One of the great things I love about blogging, is you get tomeet so many great people through your blog. One of them, whom I nowconsider a friend, is William Lehman from the Artist Hideout.Not only is he a talented Artist, he is a passionate blogger and apastor {cool!}. Discussions with him and reading his blog were ways forme to keep in touch on the more “raw and emotional” aspect of my designprofession. During one of our on-line chats on the confluence of design andart and the relationship between the two, he had invited me to write aguest article on his site discussing, from my point of view as adesigner, this relationship between Design and Art. I was more thanhonored to. So here it is. It’s a little late, as we let it go up onhis site first, but as our blog audiences are different I wanted itposted at Design Sojourn as well. Is Good Design Art?Taking a position as a designer and moving from the discipline ofDesign to Art, I like to ask can good Design be considered as Art? Thisis one of those perpetual debates and discussions topics that reallyhave no right or wrong answer. The way I see it, it always seems to bein essence boils down to how you define what design or art is?If I take a stab at this relationship between Art and Design, Ialways find that the issue is not only about the definition of Designor art, but about the amount of “constraints” a discipline has to dealwith. Just to clarify, I believe creativity cannot exist in vacuum, theremust be boundaries. For example even creating Art has its ownconstraints that must be dealt with such as the properties of clay andeven paint on canvas. But my point is Art has a lot less constraints towork with than say Industrial Design or Mechanical Design. In many ways, I always consider Art to be pure expression, in otherwords a tangible form born from emotion and/or inspiration. This iftaken from a Designer’s stand point could be very difficult toreproduce in industrial design. Often Industrial designers have to makecompromises simply because the mechanical and manufacturing processesdo not allow a certain form or detail. Product shapes are often bedictated by what manufacturing machines or processes can or cannot do. Therefore logically for a product to be considered Art, or anexpression, it has to conquer the different mechanical constraints,raise above AND maintain the original inspirational intent. In manycases the more complex a product is in terms of specifications,manufacturing or usage requirements, the more difficult it is to turnit into Art. I do take my hat off to the few designers that has beensuccessful and possibly the reason why many products in MoMa’s Architecture and Design collection are often very low technology products, although Apple has shown that they can buck the trend. Kudos to them. Now lets get back into what was brought up originally in thebeginning of this Article. And that is when Designers try to create aproduct that could become Art, how we define design rears its ugly headagain. To explore this further, we need to look at the title of thispost from another angle; can good Art be good Design? Let’s take a lookat Philip Starck’s infamous Jucy Salif.The more artistic inclined love this and most Designers I know hateit, I myself sit on the fence on this one. Why? Many designer dislikethis orange or lemon juicer as it does not do its job at all. The onlythink it does is make an artistic statement. So the Jucy Salif, ifconsidered as a product that has to solve a problem {ie juicingoranges}, it outright fails. Is it then bad design? Perhaps. However,if you consider it as a form of expression and its only purpose of itexisting is to make a statement, then it does the job well.To further expand on this point lets look at how the dictionaryconsiders the words Design and Art. Firstly Design is often used asverb. We design, you design or I
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