Aesthetic Design and practical philosophy – Aesthetics and ethics in contemporary design
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69143/2464-9309/19182026Keywords:
design, ethics, everyday aesthetics, experience, hypo-aestheticsAbstract
This article argues that, in contemporary design, ethics and aesthetics coincide within designed experience, emerging together from the same design logic, rather than constituting separate domains brought into dialogue. Through a critical analysis of the tradition of diffuse aestheticisation and by engaging with Everyday Aesthetics, the essay introduces the distinction between hyper-aesthetics and hypo-aesthetics, taking facilitation as both a design and an evaluative criterion. This yields a thesis that cuts across different scales and fields of contemporary design, from product design to services and from digital interfaces to inhabitable spaces: design configures relations, access, and practices, thereby rendering visible the ethical responsibility inscribed within the very structure of experience. The robustness of this thesis is tested through a series of paradigmatic cases, selected for their capacity to embody this convergence in radically different contexts. The framework proposed here also recognises its own limits – it privileges the logic of facilitation and fluidity, while leaving open the questions of co-responsibility and design power within complex systems – and identifies, precisely within those limits, the directions in which further research should proceed.
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Received: 15/03/2026; Revised: 06/04/2026; Accepted: 07/04/2026
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