The tyranny of the visual continues. And it may be getting worse.
I can understand why there’s a lot of attention to how things look. For most of us, vision is our dominant sense. Many places and things we encounter are also only ever seen by us – they’re pictured in magazines or online, for example, not visited in person or encountered during a shopping trip.
A recent article by Stabiner in the New York Times drove home to me how crucial visual impressions are. She writes about a new course being offered at the Culinary Institute of America: “Seven years after its founding, Instagram announced last week that it has 800 million monthly users, and the camera-ready restaurant dish has become a cultural commonplace. High-quality images are as essential to a chef’s success these days as knife skills. The people who teach those knife skills know it – which is why the venerable Culinary Institute of America will introduce two new elective courses in May, one in food photography and the other in food styling, to help students develop sophisticated skills not only for the plate but also for the app. The classes will teach students…how to cook for the still camera…[and create] photos that communicate flavor…The students see proof every day of how important visuals have become…A photogenic dish, Mr. Potanovich [Jason, assistant professor and executive chef at Bocuse] said, is ‘absolutely’ likelier to stay on the menu.”
Even though all of this attention to the visual is not surprising, it’s still of concern. All of our sensory experiences combine in our brains to generate our response to a space or object. Those responses influence how we think and behave, our emotional and cognitive states.
Ignoring scents, sounds and textures, for example, during the design process is dangerous. What is not considered is often not consistent with design-related goals. And that’s too bad because what we smell, hear, touch and taste can have a significant effect on whether we creatively solve a problem or get along with others, for instance.
Sacrificing the visual for an effect generated by one of our other senses is silly – but so is ignoring what people using a space or object are smelling, hearing, touching and tasting.
Karen Stabiner. October 2, 2017. “Lights! Camera! Culinary School Will Teach Instagram Skills.” The New York Times,
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.