Coterie, a visualization of online social interaction in IRC channels, provides a rich and highly informative display of social patterns. A viewer is presented with an explicit portrayal of the social patterns and interaction within a chat room through a live, dynamic, and aesthetic display of the activity within a channel mediated by historical interaction

Digital games are commonly described as phenomena that combine aesthetic, social and technological elements, yet our understanding of the aesthetic element of games and play is perhaps the least developed of all. All too often, an aesthetics perspective within game studies and design discourses is relegated to a marginal role, by conflating game aesthetics with graphics and “eye candy,” or by l...

PURPOSE This study examined associations of neighborhood social cohesion, violence, and aesthetic quality with depressive symptoms among 2,619 healthy adults aged 45-84 years enrolled in the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. METHODS Neighborhood characteristics were estimated by surveying a separate sample of area residents. Measures of aesthetic environment, social cohesion, and violence...

Attractive individuals are perceived as possessing more positive personal traits than unattractive individuals. This reliance on aesthetic features to infer moral character suggests a close link between aesthetic and moral valuation. Here we aimed to investigate the neural underpinnings of the interaction between aesthetic and moral valuation by combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)...

Most interactive technology is designed for the individual user pursuing either a work-oriented accomplishment of tasks or an experience-oriented aesthetic/pleasurable endeavor. In the project here presented that design paradigm is turned up-side-down focusing on social use and social context. I furthermore argue that this social user perspective can be applied in other design projects and I pr...

Functional MRI was used to investigate the neural correlates of aesthetic judgments of beauty of geometrical shapes. Participants performed evaluative aesthetic judgments (beautiful or not?) and descriptive symmetry judgments (symmetric or not?) on the same stimulus material. Symmetry was employed because aesthetic judgments are known to be often guided by criteria of symmetry. Novel, abstract ...

I want to start this paper from the premise that both academics in cultural and media studies, and left-wing political theorists and activists have found the everyday culture of the people in capitalist societies particularly difficult to study either empirically or theoretically. In this paper I wish, then, to interweave two lines of theoretical inquiry: one into the culture of everyday life w...