Pritam's Blog
Is There Any Difference Between Art And Design?
There has been a lot of debate on this topic and even today opinions are divided.
Both are languages, there is no doubt about that. Both art and design have to do with visual communication. Both are assumed to be inherently aesthetic. Both have certain common elements. Both have to do with creativity.
Then, is there any difference between the two?
And if there is, indeed, any difference, what is it?
There are, of course, very clear definitions for these two terms. Each of them has characteristics that set them apart from the other. And yet, there are times when the line between art and design becomes blurry.
Art Should Comfort The Disturbed And Disturb The Comfortable.
The purist, classical definition of art is that it is something through which the artist expresses themselves. That’s the sole purpose of art — expression.
However, the message that a particular piece of art delivers is open to interpretation. It can be perceived differently by different people, which is to say, art poses questions. It makes you think. And the answers may vary from one person to another. There is no one single explanation or meaning of a piece of art.
That way, art is flexible. But I would like to use the term ‘liberated’ instead. Art doesn’t need the mass to accept one particular meaning of it.
Vincent Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, to many, symbolizes Van Gogh’s “weary and threadbare life”. For philosopher Martin Heidegger, however, it represents “silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field”. And then there are many, it just seemed a study of shoes and nothing else.
Good design is like a refrigerator—when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.
On the other hand, design is about providing beautiful solutions to problems. The purpose of design is not to express oneself and make people think. In fact, good designs are the ones which do not make people think; they make them act, do something.
If a design makes people think, if it poses questions, then it is not a good design. There is no scope of multiple interpretations in a good design. Because then, it will communicate a different message to different people and people will act differently.
Basically, a good design cannot afford vagueness or ambiguity. Because the purpose of a design is not to pose questions but provide an answer that can be accepted by the masses.
One of the most popular examples of a bad design is the “Norman Door” (after the legendary designer Donald Arthur Norman). If a door, no matter how beautiful and creative it looks, fails to indicate whether it is to be pulled or pushed, it is a bad design. It doesn’t communicate properly, it conveys an ambiguous message. We do know that it is a door that needs to be opened to go to the other side, but we do not know how to open it. It makes us think.
And that it makes us think doesn’t make the door a piece of art. Because the purpose of a door is to act as a barrier at the entrance of a room; at the same time, it should be easy enough to remove the barrier (at least for the invited guests).
Aesthetic alone is not the purpose of design. Utility is the biggest factor that differentiates design from art.
Having said that, the boundaries between art and design are blurring these days. Today, artists show a keen interest in making benches and chairs. On the other hand, designers express themselves in things they design.
A detailed study of various design philosophies and art movements will reveal more about this debate and give insights into why and how the borders between art and design are merging.
I think art and design can be mutually inclusive as well as exclusive. More than the way you look at it, it depends on the piece of work in question.