Aesthetics and Industrial Design

"Tastes and colors are not up for discussion! Is this postulate of popular wisdom implicitly integrated into industrial design practices? The way to avoid the highly complex question of taste by those involved in product design is often to place it in the realm of the subjective and personal. While this perfectly legitimate freedom of appreciation should not be called into question, the same cannot be said for the attitude of leaving the elements and processes that lead to feelings and judgments on aesthetics in the realm of ignorance. The stakes and expectations are too high in a post-modern, democratic industrial society to dismiss this issue, whose impact in terms of well-being and commercial success or failure is obvious.

While user testing, emotional and sensory research, and methods such as Kansei have developed considerably in recent years, demonstrating a desire to better frame and define the subjective, a gap remains concerning tastes linked to aesthetics, which nonetheless appear in each of these methods.

The aim of this article is to present a kind of benchmark on aesthetic taste for the various players involved throughout the product life cycle: prescribers, designers, buyers, consumers, users, curators... and even informed observers such as historians, sociologists... one of whose essential tasks is to identify changes over time and space in the values, behaviors and other dimensions that differentiate one culture from another. Socio-cultural differences also manifest themselves in aesthetic tastes and judgments and, finally, in creations and their successes, which result in objects that bear witness to cultures and eras.

The article is divided into three parts. The first is theoretical, setting out the problem and the reference base. The second aims to make this corpus operational by associating a model and associated tools. Finally, the whole is illustrated by a more bookish example. Readers will be able to start with the article itself and continue with the example, or with the example and the operational part, and finish with the theoretical foundations that will help them understand "the why and the how".