Psychological challenges for the analysis of style

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. While formal and computational methods for analysing 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 judgements 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 artefacts. 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 paper 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.

Editorial

“…This is crucial since each artist makes pictures in a different way to everyone else. This is the essence of style (where there is a choice in how to depict, style will become apparent, according to Martin Stacey (2006)). Not only does this help the scholar to discuss any particular comic's visual aesthetic, it may enable the scholar to think how to present the visual aspects of their own research.…”

Interactive Graphical Representation for Collaborative 3D Virtual Worlds

“…A style is a manner of doing something, which is chosen from a wide range of ways to achieve a similar result. Style perception involves the interaction between the preconscious perceptual recognition of stylistic elements and relationships at different scales and levels of abstraction, conscious reasoning about similarities and categories, and explanatory inference to a coherent understanding of the artifact (Stacey, 2006). Architectural styles classify buildings in terms of forms, techniques, materials, time periods, and regions.…”

Research on the Method of Style Knowledge Acquisition Based on the Kansei Engineering

“…Traditionally Kansei Engineering apply the Quantification Type to describle the mapping relation between the subjective image and the form feature. Recently the research on how to solve the problem of the style computation [2] and its knowledge acquisition have make greatly progress y indefinite reasoning technology. Li studied the uncertainty of probability distribution in car's style based on cloud mode [3].The purpose of this research is to examine how a designer observes the characteristics of a product form which belong to the same style, and is to construct a reasoning system which help designers to observe the form characteristics.…”