Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics: Digital Reconstruction and Public Communication of Aesthetic Systems in Architecture and the Applied Arts

Abstract

At the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address. Nearly seventy years later, computational systems increasingly participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture, art, and design. Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics examines 20th- and early 21st-century computational aesthetic systems in architecture and the applied arts that formalize processes of creation and evaluation beyond purely data-driven approaches. Presented as a research exhibition at the Keller Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it brings together work from academic and industry contexts across the United States and Europe that treats computing as a medium for addressing foundational questions of aesthetics, including how design and art are judged, generated, and transformed. Drawing from contemporary design methods and technology studies on software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition translates select aesthetic systems from archival sources and academic literature into tangible and experiential formats. In doing so, it extends traditional modes of academic scholarship and public communication into spatial, visual, and material form.