Art vs. Design
I don’t find the arguments particularly interesting, but the question has been cropping up a lot. I was first engaged in the debate while I was in the AWC, and then in the WPR community (partly because they overlapped). The topic came up again while I was CUSEC in a talk that compared software design/engineering/coding to art. Most recently, I was asked where rationality fit in as a designer because a lot of it is irrational, right?
Two years ago, I argued that “web design isn’t art and shouldn’t be”. That was a poor choice of words. I see design as a subset of art, that is, all design is art, but not all art is design. All apples are fruits, but not all fruits are apple. All students are people, but not all people are students. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to treat art and design as mutually exclusive concepts, i.e. when I say “art” hereafter, I mean {art}-{design}.
What bothers me about the comparison is that a lot of new designers would chalk their poor decisions up to artistic freedom. Art is not a scapegoat for the lack of usability. That’s no excuse for illegible text, misleading navigations, loss of user control, incomprehensible content, etc.
When I think of design, interaction is the first word that comes to mind. (It used to be function and intention, but I realize now that they are criteria of the bigger concept.) Early in the creative process, there should be no limits because it’s all in the name of exploration. However, at the end of the day, everything should come together in some cohesive manner. The product must accomplish what it was commissioned to do (goal) and perform it in the way that the user (actor) expects. Making the connection between that crazy idea (design) and the given business objective (goal) is very much a logical process. The creation of it might be irrational, but the end result is organized chaos; it’s okay as long as the user is aware of the goal and the path to it is clear. (Read: actor <=> design <=> goal)
On the other hand, you don’t interact with art. Instead, art is intended for reactions; glamorously, it’s seeking a emotional response. (I suppose another reason why people like mingle art and design is that there’s a prestigious aspect in that.) Beyond that, there isn’t any function or purpose. Not in the sense that its existence was created to accomplish a user-centric goal. Think paintings, photography vs. posters, postcards, i.e. graphic design. Think sculptures vs. furniture, i.e. industrial design. Then think about how music, drama, theater, architecture, software, and fashion fit into the picture.
Design, inherently interactive, poses certain constraints that can’t be ignored because they threaten the goal. They deal with people. If the user makes a mistake and doesn’t know how to recover from it then you have failed. Maybe failure is a little harsh, but it’s certainly an indication that the solution falls short. You can always blame the user for trying to do something that the system is not intended for, but as the designer, you should have expected it. You’re designing for people, after all. That sounds crazy because we hear stories about people trying to do crazy things all the time, yet that’s the reality of it. Your users are not like you! It’s frustrating. It pisses me off. It has me at my wits end(–damn you, why can’t you just use Firefox?!), but I love it.
But getting back to reality, it is feasible because you’re not trying to cater to everyone. You have a target audience. You have stakeholders. You have a domain, a market in which you operate. Then you have everyone else. You only need to satisfy the people who matter.
To be continued. Everything is just coming together from hobbies, from school, from work, from everything around me, really.
Comments
Cyrus (March 12th, 2009, 10:22 am):
Interesting concept. Art I think encompasses alot of different things. Would life be considered art? Doesn’t life produce emotional response? Aren’t we as humans designed from nature? It’s a very subjective topic. I agree that interactive design is catered to people. What about design that is just a sketch of a UI? If the UI is elegant and beautiful, that is considered art. But I agree with your definition that design should be considered a subset of art. Art encompasses a huge range of fields, and design inherits specific fields such as interaction or user-centric functions from Art. But wait, since Art is now a superset of design, shouldn’t it have these fields to begin with?
Peter (March 12th, 2009, 10:32 am):
“If the user makes a mistake and doesn’t know how to recover from it then you have failed”
Do you know how many times IE has crashed on me and I click ‘check for solutions online’ with none found? I’m sure Microsoft has failed in their user design many times over :P. Good post.
Veve (March 14th, 2009, 9:33 am):
@Cyrus: I agree that art is hard to define, and figuring out what belongs into that category is a very subjective matter. It’s also beyond the scope of this entry as I wasn’t so much trying to separate art and design, but to examine how design has a set of criteria against which success is judged. That set of criteria is different from the criteria against which art is judged.
As for your question of set theory:, no. But I also froze for a second when I was writing. It would seem that way from the conceptual model, because design is drawn inside art, and if it’s inside then the universe must also contain all the properties of its subsets. That’s not actually a case (which brings up the whole question of natural representation and conceptual mapping, but I won’t go into that). Properties of the superset is the common denominator; each subset becomes more and more restrictive. It’s easier to see if you take the People-Student example. It’s clear that every student is a person. People can breath, eat, feel, sleep, etc. Students go to school. Not all people go to school.
Alternatively, you also think of it as a hierarchy. Art is the parent, and design is a derived from it. It will inherit all the basic elements of art (e.g. colour, line, space…), but it will also have properties of its own.
Jenn (May 9th, 2009, 12:29 pm):
Just a quick thought: if we are looking at art as the “parent”, referencing possibly a primal “art from” cave art, such as at Lascaux, I’m not sure that we can define these as being made for a “emotional” response or rather a means of communication…which would make these markings functional.
Veve (May 9th, 2009, 7:26 pm):
You make a good point, and I don’t want to be impetuous and make sweeping assumptions on something that I’m not familiar with.
Having said that, I think it depends on whether or not cave drawings were intended to be art. (Before we can apply any sort of quality metric, we need to be able to categorize it, and that depends on what it’s intended to be.) Were people trying to communicate to each other? If so, I’d say the drawings were intended to be a language, and not art. Reactions would be irrelevant, but we could start talking about language design, and what makes a good language (e.g. ambiguity). Were they illustrations of their way of life? In which case, it’ll lean more towards an art form, and you get those emotions from wanting to preserve your history (the artist), and from wanting to understand other people (the audience).
