Approaching Aesthetics Through the Senses
- Aesthetic experience is a sensory flow uniting form and emotion.
- Among the five senses, smell is closely tied to memory, and the octopus sensory model inspired a tactile experiment.
- The Invisible Box Test revealed sensory responses and the importance of interview technique.
Introduction
Aesthetics refers to experiences related to sensory perception, especially those involving beauty, formal harmony, or artistic value. In contemporary contexts, it is increasingly understood not just as beauty, but as a quality that evokes emotional and psychological responses through form, texture, colour, and visual composition.
In Art as Experience, John Dewey describes aesthetic experience as a heightened form of everyday experience—a complete flow in which form, order, and emotion are integrated into a unified whole.
So, what is it that we find beautiful? Our group began by sharing personal experiences of beauty, and then explored our collective understanding of its elements through an affinity diagram.
The Five Senses
What, then, is brain activity? It can be understood as the changing sensory responses of the brain—how we perceive, recognise, adapt, and respond. In exploring this, Other Minds offered insight into the sensory systems of humans and cephalopods. While humans have a centralised nervous system where all sensory data is processed in the brain, cephalopods such as octopuses have a decentralised system, where neural control is distributed across their arms and head.
Humans rely primarily on five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Among these, sight and hearing tend to dominate, while taste and smell are often treated as secondary. Interestingly, one finding from our literature review was that the olfactory system is more directly connected to the brain than other senses, making it strongly linked to memory.
Test: The Invisible Box
We decided to focus on less familiar senses. Our first experiment was the “Invisible Box Test,” in which participants explored objects using only touch, with vision completely blocked. They reached into a box they could not see inside, using only their hands to identify the objects. During this, we also collected their feelings and reflections through short interviews.
Participants used clues like texture, size, and shape to infer what the object might be. Descriptions included smoothness, sharpness, and hardness—but most notably, damp sponges or paper triggered strong aversions. This suggests a natural rejection of moist textures and a preference for dry ones. Although the experiment was designed to isolate touch, some participants relied on secondary sensory cues such as sound to make their guesses.
Insights & Reflection
If we were to run this experiment again, it could be interesting to control for variables such as object size or temperature to expand the scope. One key learning during the interviews was the importance of not leading participants toward specific answers. In the later rounds, we kept questions more open, which helped—but we also realised that meaningful responses often depend on well-timed follow-up questions. Going forward, improving our interview skills will be important in drawing out richer reflections from participants.
Reference
- Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.
- Forlano, L. (2017) ‘Posthumanism and Design’, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), pp. 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001
- Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016) Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. London: William Collins.
- Hanington, B. and Martin, B. (2012) Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers.
- Howes, D. (ed.) (2005) Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580907074550
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