A model of aesthetic judgment in design

Aesthetics plays a major role in real design. To date, aesthetics is mostly ignored in studies dealing with computational design support systems. Probably the main reason for this omission is that aesthetics is tightly associated with art, which is perceived to be beyond the capabilities of computational techniques. The paper outlines a model for the incorporation of aesthetic judgment in design. It shows how important aesthetic criteria that follow the rationalistic and the romanticist movements of aesthetics, can be represented, refined, and used in design. BRIDGER, a system that assists in the preliminary design of cable-stayed bridges, implements a preliminary version of this model. Several examples of designs generated by BRIDGER are discussed for demonstrating the scope and potential of the model. The most significant investigations in bridge aesthetics deal primarily with fundamental philosophical and psychological problems or direct aesthetic analysis of existing bridges, providing relatively few basic concepts for use in design (see Ref).