Aesthetic Nature: What is Beautiful?

What is design?

This definition actually contains some of the most important aspects of design, in my humble opinion. Compared to Herbert Simon’s “Design is devising courses of action aimed at changing current situations into preferred ones” it contains the exploratory aspect of design which I think is important. Both definitions point to the fact that design is an activity focused on the future. “Devising courses of action aimed at (…)” means that the actual activity of designing means to work on a future plan that will achieve a particular outcome. In my definition I try to emphasize that design is not only to lay plans, but entails the testing of these plans, somehow. Simon’s definition also contains, what he has later been heavily criticized for, the notion that design is problem solving. I don’t agree with this since there many designers designing e.g. clothes who are not faced with an actual problem, except if we define yet another trendy top as a problem with a more desired situation – namely a new successful collection for the manufacturer.

Design is essentially a rational, logical, sequential process intended to solve problems or, as Jones put it.

What is Design

What is Aesthetics?

        What is Aesthetics?

1. Aesthetics is the study of beauty and taste, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic, or the sublime. The word derives from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning "of sense perception." Aesthetics has traditionally been part of philosophical pursuits like epistemology or ethics, but it started to come into its own and become a more independent pursuit under Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher who saw aesthetics as a unitary and self-sufficient type of human experience. Because of art's historical role in the transmission of religion and religious beliefs, atheists should have something to say on this topic.