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Psychological challenges for the analysis of style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2006

MARTIN STACEY
MARTIN STACEY
Affiliation:
School of Computing, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
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Abstract

Analyses of styles in design have paid little attention to how people see style and how designers use perceptions of style to guide designing. Although formal and computational methods for analyzing styles and generating designs provide impressively parsimonious accounts of what some styles are, they do not address many of the factors that influence how humans understand styles. The subtlety of human style judgments raises challenges for computational approaches to style. This paper differentiates between a range of distinct meanings of “style” and explores how designers and ordinary people learn and apply perceptual similarity classes and style concepts in different situations to interpret and create designed artifacts. A range of psychological evidence indicates that style perception is dependent on knowledge and involves the interaction of perceptual recognition of style features and explanatory inference processes that create a coherent understanding of an object as an exemplar of a style. This article concludes by outlining how formal style analyses can be used in combination with psychological research to develop a fuller understanding of style perception and creative design.

Keywords

Psychology of DesignStyle
Type
Research Article
Information
AI EDAM , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , August 2006 , pp. 167 - 184
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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