What Do We Like? Understanding the Sense of Order and the Perception of Beauty
There are two key ideas, to my mind, that help us to understand how we visually perceive our environment, why do we find some things beautiful, and how all this relates to design.
Trying to find these sorts of explanations can help us to design environments that do something good to us.
The first idea is that a sense of order is deeply rooted in man’s biological heritage. The second one, that our perception of beauty relates to forms and processes in nature. Both ideas are timeless, interconnected, and they complement each other.
We have in ourselves a latent sense of order and a tendency to organize seemingly chaotic environments (1) (2). When we perceive order in the natural world, we feel attracted to it. Order appears in nature when the physical forces can act in isolated systems. We can see these manifestations in many situations. The geometry of crystals and snowflakes, the curvature of a rainbow, the structure of some plants and fruits, the patterns and colours of the feathers of some birds, are all examples of this.
Understanding the Sense of Order
Imagine a lake in the high mountains, surrounded by rocks and trees, in mild weather. We would appreciate the movement of the branches of the trees, leaves and stones scattered on the ground, clouds in the sky moving and changing shape, these are the results of natural forces influencing each other. If we throw a stone into the lake, we will see circular waves expanding across the water (this is called a ripple effect). We feel attracted to this sort of regularity in nature.
“It is the contrast between disorder and order that alerts our perception” (1), and this directly relates to our instinct for survival in the natural world.
Likewise, if we create environments with features that are familiar to us (meaning that our brain can adjust to them with ease), any change, any novelty in their regularity will attract our attention (our brain will need to readjust). Environments that satisfy this duality work well from a neuroscience perspective (3).
Designs that are monotonous can lead to boredom, and overcomplicated designs can lead to confusion. In both cases we wouldn’t keep our attention, and most of us would give up.
Understanding the Perception of Beauty
Our perception of beauty is influenced by culture, social aspects, and our own experiences, but at the core we find that it relates to something more fundamental.
One definition of beauty relates to how our brain process visual information. We find beauty in those features of the built environment that we can process smoothly, that we can understand and engage with ease, that resonate with our sense of order described above.
“Evolution is invoked in this definition of beauty” (3) since our brains had to find strategies for survival and reproduction in the natural world, having to process lots of visual information, and adapt over time.
Our evolving brain then is connected to the natural environment, its forms, and its processes. When we encounter an object of beauty, we make all sorts of associations in our mind, and some of them release impressions stored in our mind that come from this elemental connection (1).
We can find many examples of forms and processes in nature that give us aesthetic pleasure. Colours of exotic flowers, regular patterns of marine organisms and microorganisms, spiral organization of snail shells, symmetry of snowflakes, geometry of crystals, or the curve and the colours of a rainbow, to name a few.
I started this article with an image of a small collection of glass bottles. They were being displayed in an art gallery-shop window in Barcelona, and I noticed them when I passed by. They were small, simple, and refined, and they were displayed with delicacy and illuminated nicely.
I felt attracted to them, and I connect it to the way we perceive beauty described above. I like the bumpy dots. They remind me of some sort of marine organisms, like sea anemones, in a very abstract way. Because of the fact that they are displayed as a group, we can appreciate the variations in shape, colour, and size, between them. And then, with the light shining through the coloured glass, we see different shadows projected onto the fabric base. All these contrasts gave me information and kept my attention, in such a way that it gave me pleasure. I found beauty in these objects.
Notes:
(1)
Papanek, Victor J. Design for Human Scale. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1983: 121, 142, 137
(2)
Gombrich, E.H. The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. Phaidon Press, 2012, ©1984: 5, 6
(3)
Albright, Thomas D. “Neuroscience for Architecture” in Robinson, Sarah, and Juhani Pallasmaa, Eds. Mind in Architecture. Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design. The MIT Press, 2015: 212-214
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