The Function of Aesthetics in our Lives

Imagine taking a walk through your neighborhood, what do you see? Architecture, greenery, other people, street art perhaps? If you think about these things, do you think they are beautiful? Do you think beauty matters in this case? In the current project, this is what we are interested in. We want to find out what role aesthetics, and specifically beauty, plays in our every day life. How can beauty be useful? We generally think of beauty or aesthetics as related to only art, but actually humans can perceive beauty in almost anything. We may not be aware of itbut beauty guides our attention. Perhaps you have experienced this yourself when seeing a beautiful person on the street or when passing a piece of street art: we stop, stare, and admire. We look longer at things we find beautiful. Lab research has shown this relationship many times but what about the outside world? What about our everyday life? Our ability to see beauty in the world has been linked to adaptive success in evolution. But, beauty can only be evolutionarily relevant if it appliesbeyond the labto our everyday life. To investigate the role of beauty in our everyday life we will take our research outside of the laboratory and into the real world. We will have participants report on their daily experiences with beauty to see how beauty can influence us during our normal life. And, we will use technical advancements such as mobile eye-tracking to, for example, measure what people look at in natural environments. Here we will focus on an everyday urban environment as well as a museum which can be seen as a typical environment to experience beauty in. Does beauty play the same or a different role in these different environments? We think that beauty shapes our everyday life, and now we will test this idea.

Beauty is important in our environment: its impact on our wellbeing and attention have been frequently demonstrated in laboratory studies. But to what extent does this apply to our everyday reality, to our daily lives? In this project, we take an important step: out of the lab and into the world. In both published and still forthcoming work, we were able to show that aesthetic experiences are common in everyday life, and these experiences impact how we feel and interact with our daily environment: beauty attracts our attention and elicits small doses of happiness. But, as everyone knows, beauty is not equally distributed: some streets are beautiful, others less so, sometimes nature creeps into the city, and other times the city offers diverse spaces in which urban scenery is designed in a way to offer aesthetic experiences. In our studies we could show that placing art in an urban space invites people to engage not only with the art, but also the environment around it, shaping how we use public space . Furthermore, in various everyday environments from art museums (like the Belvedere) to Botanical Gardens (like the Palmenhaus in Vienna's Schönbrunn) and mixed everyday urban environments (like the Donaukanal that has both nature as well as urban art), what we find beautiful attracts our attention and we spend more time looking at beautiful things. Moreover, these small daily aesthetic experiences-noticing a beautiful sunset, person, garden, house, street art or whatever else we may encounter in our daily lives-not only are incredibly frequent experiences they also directly impact how we feel. Seeing something beautiful in everyday life makes us feel happier. As such, the project adds to our knowledge of how everyday aesthetic experiences can contribute to our well-being . The project is strengthened not just by direct empirical studies, but also a scoping review and several theoretical contributions that deepen our understanding of aesthetic experiences in general, and their integration in daily life specifically. Overall, the project shows how deeply integrated aesthetic experiences are in our everyday life, providing not just a nice "add-on" but a fundamental aspect shaping how we engage with the world around us, and how we feel in our everyday life.