The research project, Aesthetics of the Everyday and Human Well-Being, links to the small body of previous research by focusing on some of the more philosophically problematic issues which have arisen during the first phase of everyday aesthetics. The project wants to initiate, so to speak, a second phase of everyday aesthetics and in this way to connect the discipline of aesthetics to larger societal issues, to the problems of human well-being in particular.

I will challenge the accepted accounts of the concept of aesthetic experience, all of which require that, for one's to be having an aesthetic experience, there must be conscious awareness of or occurrent belief about one's attending to the aesthetic object. The idea is that the everyday in everyday aesthetics is best construed as a particular sort of familiarity, a familiarity defined by the very fact that conscious awareness of the intentional object is, contrary to what most aestheticians believe about aesthetic experience, simply not present. The idea is not only challenging but of great significance for everyday aesthetics and its potential impact on aesthetic well-being.

This is because, first, much if not most of the time we spend daily can accurately be characterized as spent in such a state of familiarity with our surroundings, the equipment in our office spaces, the interiors of our homes, and much more; and because, second, if this sort of familiarity can indeed be reasonably thought a species of aesthetic experience, then a whole field of activity is thereby brought into the sphere of aesthetics as a legitimate object of study. If I am correct, then we may have much to learn about the value to our lives of much that we tend to take for granted.

My strategy is that I want to expand the set of things legitimately thought potential objects of aesthetic experience. Quite often everyday aesthetics is defined ostensively with regard to its subject matter - exclude art objects, include all the others and you then have what some might claim to be the set of objects with which those working in the field of everyday aesthetics are or ought to be concerned. But as I have indicated above, the field is more complex than this. My account of the everyday emphasizes the relationship of humans to objects surrounding them. Any object, also works of art, can become everyday objects, and accordingly be included in the domain of everyday aesthetics.

Technology, design, human relations, conversation, democracy, all these and many other factors crucial to human existence and well-being have an aesthetic aspect in them.