Ethics in Beauty
By Carol Gigliotti

What is the role of aesthetics, beauty and elegance in interactive technology?

Well that's an interesting question. What you asked me was, "What's the role of aesthetics and beauty and elegance in interactive technology," and I guess one of the important things for me has been to take a much broader view of aesthetics so that it's not only about beauty and elegance. For instance, I'm very interested in aesthetics that are linked with ethics, as it always is, but I'm very interested in different perspectives on both ethics and aesthetics.

... something that is beautiful, that we would consider beautiful because of its shape or form or its style, may be something that we would also consider to be somewhat unethical.

So, in other words, something that is beautiful, that we would consider beautiful because of its shape or form or its style, may be something that we would also consider to be somewhat unethical. For instance, the Riefenstahl films for Hitler were very well made, there's a beauty of form, there's something that's very powerful about the images and yet, they were made for propaganda for Hitler. So, when you contrast those, you see that there is this very different purpose behind them. So, in my mind, they're not beautiful. They're very ugly because even though the form is beautiful, the content is ugly.

In terms of interactive technology, I think it's really important that you think about a number of things and link aesthetics and ethics very concretely in both the hardware and software design. So, in other words, it is important that the hardware be developed with a number of assumptions in mind that don't have to do with the way that hardware has originally been developed in the Cold War for military purposes, for purposes of power and control and dominance, but rather that we begin to think about other kinds of assumptions that we develop computers and technology with, and computers being a subset of technology.

Radio-V/Ethoschannel Index