Institute for Humans and Aesthetics

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Presentation

By good design, we generally mean design that accommodates human interests as far as possible. However, human needs, wishes and desires are contradictory and diverse, just like human living environments. Judgments about beauty and ugliness are strongly culturally dependent and vary widely from individual to individual. But because we belong to the same biological species and therefore have many similar physical characteristics in common, we also share many perceptions, patterns of interpretation and preferences.

Sensory impressions and spatial environments therefore have a strong effect on our senses, our feelings and our motivations, even beyond learned interpretations – and often unnoticed by our consciousness. They influence and control our behavior, our performance, our well-being and our mental and physical health.

We work in an interdisciplinary way to understand aesthetic experience in the field of tension between culture and nature. We develop contextualized questions and models for an evidence-based aesthetic quality discussion. And we develop concepts on how design can work more effectively with the help of scientific findings.

The Institute for Humans & Aesthetics is a transdisciplinary, joint research group of Coburg University of Applied Sciences and the University of Bamberg. Cooperation partners are researchers and scientists from the New Design University St. Pölten, the University of Cambridge, Georgetown University (Washington), the Westminster Abbey Institute and others. In research, discourse, teaching and application, we work to better understand the connections and effects of aesthetic experience and to make them usable for design and architecture.

Head/ Deputy Head
Head: Prof. Dr. Michael Heinrich / Prof. Dr. Niko Kohls
Head/ Deputy Head
Head University of Bamberg: Prof. Dr. Christian Illies / Prof. Dr. Stephan Albrecht
Research assistant: Dr. Morteza Izadifar
Cooperation partner at the New Design University St. Pölten, Austria: Prof. Dr. Martin Düchs
Cooperation partners at Cambridge University, UK: Nicholas Ray MA, Prof. Dr. Max Sternberg
Cooperation partner at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA: Prof. Dr. James Giordano
Cooperation partner at Westminster Abbey Institute, London, UK: Dr. Claire Gilbert, Director
Cooperation partner at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA (in planning, confirmed): Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics: Prof. Dr. Anian Chatterjee