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This chapter analyzes a familiar aesthetic experience in our everyday life: appreciation of the distinctive characteristics of objects, environments, and temporal contexts. It ranges from the quintessential attributes of a natural object, the ambience created by harmoniously-united diverse elements, sense of place, and seasonableness, illustrated by a number of examples from 18th century British aesthetics, Japanese culture, including literature, gardening, the tea ceremony, food, and packaging, and the Arts and Crafts movement. This aesthetic sensibility nurtures a moral sensibility by promoting an open-minded and respectful attitude toward what the objects offer, an attitude underlying today's ecological design premised upon designing with nature. At the same time, certain limits to this kind of aesthetic sensibility also need to be observed for moral, social, and political reasons in order to avoid aestheticization of suffering and misery, as well as guarding against denying minority taste in favor of preserving a sense of place.

This chapter reviews research on human-tech. This book's author began his research career in the discipline of human factors engineering in the mid 1980s. This was an era of increasing disillusionment, especially among those with design orientations, with the received view that dominated the prevailing culture of his field: that human factors was both largely and essentially a branch of experimental psychology, one known as engineering psychology. The author was influenced by Jens Rasmussen who observed a variety of mismatches between both the theoretical and methodological tools available in the human factors marketplace and the pressing needs of cognitive engineering researchers and practitioners. A second, perhaps less direct but nevertheless highly influential influence on the author were James J. Gibson's theories of direct perception and affordances. Strongly inspired by both Rasmussen and Gibson, in his PhD dissertation the author had seemingly found a way to leverage the resources of both these theorists, resulting in an interface design framework called ecological interface design (EID).

In the 1960s and 70s an ad hoc collection of countercultural designers united to celebrate the partnership of made and born, science and craft, nature and culture working toward an early version of the sustainability ethic. They chronicled their achievements and fostered their networks through a series of influential publications including, Shelter, The Whole Earth Catalog, Sunspots, and the California Water Atlas. These efforts represent a creative cohort’s important effort to use their academic scientific training and technical expertise outside the confines of the university or corporations. This ecologically inclined group of countercultural bricoleurs worked to revive an earlier tradition of design science and eco-pragmatism to help expand environmental culture beyond politics, aid green design enthusiasms, and foster “natural capitalism.”

This chapter discusses how surprises and ignorance are related by evaluating different terms, concepts, and unknown aspects of knowledge, and describes some major debates related to the unknown territory of the human experience in an effort to understand how different fields of ecological design address surprising incidents. It suggests ways in which these uses and the meaning of the concepts can be combined, and examines the continually changing relationships between different types of unknown events, along with the changes that occur in such events over time. The investigations reveal emerging interpretations of the unknown result in more unintended consequences, as experimental creation of knowledge and inventions result in new ignorance. The relationship between ignorance and surprise is also dealt with in the real world perspective of human experience, enabling a framework to integrate these two concepts and to investigate different instances of ecological design and landscape development.