Objectivity Is the Reason Why a Work of Art May Mean Different Things to Different People

Spend any amount of time working among professional designers and you learn that equating art with blueprint is a surefire way to stir the pot and hear assuming statements similar:

• "Pattern is not art. Design has to function."
• "Art is meant to provoke idea and emotions, but information technology doesn't solve issues."
• "Artists primarily work off instinct, whereas designers employ a methodical, information-driven process."

Unfortunately, the designer vs. creative person discussion often deteriorates into ranting and raving. Lines are drawn, battle flags are raised, and productive dialogue becomes impossible.

What's really going on here? Why have fine art and pattern been pitted against each other, and why are designers so determined that design cannot be art? These questions are the starting point for a thoughtful conversation between Toptal designers Micah Bowers and Miklos Philips.

Bowers is a brand designer and illustrator who believes that art encompasses many creative disciplines, pattern being ane, and therefore blueprint is art.

Philips, a UX designer and atomic number 82 editor for the Toptal Design Blog, takes the position that art and design may intersect, only they are distinctly different fields.

With our contestants in the band, it's fourth dimension for the debate to begin. Gentlemen, touch gloves and go to your corners.

Is Design Art?

Micah: Blueprint is art. Art is design. No exceptions.

Permit'due south be articulate—I'm aware of how unpopular my position is, especially amongst my design peers. I've been to talks, read books, spoken with colleagues, and taken classes adamant to establish the irreconcilable differences betwixt art and blueprint. Whenever I share my views, the backlash comes quick and violent, but I remain unmoved by the counter-arguments (good luck, Miklos).

The insistence on a distinction between art and design has been like a constant, low-grade fever that's bothered me for the last xv years—first through my industrial design grooming, and then during a fine arts graduate caste, and on into my career in branding and illustration.

My position is this: Great design is first and foremost art. What is this belief rooted in? A philosophical understanding of art.

Philosophers like Plato have debated the meaning of fine art and the definition of design for centuries.
("Plato" past lentina_x - licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The quest to define art is steeped in centuries of debate. Greek philosopher Plato believed that art is substantially a reflection of a reflection of what is existent. But his views are widely contested, and since nosotros have to start somewhere, we must aim for an agreement that acknowledges history and the diversity of global thought and culture.

Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy leads u.s. here:

Art exists and has existed in every known human culture and consists of objects, performances, and experiences that are intentionally endowed by their makers with a high degree of aesthetic involvement.

By virtue of this definition, pattern is undeniably art. It tin be found in every human being culture. It is used to create objects, performances, and experiences. And, designers intentionally instill significant amounts of aesthetic interest into their work.

Here, the inevitable cry is heard, "Wait! You've undone yourself by a single word. Aesthetic!"

Designers beloved to make sweeping assumptions in regard to aesthetics, so allow me to construct a safeguard.

Much like art, the concept of aesthetics is a complicated field of philosophical thought and cannot exist reduced to the designer stereotype that it ways "making things await pretty."

In fact, aesthetics covers many questions that are essential to the "fine art vs. pattern" argue:

• "Is it possible to determine an aesthetic judgment from a applied one?"
• "What is the basis by which we judge between utility and beauty?"
• And, "How are the foundational beliefs by which nosotros make artful judgments influenced by time, culture, and life experience?"

Hither'due south my bespeak: In the globe of contemporary design, art has been narrowly defined and unfairly diminished into a pathetic, watercolor caricature. Designers have flippantly inflated the significance of their own disciplines (which vary in substance to a comical degree) over centuries of artistic practice, philosophical research, and cultural understanding. Design is art. Art is blueprint. No exceptions.

Miklos: Blueprint needs to fulfill a office. Non art.

Offset of all, we accept to separate out what type of design nosotros're talking about. I can run across in the case of graphic design, analogy, and branding maybe pattern is somewhat "art," but if we're talking most more than functional design—such equally digital product design or industrial design—we need to go a lot deeper, and it becomes articulate: Design is not "fine art."

Slap-up pattern is part scientific discipline, office process, and function a practical gear up of solutions with a dash of aesthetics thrown in. Going beyond the surface, a designer inevitably discovers that not bad design is more about delivering solutions to problems.

Design is a process, not art.

Equally a UX designer, I always need to dig deeper, beyond the facade that one might call a potential "pattern" and look at the bigger picture holistically: the target audience, the use instance scenarios, the context, and the device the blueprint is intended for: TV to mobile, desktops to tablets, to ATMs, etc. And when it comes to production design, allow's not forget validation and usability testing. If design were only fine art, how could you exam information technology?

If design were purely about art, what about usability heuristics? Are such UX usability concepts equally feedback, consistency and standards, fault prevention, user control, flexibility, and predictability out the window? Isn't design there to serve people? If you desire to be an creative person, be that, simply don't call yourself a designer. Be a painter or a sculptor.

"At that place is dazzler when something works and information technology works intuitively," says Jonathan Ive.

The "working intuitively" part alone can't exist achieved by "art"; information technology's driven by user research and testing. Expert blueprint is also information-driven. What is more, in the virtually future, AI will transform the mode design is delivered. It volition exist super-personalized and anticipatory. Will design as "art" be able to do that? I don't think and then.

You can't say designing a ticket vending car UI is "art." Surely, aesthetics and emotional blueprint come into play—as other articles on the Toptal Design Blog have mentioned before—because aesthetics play a role in design to the extent that designs with ameliorate aesthetics make a production seem to "piece of work better." But withal, the function of the blueprint and context of use need to be taken into account.

For instance, in Don Norman's seminal volume "The Pattern of Everyday Things," he talks about design and the concept of affordances. (The concept of an affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his groundbreaking volume The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.) Norman writes:

Affordances provide stiff clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Handles are for lifting. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken reward of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed.

Then, affordances are "perceived properties" of a function in design, and they need to be signaled to the user with "signifiers," which provide clues to the user of the existence of a possible interaction. I don't know how ane would go about marrying the concepts of affordances and signifiers with "art." They are essential interaction design concepts in the realm of HCI (human being-figurer interaction). They take nothing to do with art.

As a UX designer, I reject the notion. I mean, tin can you imagine a ticket vending auto designed in the cubist style by Picasso? Not maxim it wouldn't exist interesting, but it wouldn't be very constructive or functional.

What Is Skillful Design?

Micah: Art solves issues. "Proficient design" is merely i path to a solution.

A ticket vending automobile in Picasso'south Cubism? At present that would be good design! I can envision the hands of a capable artist leveraging Cubism's stylistic dissonance into a conspicuously defined visual hierarchy that delights users with unambiguous points of interaction. Finally, we could wave goodbye to the banal and confusing button shrines nosotros've all grown accustomed to.

Interestingly, such an thought is not without precedent. In towns and cities around the world, public art installations have been used to improve experiences previously overlooked or muddled by pattern. The Van Gogh Path, created by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, is a perfect example.

The engineering of experimental installation fine art has a substantial impact on the world of pattern.

Inspired by Van Gogh'southward Starry Dark, the path runs through Nuenen, NL (a town where the artist lived in the 1880's) and is made up of thousands of minor painted rocks that capture free energy from the sun during the twenty-four hour period and light upwardly at nighttime.

If this were all the project encompassed, it would exist lilliputian more than than a nice lighting effect, merely the scope of Roosegaarde'southward artistic vision is much wider. Van Gogh Path is a proof of concept within a larger project called SMART HIGHWAY, an ambitious endeavor aimed at reinventing the Dutch landscape by implementing a sustainable arrangement of glowing, interactive roads.

The takeaway? Art and artists have the ability to solve substantial problems.

Trouble solving requires cognition, experience, skill, research, risk, and an understanding of man behavior, just unfortunately, many designers neglect to acknowledge that artists use problem-solving methodology in their work—fifty-fifty though artists have been systematically pursuing creative solutions for centuries, long earlier the distinction of "designer" was fashionable.

Demand proof?

Once more, we wait to a Dutch creative person, the master of light and painter of the Daughter with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer lived during the middle part of the 17th century, experienced minor success as a painter, and died nether a mount of debt. Well-nigh 2 centuries subsequently his death, nonetheless, Vermeer's work was rediscovered, and his standing as ane of the great painters of all time was cemented in the annals of art history.

Just a strange thing happened. The more than people studied Vermeer and his work, the more they realized that his paintings and process were truly unlike any other creative person's. How and so?

• Vermeer had no formal artistic training and apparently did non undergo an apprenticeship as a painter.
• His body of work is quite small, consisting of less than fifty total paintings.
• He never had whatever pupils or apprentices of his own.
• Nearly all of Vermeer's paintings were staged in one of ii rooms in his dwelling house.
• There are no surviving preparatory drawings or sketches attributed to Vermeer.
• X-rays of Vermeer'southward paintings reveal no underdrawings or compositional corrections.
• His paintings contain lighting and perspective distortions that can only be seen through manmade lenses.
• And finally, Vermeer was a shut friend of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist known for his trailblazing work in the fields of lens making and microscopy.

Some scholars contest that the human eye cannot naturally perceive the lighting and perspective aberrations found in Vermeer's paintings.

What does all this mean? Vermeer likely used an advanced, and yet unknown, course of photographic camera obscura to create his masterpieces. This is a contentious theory, but there is ample evidence from multiple sources to support such a merits.

How is it relevant to our debate? Vermeer invented an apparatus and process that went undetected and unduplicated for over 350 years and allowed him to create some of the earth's virtually iconic and technically exquisite paintings without any formal training. That is the pinnacle of problem solving.

Design is an fine art form, a method of homo expression that follows a arrangement of highly developed procedures in order to imbue objects, performances, and experiences with significance. Similar all art forms, design has the potential to solve problems, just there is no guarantee that information technology will.

More than anything, I want designers to realize that fine art is non an asinine subculture of design rejects preoccupied with finger painting their feelings. In fact, a depression view of art is also a low view of blueprint, science, history, and culture that severely limits creative potential and interdisciplinary progress.

At the end of the day, art solves problems. "Good design" is simply 1 path to a solution.

Miklos: Proficient pattern is unbiased and delivers what people demand.

Notice I didn't say "what people want" like the Rolling Stones song that says: "You tin't e'er become what yous desire…you get what y'all need." People don't always know what they want, information technology'southward upwardly to designers to effigy out exactly what they need.

By the manner, how are paintings solving problems? I neglect to see that.

Skillful design is subjective to a degree, merely in my view "adept design" is figured out along the way in an iterative design process with lots of validation/testing. It'south "pattern thinking." It's been around for decades. Information technology's something that merely works, where things come up together in the right fashion, at the right time, in the right moment.

Adept design is definitely non almost art or aesthetics alone. That is simply the surface. Good blueprint should be judged by several factors such as the intended user base, the surround, context of utilize, the medium, and the device information technology's to appear on. For example, in the case of a ticket vending automobile, aesthetics may not affair as much—people demand to get things done and things just need to piece of work for them. It needs to be super functional, fast, and efficient.

Good design in my mind is a design that is counterbalanced in the right mode between aesthetics and interaction design. To keep using the example of a ticket vending machine, in that scenario, the "wait" is less important and should accept the advisable portion in terms of importance on the balancing scale, and usability and interaction design (functional blueprint) should take the larger proportion.

Nosotros could likewise contrast "expert blueprint" vs. "bad pattern." Bad blueprint is pandemonium. It is disorder. It can be frustrating or abrasive. It slows people down and drains them emotionally. It may actually be ugly, or simply unremarkable and therefore not worthy of anyone's attention. To your audience, bad design is an impediment instead of an empowerment.

Looks kind of cool, merely is information technology good design?

Is Design Subjective or Objective?

Miklos: It'due south a mix of both in varying proportions.

Art and design are inextricably combined. I consider blueprint as a holistic endeavor which includes "fine art." Blueprint is both subjective and objective but should exist primarily objective. Proper pattern objectivity is accomplished by user inquiry (defining the target user base, getting to know the production's users, observing context of use), working through the essential steps of a user-centered design process (UCD) and user testing.

A pattern can bound from a brilliant designer'due south mind, merely its practical utilise yet needs to be validated. If design were only subjective, there would exist no need for usability testing (which would most probable upset the designer because he/she would detect that the pattern doesn't work). The blueprint would come from one person which, to me, is a ridiculous, astern idea. Designers who are 100% subjective are arrogant.

Even so, a small percent of subjectivity does come into play—aesthetics play a role, and this is peradventure where emotional design happens. This is the step where the designer's sensibility, "art," and subjectivity is brought to the forefront. Great designers "apparel upwardly" or "put a facade" on the underlying functional design to create something that works on all emotional levels—visceral, behavioral, and cogitating—to deliver a product with amazing UX.

Some designers believe good blueprint must exist objective. I don't believe that. At that place is a touch of genius in Starck's or Jonathan Ive'southward designs. They bring a nuance of subjectivity to their designs which has to practise with sense of taste. One of Steve Jobs'south greatest insults was to charge someone of having no taste.

Chair pattern by Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen

Micah: Art and all its disciplines (design included) combine objectivity and subjectivity.

I'm not sure how information technology happened, Miklos, but it looks like nosotros've found some sort of common footing, and I'm pleasantly surprised.

Art and all its disciplines, including design, crave a mix of objectivity and subjectivity. Of course, there will be designers who whorl their eyes and declare, "Art is purely subjective. It tin mean different things to different people." The obvious counterpoint? "Aforementioned with design!"

But let's await closer.

When designers affirm that art has to be subjective, they're typically referring to the way people judge the outcome of an creative person's efforts. This manner of thinking about art places a supreme accent on results. In other words, art equals objects, performances, and experiences. Fine art is a painting. Art is a trip the light fantastic. Art is a low-cal prove.

Viewed this manner, art is subjective. I think American Gothic is creepy, simply you find it inspiring. I remember an Eames Chair is classy, but you feel it'southward kitschy. I recollect the WhatsApp interface is confusing, but y'all've never seen annihilation more elegant. Art is a consequence, results are open to interpretation, and anybody'due south right!

Is it fair to judge art solely by the result of an artist's efforts?

Luckily, the definition of art that I proposed at the commencement of this debate is more than nuanced, so allow's refresh our memories:

Art exists and has existed in every known human culture and consists of objects, performances, and experiences that are intentionally endowed by their makers with a high degree of artful involvement.

Discover the words in bold. Artists "intentionally endow" their work with pregnant to a high degree. In other words, they consciously enhance or purposefully enrich. There is intent married to action.

Understood more fully, art is not a upshot. Art is a process, and the process of art is overflowing with objectivity.

Don't concord? Consider the centuries of repeatable practices, standardized tools, chemical reactions, and scientific discoveries owed to art. To the extent that at that place can be realities independent of the listen (the definition of objectivity), fine art is objective because it is process dependent.

If a ceramic artist fires a dish without first letting it dry, it will explode.

If a pianist places her fingers on the correct keys, she volition play the intended chord.

If a web designer selects Dingbats for body text, big portions of his client's site will be illegible.

The big takeaway, Miklos, is that I mostly agree with you. Fine art, and thereby design, is a mixed purse of objectivity and subjectivity sprinkled with enough ambivalence to keep this Fine art vs. Pattern debate raging on for years to come.

Decision

It is not at all clear that these words—'What is art?'—express anything like a single question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same debate… The sheer variety of proposed definitions should give us intermission. – Kendall Walton

At their most primal level, both art and pattern seek to communicate something, and whatever the differences, or whether classified every bit fine, commercial, or applied art—at their best, both forms elicit an emotional response.

It has been argued that the difference between fine and practical fine art is context and has more to practise with value judgments made about the work itself than whatever indisputable stardom between the two disciplines. Furthermore, comparing "fine art" and "pattern" is, though a lofty attempt, mayhap a quixotic one, as neither can be defined absolutely because they are always irresolute—boundaries are constantly being pushed and will hopefully keep to be so into the hereafter. This debate, after all, is timeless.

How do we decide what is fine art and what is design, and why is the relationship between the two and so fractured? Is it the difference between what is functional (design) and what is not-functional (art) that creates the dissension? Is a Noguchi coffee table or a Rennie Mackintosh chair just a functional object, or is it art that happens to have a office?

Glaswegian architect, artist, and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh was ane of the outset proponents of integrated art-architecture. He believed in the pure integration of course and function and sought throughout his career to bring forward the theory of "the room as a work of art."

Rennie Mackintosh designed the furniture and other fixtures in his buildings, where every detail contributed to a greater whole.

Frank Lloyd Wright believed so strongly in the unity of course and function that he changed the oft-misunderstood axiom, "class follows function" coined by his mentor Louis Sullivan to read, "grade and function are one." His plan for the Guggenheim "…was to make the building and the paintings a beautiful symphony such as never existed in the globe of Art earlier."

In conclusion, it is not art versus design, but the unity of the two that is at the core of any superior pattern. In other words, good design incorporates art.

• • •

Further reading on the Toptal Pattern Web log:

• eCommerce UX – An Overview of Best Practices (with Infographic)
• The Importance of Human-Centered Design in Product Pattern
• The Best UX Designer Portfolios – Inspiring Instance Studies and Examples
• Heuristic Principles for Mobile Interfaces
• Anticipatory Design: How to Create Magical User Experiences

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Source: https://www.toptal.com/designers/creative-direction/art-vs-design

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