“Konstruktion Design Ästhetik” is Rolf Garnich’s dissertation of 1967 that gained him the degree of a Dr.phil. (doctor of philosophy from the University of Stuttgart. His supervisor was Max Bense.
The field of research was information aesthetics, and Garnich did his research during the high times of that approach to aesthetics and a rational, formalistic way of evaluating by measuring “works of art”. Such works were called “aesthetic objects” in Bense’s perspective.

The thesis has the long subtitle, “Allgemeine mathematische Methode zur objektiven Beschreibung ästhetischer Zustände im analytischen Prozeß und zur generativen Gestaltung im synthetischen Prozeß von Design-Objekten” (Engl.: “Construction, Design, Aesthetics – A General Mathematical Method for the Objective Description of Aesthetic Conditions in the Analytical Process and of the Generative Design in the Synthetical Process of Design Objects”). This bulky announcement indicates that Garnich is concerned with the analysis as well as the synthesis of design objects, an approach that information aesthetics was proud of and, we might add, with not too bad reason.

The term “generative design” (as well as, before already (1965), “generative aesthetics” or “generative art”) was most likely first used by authors of the Stuttgart group in the mid-1960s.

Garnich’s concrete investigation was concerned with the shapes of vases. For this kind of object he defined the components of a formula to determine, in a Birkhoff-Gunzenhäuser style, a number as the object’s “aesthetic measure”.

Bernhard Bürdek writes sceptically and ironically about such rationalistic efforts to measure design objects (on p. 174/75 of the first edition of his book on Design).

Garnich first published his thesis himself in 1968. It was published a second time under a sightly changed (much shorter) title in 1976. This version made it to a second edition as hard-cover in 1982.

Rolf Garnich: Ästhetik, Konstruktion und Design. Eine strukturale Ästhetik. Ravensburg: Maier 1976 and 1982