HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2004, Volume 19, pp.

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Copyright 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Beautiful Objects as an Extension

of the Self: A Reply
Marc Hassenzahl
Darmstadt Univeristy of Technology

In their comments, Frohlich (this issue), Monk (this issue), Tractinsky (this
issue), Overbeeke and Wensveen (this issue) addressed a wide variety of interesting issues relevant to the study of beauty. The methodological aspects
are especially valuable. Besides the regular debate of what constitutes good
research, they reveal many unresolved higher-level conceptual discrepancies.
To resolve those and to find a shared understanding of what beauty is and
how to study it is the key to guaranteeing the impact of our research in the
field of humancomputer interaction (HCI). Only if studies can be compared
and integrated into a common model ,or even theory, others will begin to
benefit.
The present reply is selective. I address the following six loosely connected, conceptual aspects, which I consider important.

Beauty as an experience versus beauty as a judgment.

Beauty in objects as a desired extension of the self.
Does visceral beauty exist?
Beauty as a neither less nor more elusive judgment than usability,
utility, or satisfaction.
Shall we focus on objects or on individuals?
Any lessons for design?
I am aware of the many other issues, large and small, raised but not addressed by the reply. They are not lost. There will be many future opportunities to further research and discuss them.

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BEAUTY AS AN EXPERIENCE VERSUS BEAUTY AS A

JUDGMENT
In his comment, Frohlich (this issue) argues that beauty can be seen from
different perspectives: as a property of a product, an experience, and, ultimately, by referring to rareness and intensityas a lay design prize. However by this, he omits beauty as a judgment as an important perspective. By referring to Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Frohlich points out that beauty is
not a property of the object but in the eye of the beholder: Each individual
judgment of beauty could be seen as valid in and of itself. There is no right or
wrong beauty. Based on that, he impulsively concluded that beauty is an experience rather than a property. However, Kant understands beauty as a personal way to construe and judge an object but not as an experience per se. An
experience is embedded into a particular context and more importantly
stretches over time, with a beginning and an end. It often transforms individual psychological states, such as moods. Although in an experience, we constantly feel pleasure and pain in various intensities (what Kahneman, 1999, p.
4, calls instant utility). Frohlichs beauty story, given at the beginning of his
comment, is such an experience. It is a whole scenea setting, made of various
ingredients (persons, objects, time, psychological states), which leads to an
aesthetic experience. However that is not what Kant had in mind. He made
an argument about the human ability to judge; die Urteilskraft. He defines
it as the ability to subsume the particular (such as a single experience) under
the general (das Vermgen das Besondere unter dem Allgemeinen [] zu
subsumieren). In other words, Kant has more to tell about judgments that
subsume experiences than about experiences. In general, experiences (e.g.,
attending a concert) are valued higher than material properties (e.g., a piece
of jewelry; van Boven & Gilovich, 2003) but are experiences also a more valuable object to study? I believe both to be important. Judgments can lead to
choices, which initiate experiences. In addition, judgments summarize experiences (what Kahneman, 1999, p. 4, calls remembered utility; see also
Ariely & Carmon, 2003). They are used to communicate about the experience (Did you enjoy your last evening out?), they are retained in memory
(Remember that fabulous night out we had a year ago?), and they will guide
future behavior (Yes it was great. Lets do it again!). There is both in parallel:
the pleasure experienced throughout an experience (that may become conscious if very intense) and judgments about the pleasure that will be or was experienced. Likewise, beauty can be understood as an intense feeling although
interacting with a product in a particular setting, as Frohlich emphasizes (see
Wright, McCarthy, & Meekison, 2003, for a similar position) and a prospective or retrospective judgment about the experience or particular element of
that experience (e.g., an object).

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BEAUTY IN OBJECTS AS A DESIRED EXTENSION OF

THE SELF
Beauty as a judgment is a value attached to an object derived from schemata or actual experience. These value judgments are personal constructions.
They require standards, which may vary from person to person. More important, individuals dont need a precise definition of beautyor of whatever
subdimensions of it to assess beauty, as Tractinsky (this issue) points out
in his comment (p. 353). In other words, beauty is what people believe beauty
to be. Kants basic idea was that those personal norms should not be questioned as appropriate or not. There is no right or wrong beauty. Embracing
this idea (as I do) implies discounting all those philosophical thoughts on
beauty, which argue for some specific content to be more beautiful (valuable,
moral) than another. Is minimalist music more beautiful than Mozart? It depends on values, norms, and personal standards. Reasoning about why purity
and minimalism should be more valuable than an uplifting Mozart tune is a
useless endeavor because of its normative stance. However, that does not preclude taking a look at specific beauty judgments in a population. If beauty
judgments are constructions, which specific information is used to form such
a judgment? Which perceptions play a role? Why is beauty important? What
is its function? Is there any agreement among a group of individuals about the
perceptions, information, or standards on which a beauty judgment is
grounded? This is what I would refer to as the content of beauty. Agreement in
content is not necessarily identical with agreement in judgment. Person A can
find object X beautiful and Person B can find the same object ugly but for the
same reasons. For example, Person A may find a particular piece of clothing
beautiful, because it fits his style. Person B may find the same piece ugly, because it does not appear to fit her style. In this example, the judgment varies
but the content remains stable.
If agreement in the content would be as low as Frohlich (this issue) suggests by incorrectly referring to the variance in the beauty judgments, one
shouldnt find any systematic covariation among variables. However, this is
not what happened. I found beauty judgments to vary with product perceptions connected to the human need to express oneself through objects
(e.g., Logan, Augaitis, & Renk, 1994, p. XX; hedonic quality identification
in my model) but not to vary with perceptions of how well the product
works (pragmatic quality) or how new and stimulating (hedonic qualitystimulation) it appears. I found specific differences in the content of
judgments of beauty and goodness and I found goodness to be affected by
experience, but not beauty.
So what is beauty? Beggan (1992) assumed that use and ownership (actual
or imagined) leads to a psychological association between the object and the

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users or owners self. Objects become a part of an extended self (Belk, 1988)
and will get symbolic value (see Holbrook & Hirschman, 1993). Objects can
be used for maintaining important self-definitions. Borcherding and
Schumacher (2002), for example, found that students who believe that others
hold unfavorable opinions about them, such as a lack of humor or empty social lives, present more links to humorous Web sites and more personal information (links to friends, pictures, longer description of likes and dislikes) on
their personal Web sites than others. This symbolic self-completion
(Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982) is regarded as an important aspect of use and
ownership. Thus, any object will inevitably make a statement about its user.
The perceived ability of a product to make a favorable statement to relevant
others (hedonicidentification) captures this. Moreover, the very same aspect
correlated highest with beauty judgments, which makes beauty socialat least
from the perspective of the judges. Social competence lies at the core of the
what is beautiful is good stereotype in person perception (e.g., Eagly,
Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991). Beautiful people are assumed to get
along better with others, to be more popular, and so forth. Maybe people apply this general notion to objects as well, in the sense that possessing beautiful
things will help one to get along better with people and will make its owner
more popular. I would even go a step further: simplicity, usability, and usefulness could actually be a correlate of beauty but not because getting things done
is beautiful but because of the statement made by a usable product. Gelernter
(1998), for example, spoke of machine beauty, made of simplicity and elegance.
This is surely a statement about Gelernter as well as an inquiry into the nature
of beauty.
To my mind, in the debate about beauty in HCI two perspectives have to
be separated: a normative and a descriptive. Overbeeke and colleagues
(Overbeeke, Djajadiningrat, Hummels, & Wensveen, 2000), for example,
published a manifesto titled Beauty in Usability: Forget About Ease of Use,
which clearly makes a series of normative claims. Amongst other things, they
argue for focusing on the beauty in interaction (good) instead of the beauty
in appearance (bad). By that, they try to redefine beauty, to convince us to
change our understanding of beauty. After all, they are designers. They make
things. As a psychologist, I am more interested in describing how individuals
actually think, what they experience and do. Unfortunately, individuals seem
to equate beauty with appearance and not with interaction. In Study 2, reported in the target article, actual experience did not take effect on the beauty
judgment. However, if Overbeeke and colleagues mission is going to be successful, future studies may reflect a change in the content of the beauty judgment in the desired direction: from appearance to interaction.

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DOES VISCERAL BEAUTY EXIST?

Tractinsky (this issue) and Frohlich (this issue) emphasize that my understanding of beauty as a reflective, deliberate judgment does not take
visceral beauty (Norman, 2004) into account. However does something
like visceral beauty really exist? I argue against it, by referring to a debate in emotion research. Many theories understand emotions as the result of a cognitive appraisal process (see Scherer, 2003). Zajonc (1980)
questioned this in his seminal article, titled Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need no Inferences. He showed that emotional reactions could
be instantaneous, automatic, without much (if any) cognitive processing.
Indeed, neurophysiology describes a neural shortcut that takes information from the senses directly to the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotional reactions, before the cortex had any chance to
intervene (e.g., LeDoux, 1994). The key to solve this contradiction is to
look closely at the types of emotions evoked in both cases. Zajonc
showed that a valenced affective response could be made without involvement of the cognitive. But this affective response does not necessarily equal a complex emotion like hate, love, disappointment, or satisfaction. In other words, complex emotional reactions can be viewed as a
cognitive elaboration of the initial, diffuse reaction (e.g., Ortony, Clore,
& Collins, 1988; Ortony, Norman, & Revelle, in press). To experience
satisfaction, for example, one has to compare an actual outcome to ones
expectations and one has to further attribute some responsibility for the
outcome to oneself. These activities surely need cognitive activity. I
would claim the same for beauty. Beauty judgments are interpretations
of initial, diffuse, spontaneous responses of liking and disliking. The fact
that judgments are more differentiated can be read from the differences
between goodness and beauty, which emerged in my target article. If
beauty would be identical to goodness, no differential correlation patterns would have been observed. Nevertheless, both beauty as well as
goodness may use the initial reaction to the object as information
(Schwarz & Clore, 1983), which explains the general correlation between
evaluative judgments but each may focus on different aspects to reach
the final judgment. To conclude, I agree that initial reactions of liking
and disliking are apparent. But such as a spontaneous positive affective
response does not equate with satisfaction or love, I dont think we can
call these reactions beauty. They are simply too diffuse.

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BEAUTY AS A NEITHER LESS NOR MORE ELUSIVE

JUDGMENT THAN USABILITY, UTILITY, OR
SATISFACTION
Frohlichs (this issue) reaction to my attempt to study beauty (It just didnt
seem respectful enough, p. 360) made something very obvious to me.
Beauty carries the weight of thousands of philosophers and artists, who never
seem to stop thinking and writing about beauty. I am sure that for every imaginable aspect of our view on beauty a respectable support in form of a
well-known philosopher can be found. The sheer amount of thought spent on
the topic let beauty appear to be a complex and elusive thing. Because of that
maybe, Frohlich urges designers to forget about beauty and to focus on things
they can easily design for, that is, more predictable, properties of interactive
products such as utility, usability, and enjoyment (p. 364). But why is enjoyment, usability, or utility a property of the product, if beauty is not? Take usability as an example: Is there any objective way to determine the usability of
an interactive product? Is usability not in the eye of the beholder as well? The
analogy is striking: To reason that, for example, efficiency makes a product
usable is as arguing that rounded corners make a product beautiful. And indeed, accepted definitions of usability understand it as a quality that emerges
from the interplay of product, user, and task (e.g., ISO 924111; ISO, 1998).
Therefore, usability is rather a perception that a product will satisfy the basic
human need to achieve behavioral goals than a product property. It is a form
of judgment in itself. And, as done with beauty previously, one may distinguish between the experience of usability and usability judgments (see
Hassenzahl & Sandweg, 2004). In line with Tractinskys (this issue) comment
(who cites Lindgaard & Dudek, 2003, to make the point) I believe usability,
utility, enjoyment, or satisfaction to be neither more nor less elusive than
beauty. All those constructs are underdeveloped in the field of HCI.

SHALL WE FOCUS ON OBJECTS OR ON INDIVIDUALS?

In his comment, Monk (this issue) argues that one should focus on products rather than individuals. In other words, studies should account for variance between objects rather than between individuals. Monk argues, Designers primarily need conclusions that can be generalized across products.
They need to know that the variance being explained is variance in the population of possible products not simply variation in the way the subjects use the
scales (p. 372). I partially disagree.
I assume individuals to have lay theories about typical covariation among
product attributes, comparable to implicit personality theories known from
the field of person perception (e.g., Schneider, 1973). For example, a product

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with a clearly arranged user interface may also be assumed to be easy to learn
without having any experience or knowledge of its actual ease of learning. For
people, conciseness is coupled to learnability. These theories allow them to
make inferences beyond the merely perceived. The classical studies of the
what is beautiful is good stereotype follow this logic. In Dion, Berscheid,
and Walster (1972), for example, each participant had to rate an unattractive,
average, or attractive stimulus person on attributes such as marital competence. Variance in the attractiveness of the stimuli accounted for variance in
marital-competence ratings. This shows that beauty can lead to impressions
of higher marital competence, without knowing anything about the stimulus
person. Beauty and usability could follow the same logic, as Tractinsky (2004)
suggests. Beauty could be a cue for usability. (Note that I do not imply causality in the way Tractinsky suggest in his comment. Beauty can be a signal for
usability and a usable product may be judged as beautiful. However, I suggest
beauty to be a more general and abstract property compared to the perception of usability-related product attributes, such as simplicity.) A designer can
exploit any implicit relationship between attributes. If the what is beautiful is
usable stereotype would be correct, designing beautiful products would automatically lead to the assumption of increased product usability on behalf of
its user and vice versa. Brand marketing works this way. Thus, without attempting to resolve the issue of which perspective is the more appropriate, I
would argue that knowledge about implicit product theories could be helpful
for designers too.
To conclude, I am not yet convinced that focusing on stereotypes or implicit theories, as I suggest, is of no value to designers. I believe implicit theories could be exploited. Nevertheless, I agree that product-focused analyses
are certainly more helpful in the context of the formative evaluation of specific products (see Hassenzahl, 2002). Monk (2004) is certainly correct in
pointing out that future studies, especially those correlational in nature,
should put more emphasis on the sample of products studied. The inconsistency in the findings reported in the target article and by Tractinsky and colleagues (e.g., Tractinsky, Katz, & Ikar, 1999) is surely in part due to the differences in product domains studied (ATMs vs. MP3-players skins), which is
supported by newer data of Tractinsky and Zmiri (in press), who find overlap
with my results in their study of MP3-players skins.

ANY LESSONS FOR DESIGN?

Overbeeke and Wensveen (2004) stressed the importance of doing and the
practical merits of a model as proposed in my article. They ask But How,
Marc, Tell us How? and naturally I cannot resist giving an answer, albeit to a
slightly different question, namely, But why, Marc, tell us why?

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When working with designers I came across two distinct perspectives:

designers as personalities and design as an activity. Designers as personalities stresses the genius designer. Design as activity stresses designing as a
learned profession where the work is often done in teams. From the genius
perspective, designers neither need a model nor empirical data to support
design decisions. They simply design according to their highly developed
tastes. There are seemingly many examples of successful, well-known designers who are especially dismissive of any empirical grounding of their
work. The problem is this: As long as we are unaware of all the designers,
who believe themselves to be geniuses but who fail, many will tend to believe this philosophy of design.
Proponents of the activity perspective on design need models, research
tools, and empirical data for three reasons: to set appropriate design goals, to
evaluate fulfillment of those goals, and to communicate goals and design decisions to others. However models cannot substitute for the designers creativity
or problem solving capacity. To set appropriate design goals is one thing but to
create a product that fulfills those goals requires more and other insights than
models or questionnaires can provide. Design needs ideas instead of information. It needs rich, inspiring, qualitative data, which may not even be data in the
scientific sense (see Gaver, Boucher, Pennington, & Walker, in press). Researchers in the field of HCI, and especially psychologists, must realize that design as an activity can benefit from data, which are neither objective nor even
valid. We may even witness the emergence of inspiration engineering, a field
devoted to development of tools and techniques for designers and design
teams to support idea generation, integration and communication
(ID-Studiolab, http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/research/stories/storyReader
$15).
Beauty is just one of the issues the new HCI is about to address. To better
understand emotions, needs beyond task completion, and the nature of experience are only some of the interesting challenges we must face. Im looking
forward to it.

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