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This study aims to explore aesthetic atmospheres and their affordances in urban squares to advance knowledge on the research and design of attractive living environments.

Descriptions of pleasant and unpleasant experiences of urban squares were collected using qualitative questionnaires with open-ended questions. The theoretical framework and the lens of aesthetic affordances were applied to pinpoint and understand the connections between the place attributes and experiences.

This study found four distinct aesthetic atmospheres formed by perceived synergies of both the material and immaterial aspects of the environment. It was also found that the atmospheres may shift. A model that shows the aesthetic atmospheres and their potential affordances as layered and emerging is presented.

Everyday aesthetics considered as affordances open new research perspectives for the understanding of what generates attractive living environments – or not.

Aesthetics affordances may provide the design professionals and alike means on how to design places that engender specific aesthetic atmosphere.

Gathering and discussing commonplace aesthetic experiences in everyday life may enhance democratic participation in place development among people with different levels of design expertise.

This study combines theories of place with a novel concept of aesthetic affordances to identify distinct aesthetic atmospheres. A holistic overview structure of how the various constituents of aesthetic atmospheres relate to each other provides new ways of studying and understanding urban aesthetic atmospheres.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the virtual consumption communities which cohere around the object of the car. Focusing upon the cultural practice of debadging, the paper intends to reveal forms of connectivity and resistance within communities of car customization.

A netnography in the form of non‐participant observation is used to explore the talk of car aficionados around issues of customization and affiliation.

The paper discusses the importance of internet discussion boards as forums for the exchange of information and advice, but also as a site to express their passion for cars and their affiliation with like‐minded others. The research reveals that the question of aesthetics is a significant one for car aficionados. This enables us to theorize such consumers as akin to designers for whom the discussion boards exist as key reference points.

This is an exploratory study and its primary limitation is one of scope and method. Netnography provides access to web‐based communication. In this sense, a novel channel of access to new forms of expression and ways of doing social relations is employed. Clearly, the insights generated from this study are mediated by the character of the empirical site and the limits of non‐participatory netnography.

The originality of the paper resides in its attempt to theorize the significance of the cultural practice of debadging as a key constituent in community‐formation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness.

Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities.

The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding.

This research identifies the specific visual sub-dimensions of brands that enable transnational communities to be imagined.

Understanding the visual aesthetic sub-dimensions in this study provides brand managers with practical tools that can help develop referents that foster transnational imagined communities in brand building to achieve competitive advantage and reach a transnational segment.

Prior studies have primarily focussed on how visual aesthetics help in understanding issues related to national identity. In contrast, this paper examines the use of visual aesthetics in branding from a transnational perspective.

All scholarly writing must straddle the universal and the particular. The universal is commonly addressed in terms of theoretical frameworks and analytical models, supported by the objectivity norm that has guided scientific inquiry since its inception. The particularities, on the other hand, the details and the nuts and bolts of everyday life and organizational reality, are oftentimes associated with subjectivity and therefore raise concern regarding the scholar’s preferences and convictions. In order to better balance objectivity and subjectivity in the organization studies literature, it is important to pay attention to how the choice of literary style may apprehend and convey organizational realities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Discussing the role of literature, and the work of the American short-story writer and poet Raymond Carver, more specifically, as a domain wherein language resonates with the pace and breathing of everyday life, it is suggested that an increased level of “lyrical sensibility” in scholarly vocabularies is conducive to more nuanced accounts of organizational practices. To substantiate Carver’s argument, ethnographies of occupational work is referenced and compared to Carver’s work.

Carver’s emphasis on writing stories and dialogs that do not hide behind jargon, nor impose unnecessary literary experiments or heavy-handed literary vocabularies on texts, is exemplary to organization researchers. In particular, Carver emphasizes the role of materiality and objects in his stories, the understated tension and concealed conflicts in social situations and relations, and points at how individuals interpret situations wherein they are located; in many cases, leading to apathy and indolence as the protagonists cannot consider meaningful ways to handle perceived issues or to move along. Carver’s emphasis on mundane experience is therefore conducive to a wider recognition of subjectivity in organization studies.

The paper broadens the discussion about organization studies writing by introducing the work of Raymond Carver, a seminal author only sparsely featured in organization and management studies.

The term “everyday” can be found in almost every qualitative sociological study done today, though its usage, meaning, and importance are often taken for granted. The everyday world has not always had such a prominent place, however. This paper examines the development of “the everyday” an as area of study through everyday life sociologies and cultural studies, using quilting to compare sociological usage to the development of the everyday as a topic in the arts in the 1960s. As a focal point for discussions of art hierarchies, as cultural resistance, and as a form of women's cultural production, quilting's role in everyday life illuminates the new way of seeing that everyday life sociologies developed.

This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.

This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.

Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers’ responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.

While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora’s ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

Customization by segmenting within human–computer interaction is an emerging phenomenon. Appealing graphical elements that cater to user needs are considered progressively important, as the way a graphic is visually represented can greatly contribute to the interaction. However, aesthetic perceptions are subjective and may differ by target group. Understanding variations in user perceptions may aid in design processes; therefore, we set out to investigate the effects of demographic differences relating to perceptions of graphical user interface (GUI) element (i.e. game app icon) aesthetics.

The authors employed a vignette experiment with random participant (n = 513) assignment to evaluate 4 icons from a total of 68 pre-selected mobile game icons using semantic differential scales. This resulted in a total of 2052 individual icon evaluations. Regression analyses were performed with the effects of age, gender and time using graphical user interfaces (i.e. app stores) and the interactions of these variables relating to perceptions of GUI element aesthetics.

The results indicate that, overall, demographic factors have relatively little effect on how icons are perceived. Significant relations suggest that experienced users, younger audiences and women are more critical in their perception of aesthetic excellence, and that perceptions change for younger women. The implications of the findings are discussed via adaptive decision-making theory.

In the context of graphical user interface element aesthetics, demographic differences have received minimal attention as moderating variables regardless of their relevance in design and development. Hence, it merits further research.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods.

To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007).

The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and were concerned to find the right furniture to fit a desired lifestyle, aesthetic ideal and sense of self.

The problem is how to conceptualize the trajectory of change in ways that do justice to historical subjects’ experience and narratives, while avoiding uncritically reproducing Cold War binaries or perpetuating the normative status claimed by the postwar West in defining modernity and consumer culture.

The paper challenges dominant Cold War narratives, according to which Soviet popular relations with goods were encompassed by shortage and necessity. It advances understanding of the specific form of modern consumer culture, which, it argues, took shape in the USSR after Stalin.

Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.

Personal museums are conceptualized as spaces of knowing in-formation, ontological openings that are literally and figuratively entered into, that make a difference to human and material ways of knowing. Karen Barad's agential realism and Sianne Ngai's vernacular aesthetic categories provide the theoretical lenses through which the researcher's 2018 visit to one personal museum is revisited.

An ethnographic account of the author's visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in Timişoara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of thinking about information and knowledge.

Human expressions of liking reveal material agencies as ways of knowing and information beyond the realm of human experience and meaning. A vernacular aesthetics of liking is presented as a way to resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This approach is one way of resisting the assumptions of channel thinking that often shape how information is studied.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how information on air pollution is shaped online on an everyday basis, with a particular emphasis on digital devices and digital representations as constitutive of environmental information practices. Furthermore, this research highlights an understudied aspect of air pollution – the digital flow of multimodal representations that citizens encounter and produce in their everyday life.

The information gathering was carried out on an everyday basis during February-March 2017. The study is based on 403 microblog posts from the social media site Sina Weibo, and netnographic fieldwork, including the observation of news, advertisements, and diary writing. The collected data were mapped in clusters based on the interrelations of objects, agents, and activities, and analyzed in depth using qualitative multimodal analysis.

Information enacted through specific socio-materialist configurations depicts air pollution as self-contained and separated from human action. Air quality apps are central in connecting a wider nexus of representations and promoting such perceptions, illustrating the role of digital devices in an everyday information context.

The study reveals a schism between Chinese political environmental visions and everyday environmental information practices, which raises questions of how the battle against air pollution can be sustained in the long term.

This study suggests that digital material aspects – inbuilt applications of digital devices and digital representations of objects – are interrelated with physical experiences of air pollution, and thus constitute elements of practice in their own right.