Interactionist Approach to Visual Aesthetics in HCI

Visual Aesthetics has gathered interest among scholars in HCI research. The growing interest stems from examinations of the aesthetic-usability effect ("what is beautiful is usable"), and possibly vice versa. Thus, numerous studies focus on understanding how we make sense and experience visual entities in interacting with technology. However, theoretical, and methodological stances vary, which impact conclusions of the studies conducted, and thus, affect design implications. Visual experience research in HCI lacks detailed conceptualizations of the constituents of visual experience and understanding of how these conceptualizations affect the overall research results through implicit methodological stances taken. In this paper, an overview of methodological stances to visual aesthetics in HCI research is presented and an interactionist approach is discussed which combines objectivist and subjectivist methodological stances and enriches our understanding of current research of visual aesthetics in HCI. In addition, methodological grounds of interactionism are described and extended from cognitive processing fluency paradigm to take into account the overall complexity of visual experience. Moreover, conceptualization of visual experience from cognitive-affective perspective in line with interactionism is discussed, following with metodical considerations of interactionism, and issues related to the role of visual stimuli in examining visual aesthetics in HCI.