On dogs, R2D2, C3PO, + beautiful interactions.

Beauty is mathematics. Beauty is objective. Or subjective if you insist, but only within a range of mathematical objectiveness. But it is not perfection. On the contrary. There comes a point, actually, when perfection is not only not beautiful, but weird.

In Donald Norman’s Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things, he writes:

Finding the right mix of emotions and intelligence is not easy. The two robots from the Star Wars films, R2D2 and C3PO, act like machines we might enjoy having around the house. I suspect that part of their charm is in the way they display their limitations. C3PO is a clumsy, well-meaning oaf, pretty incompetent at all tasks except the one for which he is a specialist: translating languages and machine communication. R2D2 is designed for interacting with other machines and has limited physical capabilities. It has to rely upon C3PO to talk with people.

[They] show their emotions well, letting screen characters – and the movie audience – understand, empathize with, and, at times, get annoyed with them. C3PO has a humanlike form, so he can show facial expressions and body motions: he does a lot of handwringing and body swaying. R2D2 is more limited, but nonetheless very expressive, showing how able we are to impute emotions when all we can see is a head shaking, the body moving back and forth, and some unintelligible sounds…but the conceptual models underlying R2D2 and C3PO are quite visible. Thus, people always have a pretty accurate understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, which make them enjoyable and effective.

In contrast, Norman describes David, a surrogate robot child, from the movie AI:

David is sophisticated, but a little too perfect. [He] is the first robot to have “unconditional love”. But this is not true love. Perhaps because it is “unconditional”, it seems artificial, overly strong, and unaccompanied by the normal array of emotional states. Normal children may love their parents, but they also go through stages of dislike, anger, envy, disgust, and just plain indifference toward them. David does not exhibit any of these feelings. David’s pure love means a happy devoted child, following his mother’s footsteps, quite literally, every second of the day. This behavior is so irritating that he is finally abandoned by his foster mother, left in the wilderness, and told not to come back.

Upon reading this, I immediately thought of humans’ relationships with dogs. R2D2 is a lot like a dog, I think. In our house, Mies would be R2′ and Oslo, ‘3PO. There are a lot of behavioral cues interaction designers can take from dogs when it comes to designing a beautiful interaction (hello, biomimicry). What is it about dogs that endear them to us so much? In what ways do they behave that make interacting with them so incredibly healing and fortifying? And could man’s relationship with dogs lend insight into the aesthetics of interaction design?

Let me analyze, first based on the five physical senses.

Sight.
So much is communicated via a dog’s body language. A waggling bum, bared teeth; a long stare; a tucked tail; a lowered ear; a panting tongue; a tall, alert posture. These are obvious components of beautifully designed system feedback. Without ever saying a word, dogs communicate with humans all the time. A lot like R2’s swaying and C3PO’s handwringing when you think about it.

And some breeds – like the Weimaraner – are especially visually beautiful: my guess is that if you did an analysis of the Weimaraner form, you would find references to the Golden Ratio all over the place. Not to mention their beautiful coloring. For humans, whose dominant sense is vision, looking at a beautifully formed dog makes them even more seductive. Breeds like the pug, while not classically beautiful, have babylike features. This is a form of beauty that appeals to visceral human preferences as well, inspiring doting and caretaking. As a general rule, evolution has shaped humans to want to take care of cute things.

Sound.
Besides body language, dogs bark. They whine. They growl. Depending on the tone and duration of any of these noises they make, a message is communicated: danger, pain, joy, sorrow. Think R2D2 and his myriad of tweets, chirps, squeals, and mournful electronic sighs.

A dog’s sense of sound could also be considered an augmentation to our aural senses. I swear to god these dogs hear stuff lurking around in the night that Will and I never do, and they give us fair warning. Beware the person who tries to break into our house.

Taste.
Taste, like sound and smell, could also be considered an augmentation that dogs provide the human senses. Dogs use taste in addition to their incredible sense of smell to diagnose cancer patients and to warn owners of impending seizures. If you have a mole that your dog is repeatedly licking, maybe it’s time to see a dermatologist.

Touch.
Dogs are wonderful to touch: all warm and soft and furry. Petting dogs has been scientifically proven to reduce human stress. Patients who interact with dogs recover faster. Like C3PO and R2D2, dogs are specialists. Namely, in smelling stuff, warning us of danger, and lowering our blood pressure. They’re like a BFF and psychiatrist, wrapped into one. They never criticize or shame you, they just offer their wonderful, furry coats and unconditional love for solace.

In terms of aesthetics on a cognitive level, happy flubs and quirks are desirable (how many times did Luke Skywalker throw up his hands in exasperation in response to the quirks and flub of his galactic droids?). Dogs aren’t so good at completing lists of chores, preferring instead to lounge all day while we’re at work, and sometimes chew stuff they shouldn’t because they don’t like being alone or need more exercise. But we tolerate their shortcomings because the things they do well, they do with charm and grace, and better than anyone/anything else.

Smell.
If you’re a dog lover, you love the way dogs smell. When you don’t, it could be a sign that they’re dirty, they need to go out to do their business, or they’re sick. Again, another form of non-verbal system feedback.

In the same way that I consider my iPhone my augmented cognition, an exptension of my brain, so do I consider dogs to be mankind’s augmented olfaction. A dog’s superb sense of smell is also the sense that humans take advantage of the most. Humans have learned to use a dog’s smell to the benefit of humanity (for example, consider the role search and rescue dogs played on 9/11). Which appeals to beauty in Norman’s “reflective” domain of the three levels of cognition/emotion: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.

And which can also be mapped to the aesthetics of beautiful relationships. More to come…..