In search of a golden ratio for the aesthetics of movement

Abstract

There is a growing interest among designers and design researchers in dynamic forms, behavior and the associated questions regarding the meaning and the aesthetics of movement. In this article we address a simple, perhaps naive, question about the aesthetics of movement: are there one or more numbers that are as fundamental in a theory of beauty in movement as the golden ratio is in two-dimensional aesthetics and the plastic number is in three dimensional aesthetics.The paper is essentially theoretical, and as such it proposes a number of hypotheses that, at least in principle, can be tested by experiment