Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty

Hassenzahl, M. (2008). Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty. In Schifferstein, H. N. and Hekkert, P., editors, Product Experience, chapter 11, pages 287-302. Elsevier.

Beauty matters. Certainly, most people would agree. Beauty is an important ingredient of our daily lives. We admire and praise the beauty of nature, architecture, music, other people – an ugly color or an awkward form easily repels us. Given its pervasiveness, the lack of research addressing beauty (or aesthetics) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is striking (see Tractinsky, 2005). HCI seems a "science of design" (Carroll, 1997) that long neglected beauty. A cursory search of the keyword "aesthetics" in the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) Digital Library (www.acm.org/dl), for example, showed 25% of all retrieved papers to be published in 2005. This is so far, the culmination of a growing interest in the topic, which had its starting point about 10 years ago.