Art & Design — What’s the difference?
The concepts of art and design are as old as humanity itself. For as long as we’ve been around, humans have been making things and ascribing these terms to their creations. To examine the former, nowadays, art is a more convoluted and problematic term. As the passage of time has blurred the line of what is socially accepted as art, practically anything and everything can pass today. Disagree? Use this as a test:
If I were to take _____ and put it in a museum, would it look out of place?
If you’ve been to any modern art installations recently, the answer is probably no. Your grandma’s old bookshelf? Yup. The half-dead oak tree in your neighbor’s yard? Sure. That construction worker you almost hit on your way to work today? Performance artworks too. That’s just what makes art so tricky — to quote Rainbow Rowell:
Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.
By those standards, art might be the only thing that can be truly defined in the eye of the beholder. It seems like something’s ability to make you feel something is determined by the context you experience it in.
Now we turn to a slightly less convoluted term: design. What design isn’t necessarily of the most important? What matters, however, is how it relates to art. So, where do the circles in this weird Venn diagram overlap? The way the term is used today often suggests that art and design are practically interchangeable. However, it seems more likely that the defining feature of the design is that of purpose. That is to say, the design is design if it is created to serve a particular purpose outside of pure expression.
Let’s take a look back in history for a moment. Initially, art and design were pretty well defined. Did you make a cave painting? That’s art. Sharpen a rock into a tool? That’s design. Nowadays, the lines are blurred, but the principles remain. Let’s say you make a chair. What matters isn’t what it looks like, but what purpose it was made to serve. Bad design, in turn, just does a bad job of fulfilling that purpose. For example, you can sit on a painting, but it probably won’t make a great chair.
So what makes any of this matter now? Well, as a matter of fact, “good” design can become a bad design in large quantities. On a daily basis, we’re constantly experiencing sensory overload, and that reach has expanded with the introduction of new technologies into the pockets of billions around the world. Day today, for example, we’re bombarded with well-calculated advertisements and tactics to capture our attention in order to sell us something. The problem with these battle-proven strategies is that they’ve become all too common to us, and we’ve effectively resorted to tuning them out entirely. What that creates, in effect, is a sea of white noise we now hardly notice.
The answer, then, lies not in “good” design, but in refreshing design. The ability to disrupt a mundane pattern and breakthrough to someone is, in reality, the real test of your labor. In focusing on the ability for what you’re making to resonate with people rather than follow the guidelines of those before you, you’re taking the heavy lifting out of the whole process. Design smarter, not harder.
Contributors: Written by Alex LaBossiere-Barrera, Illustration by Amanda Song www.visualfeeder.com