Psychological challenges for the analysis of style.

Date
2006
Authors
Stacey, Martin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
ISSN
0890-0604
Volume Title
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Peer reviewed
Yes
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.
Description
This article remains the copyright of Cambridge University Press. The definitive version of this article can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S089006040606015X
Keywords
style, design, shape grammar, cognition, fashion, visual object recognition, categorization, similarity, analogy, concepts
Citation
Stacey, M. (2006) Psychological challenges for the analysis of style. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 20 (3) pp.167-184.
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