From the 24th of March till the 27th, the University of Vienna is organising their 55th conference of Experimental Psychologists. In the morning of the 24th I will be presenting a study which investigated the effects of unity in variety on the appreciation of car interiors by Automotive Design students.
Abstract
Several visual principles are known to influence how we appreciate product designs aesthetically (e.g., complexity, novelty, and typicality). One of these principles – unity in variety – holds that the greatest pleasure or beauty is arrived at when a maximum of unity or order is combined with as much variety as possible. Most research on unity in variety has been done with art or simple polygonal figures, but not with product designs. We contribute by investigating how unity and variety together influence aesthetic appreciation of product designs. Participants rated photos of twelve espresso machines or twelve lamps on items measuring visual aesthetic appreciation, unity and variety. As expected, unity and variety are negatively intercorrelated (r=-.384, p<.001), but both correlate positively with aesthetic appreciation, especially when their shared influence is partialled out (partial runity=.341, p<.001; partial rvariety=.326, p<.001). Congruently, a regression analysis shows that both unity and variety independently and positively predict aesthetic appreciation (R2=.151, F(2, 813)=73.6, p<.001; βunity =.361, p<.001; βvariety=.344, p<.001). These results corroborate that although unity and variety are partially opposites, they can simultaneously influence the aesthetic appreciation of product designs. An evolutionary account for this unity-in-variety principle will shortly be discussed.
The program can be found here
