Beauty, its essence


What is beauty?

We often fail to articulate what we mean by 'beauty'. However, I use this word quite often in all cases, whether it has something to do with art or not. The Oxford Dictionary defines beauty as "the combination of characteristics, such as shape, color, or form, that are aesthetically pleasing, especially to the eye". But we know it's more than that. We often also say that a person is beautiful or has a beautiful soul.


Beauty is ambiguous. It has a deeper 'resonance' about feel than composition or color, without relying on specific aesthetic qualities. When we recognize that there is beauty in something, we implicitly accept it: 'X is the source of positive aesthetic value or positive aesthetic appreciation' There are many theories and definitions of beauty in the history of philosophical aesthetics. Despite their differences, most of these theories link the experience of beauty with certain types of pleasures and pleasures.


However, there are universal indicators of beauty in our nature. What about beauty in terms of Einstein's theory of relativity, Dirac's theorem, spirituality and the laws of nature? At the atomic level, everything is connected. They dance and are attracted to each other at the nuclear level. The laws of nature seek to make things in symmetry and harmony, and vice versa, they are complementary. We all have a sense of beauty because we are all made of the same molecular substance. We know that beauty is the power that enriches our lives.


So you can see beauty in reproduction, not symmetry. The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy can be transferred or changed from one form to another. This intrinsically has to do with good design.

 

 


Beauty is also about utility. Mother Nature has a purpose in everything it does. Ideally, beauty and usefulness are mutually generative. The combination of the two is when you reach the pinnacle of design. Any kind of visual communication should be considered the embodiment of form and function. That is, it must be integrated.


The concept of beauty is changeable and subject to context. What we know about an event or object, worldview, and moral values determines our perception of what is beautiful, what is not, and why it is beautiful. Whether in art, design or human form, historically what is considered beautiful and what is not has always changed. Always.


Let's see an example. It appeared during the Renaissance that the dominant belief in beauty was based on numbers "similar to the harmony of music and the motion of the planets". At the other end are views of medieval beauty as part of a "divine order" or far more romantic concepts, such as the poet John Keats' "Beauty is truth, the beauty of truth" from a Greek urn song. More time passed, and modernism emerged. Everything went back to the most basic building blocks. The rise of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought about extensive cultural changes in the Western world. 


They quickly switched to a succinct base design, prioritizing strict proportions and functionality. This was the limited beauty of that time. This marks the beginning of a fundamental rejection of the previous era, which continues to this day. For many people, the concept of beauty is (perhaps subconsciously) banal or outdated. This is an aesthetic principle that goes against the strict framework of 21st century design. The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones wrote in 2012 about the rejection of beauty in contemporary art. "Beauty is the most dangerous idea in art"


Now, in order to create more beautiful designs, we need to think about the social purpose of what we are doing and how we are running our creative business. In an age where designers increasingly see AI and other technological innovations increasingly benefit from their design work, one thing computers will never be able to do is judge their innate, more obscure sense of the beautiful. Beauty has to do with innate humanity, and no matter what face you have, a computer will never be truly human.


작성자: 위디딧 명재영

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