Engagement is important to the success of applications, systems and artefacts as diverse as robotics, pedagogy, games, interactive installations, and virtual reality applications. Yet engagement has proved to be remarkably difficult to define as it can take many forms, so many that it is difficult to isolate what these different instantiations have in common. Instead of pursuing an empirical perspective, the human side of engagement, namely, involvement is considered from a broadly Heideggerian perspective. As Heidegger has a deserved reputation for (...) philosophical obscurity, all of the concepts adopted from his work are mapped onto the more familiar languages and vocabularies of psychology, human–computer interaction and cognitive science. It is argued that technology is engaging and our response to it is to be involved (with it). This resulting involvement–engagement dyad is thus an explicitly holistic account recognising roles for affordance, purpose, identity, affect and embodiment. (shrink)

In this article, I enter into a discussion of how aesthetics can be conceptualized in the context of design and related to the field of human–computer interaction (HCI). I contest the current trend in design aesthetics that primarily focuses on beauty, pleasure, and the creation of emotional appeal by means of the sensual and visual elements of the design. Conversely, I advocate for a series of concepts related to aesthetics, such as reflectivity, representation, and epistemology, as these point aesthetics beyond (...) the immediate sensual and visual. Through these concepts, a deeper understanding of the character of the relationship between humans and design can be obtained: Design objects and HCI solutions can be more accurately described in their roles as interfaces for how humans approach the world. This broader perspective on aesthetics has implication for practice when designers set the task of creating new experiences for the users. (shrink)

Nowadays, aesthetics are generally considered as a crucial aspect that affects the way we confront things, events, and states of affairs. However, the functional role of aesthetics in the interaction between agent and environment has not been addressed effectively. Our objective here is to provide an explanation concerning the role of aesthetics, and especially, of the aesthetic experience as a fundamental bodily and emotional activity in the respective interactions. An explanation of the functional role of the aesthetic experience could offer (...) new orientations to our understanding of embodied cognition and of aesthetics as a fundamental part of it. We argue that aesthetic experience, especially its emotional dimension, is an evaluative process that influences the anticipation for stable and successful interactions with the environment. In other words, aesthetics facilitates sense-making as they affect what might be anticipated by an action tendency with respect to an environment. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. In this chapter I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of be- coming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, (...) contextual and dynamic speci- ficity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asym- metry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal- directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor no- tion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework for future empirical and theoretical research on aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience, as a cognitive activity is a fundamental part of the interaction process in which an agent attempts to interpret his/her environment in order to support the fundamental process of decision making. Proposing a four-level interactive model, we underline and indicate the functions that provide the operations of aesthetic experience and, by extension, of aesthetic judgment. Particularly in this paper, we suggest an integration of the fundamental Peircean semiotic parameters and their related levels of semiotic organization with the proposed (...) model. Our aim is to provide a further theoretical understanding with respect to the perception of aesthetics and to enrich our models regarding the functionality of aesthetic interpretation, using the theoretical interpretive richness provided by the semiotic perspective. (shrink)