Thank you, while I can't recommend original philosophical sources, I can say I like Matthew B. Craford's "Shopclass as Soulcraft," was the best recent version of these ideas I've read, and it is a much more in-depth treatise than one would typically expect from a popular book. Only tangentially related by motorcycles is zen and the art..., which was also about these kinds of qualities.

The other influences might be Aristotle's nichomachean ethics and the Stoics, but I'm having trouble sourcing my own ideas directly from those much better ones other than to say they were influential.

From a po-mo side, Venturi's "ducks and decorated sheds," essay was influential, as his bit was about buildings that are symbols vs. buildings with symbols. I don't imagine reading Simulacra and Simulation again, and I don't know if it would stand the test of time, but that decoupling of symbols from artifacts and the represented from the real is a theme in 20th century critical theory.

There's some romantic thinking in there as well, and I can't quite source why I believe it, but there is a kind of catholic, hellenism to taking the idea of our perception of beauty and symmetry as a form of truth (as distinct from mere power deciding truth by fiat, or of it being ineffable), and then iterating on that idea into a logic around it. I don't know whose idea that was, but the limits of it became obvious when I learned about things like polyrhythms and self similarity, where the symmetry is more dynamic and implied, whereas even music demonstrates how our minds impose symmetry and favour the things the mind can impose its sense of symmetry and beauty on. That would probably align with pop "cognitive biases" lists and thinking fast and slow.

The effect vs. affect part has been a personal theme for a decade or so, so I can't source that elsewhere.