The study of aesthetics is the study of beauty. When you really think about it, the way we react to art and music is fascinating and not very well understood. Sometimes beauty seems to be only in the eye of the beholder–subject to cultural conditioning. Other times beauty seems like something that can be appreciated by all humanity–transcending cultural considerations .
The way we react to beauty is really an emotional response. I don’t know how to really define it, but for me, the reaction to something beautiful feels like it comes from something in my chest instead of my head. Maybe that sounds weird, but that is the best way I know to describe it.
In college and graduate school I studied music composition, so a lot of what I would do was try to figure out how certain sounds and sequences of sounds made me feel emotionally. When I started doing software engineering, I discovered that my reaction to beautifully simple code was emotionally very similar to my reaction to beautiful music.
Over the years I’ve found that when presented with a beautifully simple solution, I experience (to different degrees) the same type of emotion that I experience with beautiful art and music.
For example:
The owners of a low income housing complex were having a difficult time. There was a concentration of crime in the housing projects and it didn’t take too many mischief makers to start ruining the area for everyone else. Several solutions were presented including expensive security systems and hiring a full time guard, but they were all expensive and there was no guarantee that they would fix the problems. Finally someone hit upon a beautifully simple solution:
Let active police live in the housing areas for free.
This simple solution solved the problem in an elegant way. Drug dealers and others moved out once there was a police car parked in the driveway. Members of the police force who didn’t live in the area started checking up on things at night because some of their buddies lived there.
It isn’t something earth shattering, but for me the solution had the beauty that on a small scale compares to a work of art. It is the simplicity of the solution that gives it this beauty.
Here is another example:
The company that constructed a sky scraper kept getting complaints that the elevators were too slow. This was a big deal because replacing elevators would be very expensive and there isn’t an easy way to just speed them up. They sent someone in to look at the problem who discovered that the elevators were performing as expected, but the complaints kept coming.
Finally someone went in and installed a mirror on each floor near the elevator buttons. The complaints disappeared. Once they gave people something to do (preen in the mirror) the elevators didn’t seem to take as long.
Sometimes the ease of procuring technological solutions often hampers our ability to find simple, elegant, low tech solutions to problems.
If we had to break it down to a mathematical formula, the equation that defines how much somebody loves something (be it a song or a work of literature etc) is an amazingly complex one with lots of factors involved (some being the ones you mentioned like cultural conditioning, or past experiences). I think though this has been hard-wired into us and it won’t be easy to precisely calculate it. It would be fascinating though :)
Clarity through brevity – I think that if more people would just look at what they write or produce and see if they can increase the clarity by reducing the quantity of the material they are producing we would all be more productive.
BTW – Does Levi’s give you any trouble with your name? :)
@Roger – Brevity is a trait that gets overlooked most of the time. Most speakers would improve the quality of their talks ten fold simply by cutting the length in half. No problem with Levi’s. I hadn’t really thought of that. The number is actually a play off the idea of a 101 website. In the US 101 is usually the introductory college level class in a particular subject. The 500 level classes are usually in graduate school.
“The ease of procuring technological solutions often hampers our ability to find simple elegant solutions to problems.”
In essence this is similar to a mindset that is sometimes called “technological determinism”, where one automatically assumes that whatever is newer (or more technologically “advanced”) must therefore *necessarily* be better. The “simple elegant solutions” that may have worked in the past for hundreds of years must be rejected in favor of the latest-and-greatest because “newer = better”.
While newer certainly *may* be better, it is not *necessarily* better. It is most unfortunate that modern encomic growth, being rooted in the perpetuation of the process of (essentailly) selling more and more ‘things’ to more and more people, needs such a principle to provide an ethical grounding. While there are already 40 kinds of toothpaste on the shelves of my local Wallyworld, we need #41 because it is “new” and “improved”.
This mindset results in a misalignment of the balance between what we may refer to as CAN and SHOULD. The ‘newer-is-better’ mentality is a CAN|SHOULD (CAN over and above SHOULD) mindset that asks what CAN we do with all of our new technology, irregardless (for the most part) of if we SHOULD do it. The alternative is – surprise, surprise – SHOULD|CAN, where we first ask what we SHOULD be doing or if we SHOULD be doing something before we launch of into “newness for newness’ sake” or “technology for technologys’ sake”. There is a historical link here, with the SHOULD-dominant mentality having roots in the Medieval focus on WHY things happen, which was gradually replaced by the Enlightenment notion of a concern for HOW things happen, i.e. ‘HOW’ ‘CAN’ we make things happen, irregardless of WHY or SHOULD they happen.
In sum, the “simple elegant solutions” are most likely to be disregarded precisely because of their simplicity and elegance. How can a company sell a way of doing something that your great-great-grandmother did at the turn of the century, irrespective of how well it works?
@Jason:
This reminds of a article I read sometime ago in The New Yorker called Feature Presentation. The author proves that people would go for a feature-rich “complex” solutions anytime over the “simple and elegant” ones, simply because they’re hoping to get the maximum value for their money spent.
“Sometimes the ease of procuring technological solutions often hampers our ability to find simple, elegant, low tech solutions to problems.”
I used to work among my software programmer colleagues, and I can tell you, it’s the same this in this field also.
Sometimes they’re just sooo in love with the technical challenge and the new technology, so they seem to completely forget what they actually need to solve ! :)
Over the years I’ve found that when presented with a beautifully simple solution, I experience (to different degrees) the same type of emotion that I experience with beautiful art and music.
I agree 100%
Tina :)