4. Sociocultural Returns of Aesthetics Education: A Yogic Neurodesign Framework

Modern neuroscience has advanced to embrace the study of cognitive processes of aesthetics in recent times. Design as a discipline from its inception had laid emphasis on academic pursuit of aesthetics. While design approaches solutions to ill-defined problems through a creative and user-centric process, the aesthetic delight of the designed solutions is one of the primary goals of a designer’s pursuit. Interestingly, the pursuit of aesthetics, called ‘Sundaram’ in Sanskrit language, had also been the central goal of the cultural pursuits in India as famously expressed in ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’. This paper argues that there is a sociocultural need to place emphasis on education of aesthetics as it has immense benefits for social good. In search of models which can be operationalised in design pedagogy, this paper discusses prevalent neurocognitive models of aesthetics and identifies gaps in them. This paper then proposes a yogic neurodesign framework that can fulfil the gaps in prevalent models. The proposed yogic framework looks at the culmination of mind into the enjoyment of aesthetics as expressed in ‘Soundarya Lahari’ by Shankaracharya. Drawing upon the ancient yogic literature and modern neuroscientific findings, this paper presents a framework for the education of aesthetics using yogic neurodesign, especially keeping sociocultural benefits of aesthetics education in view.