Browsing by Subject "Aesthetics"

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Aesthetics at Work: Using Principles of Art and Beauty to Improve Work Engagement
(2014-06-06) French, Jennifer
Organizations today need employees who are creative and innovative, yet most OD and HRD initiatives focus only on technical learning. This project challenges the effectiveness of narrow, skills-based, and transactional design and implementation of employee training programs. The integration of aesthetics into HRD is proposed to improve training and development practices through the integration of imagination and creativity. The implications of aesthetics in HRD are outlined, including more holistic learning programs, improved work engagement, and a legitimate need for artful and art-inspired HRD.
Analysis of Feminist Appearance
(2015-08) Heckman, Joyce
In an age when the term feminist has evolved to include various strains of the women's movement and is highly inclusive of women and men, people are often quick to disassociate themselves from the term, viewing it as controversial and divisive. The present study investigates whether this dissociation with feminism has to do with a perceived negative appearance stereotype tied to feminists, a stereotype women feel is not representative of their personal appearance. The purpose of this project is to provide an analysis of feminist appearance and to explore appearance negotiations feminists deal with in their everyday lives. Another goal is to discover if feminists feel their appearance is representative of feminism as a whole and whether they feel their appearance choices conflict with their feminist beliefs. Drawing from analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with 17 self-identified feminist graduate students, I explore the following overarching research question: "Are there appearance cues tied to feminism, and if so, does the perception of these cues shape society's understanding of the current feminist movement?"� Each participant took part in an in-depth interview, consisting of open-ended questions in addition to a four question written pulse survey. Each agreed to be photographed for the purpose of the interview. Using Marilyn DeLong's "Apparel-Body-Concept"� (1998) as a conceptual aesthetic framework to guide my analysis, this study focuses on participants' own perceptions of the interaction of apparel and the human body as they examine images of themselves and discuss ways they alter their appearance depending on the contexts, environments, and roles in which they find themselves. I examine modern definitions of feminism, both broad and personal, provided by the participants and I investigate how these definitions affect how the participants have developed their personal appearance and the types of dress and appearance they associate with the feminist movement. I explore whether participants believe this appearance has evolved over time, as the feminist movement has progressed from the suffragist movement in the 1800s to its current form in the 21st century.
A Case Study on the Designer Hannah Troy, who Translated Couture into American Ready-To-Wear During the Mid-20th Century
(2023-05) Martin, Nancy
This study investigated how the American designer, Hannah Troy, adapted the aesthetic qualities of original couture creations to appeal to the American market. It used a historical-comparative and material culture methodology and compared apparel designs and garment artifacts presented by Hannah Troy between 1947 to 1955 to the work of contemporary American designers and Parisian couturiers. The study used ready-to-wear designer Hannah Troy as a case study into how American designers successfully translated the aesthetic dictated by top Parisian couturiers into a product that suited the expectations of American women. Two competitive but complementary clothing production systems, ready-to-wear and couture, were prevalent in the United States and Europe following World War II. The two methods of producing clothing differ. In couture, design and fit are individually customized in the commission, in conjunction with exclusive and often hand-made textiles. The couture garment is a unique and singular product. Couturiers have long maintained style authority to set trends and historically have been extolled as aesthetically and technically superior to ready-to-wear. The other method of apparel production is ready-to-wear, which depends on an agreed-upon sequence of construction supported by mechanization. Ready-to-wear relies upon replication- exact copying- as a process developed to ensure product quality in quantity. The research focuses on how Hannah Troy created her designs for the American market using these two systems.
Digital material samples for design.
(2012-08) Berrier, Seth Franklin
Designers work from example. They surround themselves with inspirational artifacts and material samples; blocks of marble, wood and metal, swatches of paint and fabrics, photographs and magazine clippings, anything that could inspire creativity or be a building block in a new product. Digital representations of these artifacts would enhance the design experience and facilitate the development of computerized collections of materials and novel appearance design tools. In this thesis we explore techniques for capturing and rendering these material samples. We employ both the traditional rendering pipeline and the emerging body of work in image based rendering for digitizing and developing these materials. We build interactive programs for selecting paint samples and interpolating metallic paint colors and we develop a new approach to morphing surface light fields to meld these materials together into novel shapes and appearances. The first tool allows interaction with a large set of household paint colors. It affords easy viewing of the colors on 3D objects and a novel interface for traversing and searching the large collection. Our searching tool employs the science of color perception as well as a unique 3D user interface to enable easy navigation of the large collection. We evaluate this interface with a user study and report the results. The second tool allows for the creation of new metallic paint colors. Given two input colors it can generate an interpolated sequence of metallic colors that smoothy fit between them. This tool was used by an architect to design and exhibit a wall prototype and we detail his experience as a case study. We were able to enlist a commercial paint manufacturer to help us formulate the designed paints and construct this prototype. The last tool provides a novel morphing algorithm for surface light fields represented as unstructured lumigraphs. The use of surface light fields allows for nearly arbitrary complexity of material appearance properties and affords scanning of real material samples into a digital representation. The morphing algorithm provides a new way of computing a 3D shape morph using shape-from-silhouette techniques. It also simultaneously morphs the appearance of the object giving a full surface light field at every point in-between. The surface light field morphing algorithm represents a novel contribution to the field. It approaches 3D shape morphing in a new way and calculates a morph for a type of surface light field that has not been previously undertaken. Unlike other surface light field morphing algorithms, it explicitly computes light field samples at every in-between point providing detailed and physically plausible reflection data. The interface for searching color collections also represents a unique contribution that melds the science of perceptual color spaces with a unique interface that is useful for designers in their day-to-day color selection tasks.
For the Love of Technology: How Aesthetics Define Emotions in a Digital Education Setting
(2021) Brower, Autumn
Educators often admit that they are aware that emotion plays a significant role in students’ educational success, yet most of the scientific literature measures cognition in education to the exclusion of emotion. This study is intended to be a proof of concept design for future research. Its goal is to assess how an individual’s aesthetic value of a product might be a way to gauge emotion in educational settings. Three faculty members at the University of Minnesota were interviewed about their viewpoints pertaining to the product design of a static Canvas page and asked to evaluate its design based on its visceral, behavioral, and reflective beauty. Page orientation and font were used to represent product design. Results of the interviews showed that readability was the most frequently mentioned reason people are drawn to certain aesthetic features of a product’s design in digital education, followed by alignment, accessibility, mobile devices, tradition, and font personalities. Additionally, this paper evaluates the participants’ valence response; their responses to the design’s functionality; and their thoughts on meaningfulness as they relate to Norman’s (2007) three aesthetic levels of product design. At the end of the paper, suggestions for how we might use this data to increase productivity in our classes and enhance educational technology are addressed. Future directions for how these results might apply to cognition, emotion, and computation are also discussed.
Interview with Marcia Eaton
(University of Minnesota, 1995-04-20) Eaton, Marcia Muelder; Chambers, Clarke A.
Clarke A. Chambers interviews Marcia Eaton, professor in the Department of Philosophy.
Modernism's Critique du Coeur: the Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925
(2013-05) Pistelli, John
Modernism's Critique du Coeur: The Novelist as Critic, 1885-1925 provides a new account of the modernist novel's famous inward turn toward subjectivity and language. This turn makes the novel of modernism not politically quietist, as prior scholars have assumed, but rather a unique resource for the robust criticism of ideologies that manifest themselves in language and consciousness. My thesis on the critical power of modernist novels promises to renew the theory that aesthetic autonomy is the keynote of modernist innovation. In this, I join the current re-examination of literary aesthetics' potential to do more than serve as an ideological pretext for vested social interests, as post-structuralist and Marxist theory had argued. I claim instead that the aesthetic has the potential to make its adherents critical and self-critical subjects of modernity. In two theoretical chapters, I survey the theory of the novel as it has addressed two primary issues: the cognitive power of novels to encapsulate a society's self-conception and the affective power of novels to move their readers toward social reform. In chapters that treat the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, I show how the modernist novel, by withholding obvious political referents and inhabiting the subjectivity of a central character, forces its readers into the position of textual critics. My approach to the texts of modernism is also meta-critical, examining not only their works but the body of criticism their works have generated in support of my argument that modernist fiction calls for its own critique. These theoretical and critical approaches allow me finally to make a literary-historical argument: by emphasizing aesthetic autonomy as the modernist novel's mode of radical critique, I am able to identify the under-analyzed novels of British Aestheticism's founders, Pater and Wilde, as the key Anglo novels of the late Victorian period. Their fictions of Aestheticism inaugurated the novelistic project of modernism.
Professional women active commuters: apparel design criteria
(2013-05) Lastovich, Theresa Elizabeth
The purpose of this research study was to identify the design criteria for professional women's active commuter apparel. Six professional women active commuters living in Minneapolis, Minnesota were interviewed. The women rode their bike and/or walked to their professional work environment. The participants where physically fit and adhered to a business casual dress code at their place of employment. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded. The clothing comfort model and activity theory was used as a guideline to analyze the data. Emergent themes revealed that their physical and psychological comfort levels affected the participants' apparel requirements. The study produced the following categories that established the professional women active commuter design criteria: sustainability, financial, health, fabric, fit, aesthetics, air temperature, safety, and peer group affiliations.
Security and Destruction:" Reading the Sublime in the British Romantic Period "
(2022-11) Brogden, Matthew
This dissertation examines the sublime in relation to four authors of the British Romantic period: Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), William Godwin (Political Justice and Caleb Williams), Percy Shelley (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”), and Mary Shelley (The Last Man). It draws on major theorists of the sublime—particularly Longinus, Burke, and Kant—but finally relies on textual analysis, working to discover the distinct texture of each sublime it examines. More specifically, I study the ways in which the authors I study stage and negotiate difficulties in the process of reading or meaning making, difficulties that take many shapes but broadly come as confrontations with the unknown, mysterious, or awe-inspiring. The first chapter centers on Edmund Burke’s attempt to decipher the French Revolution, the second on the interpretive challenges that emerge in William Godwin’s work—more specifically, those that relate to the history of language and the interpretation of character—the third on Percy Shelley’s effort to praise and theorize an unseen divinity, and the fourth on Mary Shelley’s depiction of the last man’s confrontation with an uncertain future, what the novel names a “dread blank.” I show that the plots, arguments, and language of the texts I study are intertwined with—or develop towards—moments typically named sublime and conclude by making the case for its continued relevance.
The Aesthetics of Terrorism
(2011-01) Collenberg, Carrie Ann
The 'Aesthetics of Terrorism' is a term I use that encompasses various narratives with regard to the visual representation of 9/11 and the Red Army Faction and takes into account changes in practices in photography, aesthetics, representation, and the nature of terror and terrorism. Photographs play a significant role in the reception of terrorism and the trends and contexts that have developed in the reception suggest not only methods to deal with tragedy and trauma, but also preemptive strategies to counter the aesthetic potential of the photograph to influence, subvert, and indeed terrorize, established institutions of art, morality, history and nation. This dissertation focuses on the aesthetics of terrorism and how media photographs are used in the construction of postmemory. Chapter one is devoted to discussions on whether and under what circumstances a terrorist attack can be compared to an artwork. Chapter two is a case study of the deathbed photograph of RAF member Holger Meins. Chapter three is a case study of the photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center that has come to be known as "The Falling Man." Chapter four focuses on the appropriation of media photographs into films about the RAF, paying special attention to Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Todesspiel, and Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex. This dissertation was conceived as a step towards visual literacy and understanding the contemporary representation and reception of terrorism in order to understand the visual language that is used to construct and manipulate history and memory.
Warring opinions: an investigation into the sublime aesthetic narratives of contemporary warfare.
(2010-08) Licht, Melissa Vera
This project uses aesthetic concepts of the sublime as critical categories for exploring opinions and subjective responses to war as they are presented in selected soldiers' memoirs, literary theory, films, and public affairs-from World War I to the (ongoing) Gulf War. Representations of sublime force as well as sublime sacrifice and idealism permeate even "objective" journalistic accounts of warfare and inform the perspectives through which we engage with war in thought and feeling. The project argues that "opinion" is not merely a rationally measurable statistical phenomenon but an aesthetic problematic through which we experience ourselves in relation to the world. Soldiers' memoirs and public discourses narrate the trauma of war and express opinions that swing between and simultaneously uphold radically different positions: war as a sublime communal endeavor versus war as the destruction of social meaning. These opposing opinions reflect different aesthetic and narrative strategies: different ways of representing one's position in the world and of managing overpowering forces and emotions. Opinion itself is built and supported through our emotional narratives of sublime antagonism and/or sublime interest in the social world. The critical thought of Hannah Arendt, J. Glenn Gray, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Immanuel Kant are central to the analysis of sources throughout the project.

University Digital Conservancy

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Browsing by Subject "Aesthetics"