Are you familiar at all with the works of Christopher Alexander? He spent about 50 years exploring the objectivity of aesthetics in Architecture (and was highly influential across several fields, including software design). His book “The Timeless Way of Building” is available as an Audiobook and is approachable. It is also the closest thing I have ever read to the teachings of my Tantric Teachers in India.
Basically, the book is about a “Pattern Language” by which beautiful things happen. The hard part though is getting people to be honest about their feelings rather than lost in the intellectual games of taste. Alexander did weird experiments like asking people “Between these two buildings, which one makes you more whole?” People, being sophisticated and not woo, would typically say it’s a stupid question. So he would agree with them and say, “Okay, but if you had to pick one on that term, which would it be?” He would get about 90% agreement on what is aesthetically right and what isn’t. Whereas if you get into matters of taste, you’ll maybe get 10% agreement, because people need to be sophisticated and express interesting opinions about modern art, modular walls, other such things.
At the very least, he’s striving to find ways to test these rather hard things, and separate points that seem impossible to tease out otherwise, such as actual feeling rather than intellectualizing. And he was highly influential on the development of software patterns. Most people who read the books seem to find them impactful and useful. The downside is the thing he is finger-pointing-at-the-moon at for you is definitely “nameless” or perhaps even ineffable, yet also extremely obvious.
The book dances closely to the “Obviousness” in true creativity that the author of Impro talks about. Another very recommendable book on both aesthetics and human dynamics in general.
Edit: All this is related to human factors engineering, where self-reporting of perceptions is considered secondary information. Testing perceptions more directly can be elusive, and is thus the whole art in much of that human subject research.
Are you familiar at all with the works of Christopher Alexander? He spent about 50 years exploring the objectivity of aesthetics in Architecture (and was highly influential across several fields, including software design). His book “The Timeless Way of Building” is available as an Audiobook and is approachable. It is also the closest thing I have ever read to the teachings of my Tantric Teachers in India.
Basically, the book is about a “Pattern Language” by which beautiful things happen. The hard part though is getting people to be honest about their feelings rather than lost in the intellectual games of taste. Alexander did weird experiments like asking people “Between these two buildings, which one makes you more whole?” People, being sophisticated and not woo, would typically say it’s a stupid question. So he would agree with them and say, “Okay, but if you had to pick one on that term, which would it be?” He would get about 90% agreement on what is aesthetically right and what isn’t. Whereas if you get into matters of taste, you’ll maybe get 10% agreement, because people need to be sophisticated and express interesting opinions about modern art, modular walls, other such things.
At the very least, he’s striving to find ways to test these rather hard things, and separate points that seem impossible to tease out otherwise, such as actual feeling rather than intellectualizing. And he was highly influential on the development of software patterns. Most people who read the books seem to find them impactful and useful. The downside is the thing he is finger-pointing-at-the-moon at for you is definitely “nameless” or perhaps even ineffable, yet also extremely obvious.
The book dances closely to the “Obviousness” in true creativity that the author of Impro talks about. Another very recommendable book on both aesthetics and human dynamics in general.
Edit: All this is related to human factors engineering, where self-reporting of perceptions is considered secondary information. Testing perceptions more directly can be elusive, and is thus the whole art in much of that human subject research.