategist)

These comments, therefore, represented the most basic and immediate attempt to voice aesthetic responses and express and share aesthetic knowledge. Voicing pleasure or displeasure, however, could account only for the simplest, primary visceral reactions. We have already mentioned how designers would often use metaphors to try to express more nuanced emotional responses and link them to formal properties of objects and spaces. Take for instance this excerpt from our field notes:

Mike stands up and draws the reclining system of Alan’s sketches on a mobile whiteboard in order to explain those aspects of the reclining system he thinks are important. He comes back to sit down and keeps on talking about Alan’s drawings, but Alan seems much more interested in Damien’s sketches: ‘I like your chair very much; it’s simple, but there’s enough stuff going on.’ Also Mike likes it, even though for a different reason: ‘I like it too because of the sense of solidity it conveys.’ ‘Yes, there’s a sense of solidity, but also harmony in these shapes … this chair seems as if it dances’ [italics added].

Even metaphors, however, were considered limited, as they were open to multiple interpretations. While the semantic richness of metaphors has been linked in the past to their generative potential (Schön, 1983), it could occasionally hamper the effective sharing of aesthetic experiences. In the case of Project Chair, for example, the ‘airline chair’ was initially proposed as a metaphor for the seating experience designers intended to deliver. The proponent of this metaphor recalled the relaxation he had experienced on a business-class seat on a flight to Korea. The metaphor, however, soon proved impractical as different members, as well as the clients, associated this notion with different aesthetic experiences, some pleasant, others unpleasant.

Because of this reason, designers found it crucial to be able to expose each other to the same stimuli, as well as to experience objects and spaces directly, rather than relying exclusively on the reports of users. These practices effectively relied on multiple signifying modes, as they combined tentative verbalization with direct exposure to selected visual/material artefacts. Theoretically, we could refer to this attempt to build common aesthetic knowledge as inducing aesthetic experiences. Project rooms, in this respect, proved particularly useful, as they allowed designers to refer to visual imagery, materials, fabrics, sketches, drawings and other objects available in these rooms in order to trigger in team members or clients the same feelings and sensations they had previously felt. In this way, designers could explain the proposed aesthetic solutions on display by exposing their audiences to the same sensory stimuli they had responded to when developing those solutions, and could get feedback from them on how to improve them. An excerpt from field notes taken during a project meeting of Project Store Window illustrates this point:

Today we’re meeting in the project room to share the different aesthetic solutions generated by Claudia, Susan, Christine and Ethan for the store windows of ‘Back to School’. The ‘Ball Room’ is set up for the meeting. On one side of the room, they put two boards: one called ‘Back to School content’, and the other called ‘Back to School style’. Both boards are full of images taken from magazines and stock photography databanks. Those on the ‘Back to School content’ board are images related to the ‘reinvented traditions’ theme, previously selected in agreement with the client – images of blackboards, of lockers, of kids using abacus, of school music bands, of the yearbook, of football teams and cheerleaders, etc. Those on the ‘Back to School style’ board are images illustrating the style and the look and feel designers intend to convey, and suggesting some stylistic ways of executing the ‘reinvented traditions’ theme, as GB explained to me – images of people’s faces, of doodles, of grids of objects, etc. On the opposite side of the room, they pinned up the sketches they’re going to illustrate to the rest of the group.

We start with Claudia explaining the ‘reinvented traditions’ concept, and how she decided to translate that concept into ‘Back to School’ design execution. She makes it clear that, according to the look and feel they want to convey, she decided to develop sketches showing a mosaic of people’s faces reminiscent of the yearbook layout, a collection of historical iconic school objects, and kids’ doodles on their notebooks in ballpoint pen. While she’s talking, the other designers observe the sketches on display and start giving their feedback on how to modify or improve her ideas. RC [the creative director], for instance, says: ‘I think that the big challenge in all these sketches is visually communicating how that, like the doodling thing or the grid of objects, gets reinvented. Otherwise they [customers in store] are just going to think ‘it’s all dated’. George steps in to say: ‘You know, a possible way to visually communicate how the mosaic of people’s pictures reminding of the yearbook gets reinvented can be putting a collage of faces used as a screensaver. So you can visually convey the idea of a school book laptop or something like that; something that people can download on their laptop, instead of having the old school book with pictures of their classmates.’ (…)

Once every designer has illustrated and explained their ideas, getting feedback from the rest of the team, Richard, the project manager, says: ‘So, what I think we should do is go back to our desks and keep working on these ideas trying to invigorate them. We’ll meet tomorrow for another internal sharing and maybe we can critique a little bit more.’

In this respect, the joint selection of visual and tangible references marked the convergence around a common understanding of aesthetic experiences. As a team member of Project Chair during a debriefing interview explained:

We have selected some of the design attributes that we think the potential future chair should have and for each of them or for each group of design attributes we have selected an image of a particular chair or armchair already existing on the market, able to convey that message. As an example, to the groups of words ‘friendly, hopeful, warm’, we have associated these colourful and joyful plastic chairs;, to the words ‘fabric and drape’ we have associated this famous blue chair which is inspiring the shapes the chair has started to take; finally, to the words ‘inviting and soft’ they have associated this other chair with many colourful pillows. This is very important, because it allows us to translate in real shapes the design attributes we think the chair should have and convey to the users.’ (Gianfranco, industrial designer)

In the process, therefore, the project room effectively became a multimodal representation of an emerging body of collectively co-produced, project-specific aesthetic knowledge.

Project rooms – along with some of the artefacts they contained (mood boards, design landscapes, etc.) – illustrate how mutual exposure to aesthetic experiences were often part of a more general practice of shifting from verbal to visual mode, multiple times over the course of the project, to gradually construct a common understanding of aesthetic and symbolic requirements and how to address them. As mentioned in the previous section, the goals of a project were initially agreed with clients in verbal mode. At this stage, however, the content of these words and their implications for the project were still relatively vague. Field observation and visual libraries helped produce visual artefacts that qualified the meanings associated with these words. Mood boards and landscapes generated additional knowledge, later to be expressed in partly verbal mode, as designers tentatively labelled their experiences to share them with team members or clients.

As the projects progressed, designers switched periodically from verbal (written documents articulating design intent, attributes, etc., as well as more general conversations) to visual mode (mood boards, sketches, drawings, etc.), and back, whenever the current mode seemed incapable of properly capturing relevant aesthetic experiences or of ensuring consensus around an emerging set of meanings setting the direction for design choices – a practice we refer to as cross-mode shifting. By doing so, we argue, designers could compensate for the inherent limitations of each mode, and push the project forward by expanding the resources available to members to express, access and share original aesthetic experiences. Essential to this task was the multiliteracy (Kress, 2003) of team members, whose professional training had accustomed them to shift between multiple forms of representation. The difficulty created by the absence of multiliteracy was most evident when the team transferred ideas to clients that were less used to engage with the visual. As a designer explained:

[Clients] are never visual people … they are decision makers, but they don’t necessarily have the ability to translate something from a piece of paper to their brains. (Rich, model shop manager)

Finally, according to Taylor, part of the difficulty of communicating aesthetic knowledge and aesthetic experiences depends on the absence of a ‘legitimate discourse about aesthetic experience in most modern organizations’ (Taylor, 2002, p. 822), by which he refers not only to the absence of linguistic categories to describe these experiences, but also to the uncertain appropriateness of open discussion of aesthetic matters in the workplace. The absence of a legitimate discourse, according to Taylor, lowers the salience of aesthetic experiences and makes it difficult for organization members to grasp them and recall them (‘aesthetic amnesia’), in part because they have no name for them.

As illustrated in the first-order narrative, at Continuum this problem was compensated by the development of an elaborate ‘design vocabulary’ – a set of linguistic categories that designers routinely used to frame the discussion of aesthetic issues (see Table 3). Terms such as ‘design intent’, ‘design attributes’, ‘look and feel’, ‘design language’ offered a legitimate aesthetic discourse that directed attention to aesthetic experiences and reminded listeners of their salience and relevance to the task to be accomplished. By doing so, this discourse supported what Ewenstein and Whyte (2007) term ‘aesthetic reflexivity’ – that is, a capacity to notice and reflect on one’s aesthetic experiences, which is central to the development and deployment of aesthetic knowledge – and offered a linguistic infrastructure for the collective engagement in these reflections (see Table 4).

Importantly, this aesthetic discourse not only rested on a common language but was substantiated by tools and practices that actioned this discourse in the course of design projects. ‘Visual library’ meetings, the construction of ‘mood boards’ and the mapping of ‘design landscapes’ represented common milestones in the unfolding of projects, along with other activities, such as the review of existing and emerging technologies, the identification of users’ ergonomic needs and the creation of functional mock-ups, aimed at addressing functional and technical issues. These practices periodically brought the attention of designers back to the desired aesthetics and symbolism, and structured their collective reflections on how to accomplish these responses through their choices about the formal properties of objects and spaces. Project rooms gradually collected relevant sources of aesthetic experiences, contributing to the accumulation of project-specific aesthetic knowledge by reinforcing collective exposure to a common set of sensory stimuli.