Applied Aesthetics - Information Technology

Information Technology

Aesthetics in information technology has focused upon the study of human-computer interaction and creating user-friendly devices and software applications. Software itself has aesthetic dimensions ("software aesthetics"), as do information-technology-mediated processes and experiences such as computer video games and virtual reality simulations. Digital culture is a distinct aesthetic to judge the appeal of digital environments such as Web browsers, websites, and icons, as well as visual and aural art produced exclusively with digital technologies. The notion of cyberspace has sometimes been linked to the concept of the sublime.

Aesthetics in information technology do also apply to the act of designing software itself. Numerous programmers profess to experiencing a dimension of elegance in the functionality and structuring of software at the source code level. For example, a short, powerful expression that clearly expresses the intent of the code can be considered "beautiful" to the poor programmer charged with maintaining said code. This contrasts with code that is (as code all too often is) short, cryptic, unclear, and unnecessarily "clever". In-line documentation, while not strictly code, can be considered something a programmer would need to be good at in order to write beautiful code. Correctly done, documentation can accentuate the effect of beautiful code, when it is clear, concise, explains the intent of the programmer, and expands the understanding that one can gain by simply looking at the code. Comments that are redundant (only explain what the code already explains), cryptic, and overly long or short can detract from beautiful code. Aesthetics in programming can also have a practical level: Under the right conditions, elegant code can run faster and more efficiently, and (most importantly) be less prone to errors.

Critics of this would say that the need to justify "good design" by reference to "cost savings" mean that "good design" isn't "art" insofar as art is autonomous, and many aestheticians would have to say that art emerges in applications only in excess of cost savings. In information technology, theorists of "user friendliness" have to justify their "user friendly" applications and often disregard basic statistics when most users like a system, but a significant minority hate it.

That is, they may discard the standard deviation of their data in order to sell a good design for the best price, and this has nothing to do with art insofar as art is a useful signifier (if you cost-justify everything you are a businessman and not an artist).

A folk phenomenon among real programmers is in fact their frequent hatred of practice described in books as best practice and good design. A Marxist theory of industrial "art" would ascribe this to alienation, in which subaltern programmers never produce code they own in any meaningful sense, with the problem that the same sort of alienation, soldiering, and bloody-mindedness appeared, it seems, in Soviet computing shops.

The most sophisticated writings on the topic of aesthetics are to be found in the late Edsger Wybe Dijkstra's corpus of papers and notes on computing: in Dijkstra, the art is real, but Ying with respect to the Yang of applications; Dijkstra seemed to have refused any analysis of programming as other than applied mathematics and, strange to say, never pursued what Adorno (the midcentury theoretician of whom Dijkstra was apparently unaware) called a purely culinary elegance...despite the protests of others that his work was "hard to digest", in Adorno's words not very culinary.

Dijkstra's beauty refused the notion of accessibility as do many "artistic" works ancient and modern: it was hard as is the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven's syncopated and neo-primitive late movement. In fact, no aesthetician makes "user friendliness" canonical and necessary in a work of art, strange to say in an era when supposedly the masses rule through the market; for most art theorists, it is nice if the canaille can enjoy some pretty rondo of Mozart and whistle it on the street, but would deny that this property must be shared by the Masonic prelude and fugue or the Requiem mass.

This makes strange any claim that a programmer making his work "user friendly" to all comers is some sort of artist by virtue of that. For Dijsktra, truth was primary, and beauty the automatic result.