Aesthetic evaluation of design objects at an implicit and explicit level between laypeople and experts

Can the preference for industrial design objects be also achieved automatically? The aim of the study is to verify if different levels of expertise on industrial design (laypeople vs. design students) can orient the preference towards different styles of design objects (classic objects vs. modern objects), at an implicit and explicit level. Implicit and explicit preferences are often mediated by assessor features. The Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998) was used to assess the automaticity of the evaluation. Participants (44 laypeople and 40 design students) performed a categorization task of pictures (5 classic and 5 modern chairs) and words (5 positive and 5 negative aesthetic words). Reaction times were registered. The explicit evaluation of the stimuli was assess through a 7 points Likert scale for the adjectives beautiful, typical, familiar, complex and interesting. In both measurements, implicit and explicit preferences for classic and modern objects were moderate by expertise: experts were more aesthetically oriented towards modern objects while laypeople towards classical ones. According to the model of Processing Fluency (Reber, Schwarz e Winkielman, 2004) the more one is fluent in the processing of an object, the more positive the aesthetic evaluation will be.