The emotional response to art and design work - empirical studies

The perception of drawing and design work involves an emotional response. We all know what we like and what we don’t like. However when asked to articulate why we like a particular drawing this is not always easy. Designers and design educators may talk about “good” colour and “sensitive” mark-making but what is meant by these terms?

Many students will say that appreciation of art and design work is highly subjective; that what one person considers “good” will depend on personal preferences and may differ considerably from what another considers to be “good”. However observations of design students would appear to indicate that the best work by students is generally recognised to be so by everyone in the group; there appears to be a “wow” factor that really excellent work evokes and no matter what someone’s personal preferences may be they will recognise high quality work. Equally, very poor work will be identified, although there is often a reluctance by students to articulate this.

The emotional response to products and artifacts is now being recognised as a key driver in product acquisition, and a better understanding of how we respond is therefore of great importance to designers and manufacturers alike. Don Norman in his book “Emotional Design” (2004) talks of three levels of response to a design - visceral, behavioural and reflective. Patrick Jordan in “Designing Pleasurable Products” (2000) explains how good design can appeal to the user holistically, leading to products that that are a joy to own and use.

Current research at The University of Manchester is investigating response to initial artwork and drawing – the starting point for most design. Observations of responses to art and design work over the years indicate that these responses are more than merely subjective. The research programme at Manchester aims to investigate whether or not this is actually the case. Is “good” drawing really recognised to be so by a majority and can this be corroborated by experimental data? The work is also investigating the language used to describe the quality of art and design work; what exactly is meant by “good” and “sensitive” when describing the elements (line, shape, colour etc) that go to make up any drawing or design?

Initial experiments have taken sets of drawings of simple arrangements of natural objects and asked a wide range of people to describe the sets and then rank the drawings in terms of perceived quality. The responses to the work were recorded via questionnaires and observation, analysed and evaluated. Initial results suggest that there is indeed a consensus among observers when presented with sets of drawings as to which are “better” than others. Even with very abstract, non-representational artwork there appears to be consensus on those that appeal and those that don’t. With regard to articulating responses to drawing quality, respondents find this difficult; in the first experiment several felt unable to describe the drawings at all and many voiced their reluctance to describe the drawings verbally.

This paper outlines the experiments, analyses the data recorded and evaluates the work. The results give a greater insight to the immediate response to artwork and design and should be of particular interest to students and teachers of design and practicing designers.