What’s the difference between art & design?
I recently came across an article in the Washington Post about Facebook’s new user interface by Bill Moggeridge (he is the newly appointed director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum), which suggested an interesting contrast between art and design:
“One of the big differences between art and design is that art is mostly about commentary — it’s making a statement that you’re expecting other people to contemplate and be moved by, emotionally, or altered by, in terms of their perceptions.
Whereas design is really about solving a problem that makes something more pragmatic, and useful, and valuable or valued, and of course you can add qualities of aesthetics to that, that make it also a delight. At the same time, if it fails on the functionality side, all is lost, whereas if it fails on the delight side, it might still fit into a lot of people’s lives in a satisfactory if not an exciting way.”
(The original Post article is here – you’ll need to scroll down the page to see it.)