For the Love of Technology: How Aesthetics Define Emotions in a Digital Education Setting

Abstract

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.