Special Issue: Understanding, representing, and reasoning about style

Style is a word that people think they understand. Most people recognize artifacts like buildings and clothes as being exemplars of particular styles, and they know words like Rococo and Art Deco as names for styles. They can recognize stylistic similarities not only in one sort of artifact but also across wide ranges of different things, such as buildings, furniture, artworks, clothes, music, and even manners. However, “style” is a slippery notion: the word has been used in a variety of senses since the ancient Greeks first thought about the differences in how people wrote or painted, and it is still used to refer to different things. Our notions of style encompass both the characteristics of the procedures through which people create artifacts and the characteristics of the artifacts themselves. Designers have creative styles: their characteristic designing and making procedures, which are influenced by the designers’ personal experiences as well as the training they received, the tools they have available, and the questions that they are pursuing through their work. In design practice, designing actions are inseparable from perceptions of the styles of artifacts and style is inescapable: in visual design fields ~e.g., graphic, fashion or industrial design!, designing actions are tightly coupled with the perceptual recognition of the characteristics of partial designs, including stylistic characteristics. This is also the case in branches of engineering design that depend on the perceptual evaluation of features in conceptual design, before mathematical modeling techniques can be applied, such as the design of turbine blades. Style perception is subtle. It depends as much on other artifacts as the one seen, as it depends on awareness of similarities and differences. It also depends on context and how we attribute meaning to things and situations, such as a 1950s dress in a 1980s movie or 19th century public buildings with columns adopted from classical Greek architecture. Even when we can recognize the exemplars of a style and agree on what is and is not an exemplar of the style, characterizing it is problematic. Style recognition depends on emergent perceptual features that can be difficult to define clearly or even identify. We may find it hard to define what constitutes a style, and even among experts there is rarely complete agreement. Different characterizations of a style, focusing on different features, may serve equally well to distinguish exemplars from nonexemplars, for instance, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie house style has been analyzed in different ways ~see Kimberle Koile’s paper in this issue; Koning & Eizenberg, 1981!. Which features are truly essential to the style, and which are merely insignificant consequences of the essential features? Moreover, artifacts are often not merely exemplars of single styles, but also expressions of different, overlapping styles. For example, a BMW 535 saloon car is clearly recognizable as a “5-series” ~it belongs to a range of products sharing many features!, but it also has a BMW look that gives it a brand identity. In addition, it is similar both to other large, relatively expensive saloon cars ~executivetype cars! and to many other contemporaneous cars, as different manufacturers’ cars change over time in similar ways, creating clearly recognizable time-period styles. The features that characterize some of these styles can be identified. Jonathan Cagan’s group at Carnegie Mellon has sequenced the “brand DNA” for Buick cars ~McCormack et al., 2004! and Harley-Davidson motorcycles ~Pugliese & Cagan, 2002!. The different contributors to this Special Issue employ different notions of style and pick different aspects of the styles for the artifacts they examine. What unites them is a Reprint requests to: Ellen Yi-Luen Do, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 247 4th Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-0155, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing ~2006!, 20, 163–165. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 2006 Cambridge University Press 0890-0604006 $16.00 DOI: 10.10170S0890060406060148