4 - Seeing Design

Summary

Design patents are meant to promote designs that are “pleasing,” “attractive,” and “beautiful.” Yet judges fret that they will inject their own prejudices into such aesthetic determinations and have adopted a permissive nonobviousness standard that only rejects designs when they are exact copies of what came before. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanics of design perception and appreciation. Visual processing is arguably the best understood mental process in modern neuroscience. Recent studies show that aesthetic preference is strongly tied to the ease with which an observer can mentally process a particular design. Although a limited amount of innovation may be needed to gain the observer’s attention, consumers insist on simplicity, familiarity, and congruence in designs. Rather than correlating with what an audience considers pleasing, innovation in design, after rapidly reaching an optimal level, begins to trigger aesthetic distaste. I use a variety of examples from popular products and actual cases—like Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and Lego blocks—to illustrate this audience preference for designs in the “aesthetic middle.”