ABSTRACT
Even a brief examination of design history reveals the continual emergence and disappearance of a large number of design philosophies, which based their claims on the authenticity of experience they promised to the users. Throughout this “incessant recycling of arguments” one can observe that even contradictory terms were proposed as recipes for achieving authentic experience in the userproduct relationship (Martinidis, 1991). For example, ‘ornamentation in design’ was declared either as harmful or indispensable to the authenticity of the experience of users. While the proponents of functionalist aesthetics denounced ornament as crime, as an accidental rather than essential quality of designed products, others were arguing for ornament as a basic emotional need of human beings. For example, William Dyce wrote in the Journal of Design in the late nineteenth century that,
Ornamental art is an ingredient necessary to the completeness of the results of mechanical skill. I say necessary, because we all feel it to be so. The love of ornament is a tendency of our being. We all are sensible, and we cannot help being so, that mechanical contrivances are like skeletons without skin, like birds without feathers-pieces of organization, in short, without the ingredient which renders natural productions objects of pleasure to the senses (Heskett, 1987, pp. 2123).
