At least a few posts seem to suggest that design is more art than science. This is a serious -- and possibly widespread (in the community, may not be in this forum) -- misconception, and is founded on a misunderstanding of the term 'design' which deems the terms 'art' and 'design' to be near synonyms.
I seriously doubt if artists, prior to the 20th century would have called themselves designers. In fact, I doubt if serious/successful artists today would like the appelation 'designer' applied to them. I have a friend who would like to be an artist full-time but works as a designer to 'pay the bills'. This conflation of art and design may have something to do with the visibility and iconic status of architects from around the beginning of the 20th century (Walter Gropius/Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc.). Architects -- as distinct from civil engineers, or 'mere' builders -- were/are supposedly persons of vision and flair who 'imagined habitations' rather than drew up buildings. They became celebrities whose rock-star status often camouflaged the impractical nature of some of their designs [of current notoriety is Frank Gehry's leaky design for MIT]. The term "design" means, among other things something deliberate, intentional, considered, and ... horror of horrors! ... calculated. Before I discovered psychology, anthropology and computer science, my first degree was in Mechanical Engineering and my senior thesis involved the DESIGN of a heat exchanger for a nuclear power plant. Now, despite the fact that I was the college cartoonist at the time, there was nothing art-related in my project. Sure, I did engineering drawings of the heat exchanger, but it was calculated to avoid Three Mile Island sort of situations. No jury awards and all for flair and panache and all that sort of thing. Design means "working to a purpose", and to claim that Design is all or mostly about 'that ineffable something' strikes me as being a little scary. Ineffability is great for pure art, but Design better be pretty darned effable. One thing I noticed from many posts is the preponderance of people with a formal/semi-formal background in art and hence having strong visual/spatial skills. Also, a significant proportion seem [and I could be totally mistaken here] to work on/with websites rather than with physical artifacts such a cellphones, ATMs, hearing aids, etc. If one is tasked with designing the billionth website or corporate logo on this planet, then yes, you've got to go into that state of ineffability to conjure up a visual design that has that ol' je ne sais quois: something unique, distinct, and fresh. Undoubtedly, the visual impactis an important consideration for a website, and to be able to come up with a unique website design in this vast web ocean requires an immense amount of creativity and original, unstructured thinking. Once you've come up with that fresh new angle that projects a unique identity, there's a lot of science to making a site successful. As far as physical artifacts are concerned, there are far fewer archetypes within a specific domain than the potential (visual) variety of websites; the visual is just one among many aspects, and thus visual aesthetics no longer occupy center stage (there are tactile and auditory issues too, among others). It's interesting that while this is a forum of interaction designers -- with the emphasis on 'interaction' -- that there is so much focus on the visual and spatial. Sure, finally most of what is designed will manifest itself in visual form (except for purely auditory design); but designing the INTERACTION PROCESS which is more critical than the visual presentation is nearly pure science. Jakob's Nielsen's site is pretty ho-hum looking, but from an interaction perspective, I think the man has it all down pretty well. Perhaps this reflects my bias -- I didn't get into this field from the world of art (despite a personal passion for art, and though I sport earrings, an artsy two-day stubble and love my latte; and yes, I do own a black beret, but it's in a box somewhere); my formal training is in engineering and the social/behavioral sciences. Everything constructed deliberately by human beings, is, by definition, art (everything else, is nature). Science does not -- and perhaps never can -- precisely determine how a design will manifest itself; but it sure does set a whole bunch of boundaries (and constraints) that delimit its scope. -murli -- murli nagasundaram, ph.d. | www.murli.com | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +91 99 02 69 69 20 - The reason why death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity -- it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous possessive love that grabs at what it can. - Yann Martel, The Life of Pi. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
