Ken Friedman wrote:
> But there is a second issue, and this is a crucial distinction between
> art and design. In art, one sets out to solve artistic problems that
> the artist sets for himself, herself, or their group. In design, we
> set out to understand and solve a problem for a legitimate problem owner.
I used to believe this, partly because the academic art community in
Britain has been fairly exclusive in its world view, maybe because of
the success of Brit-Art. But these distinctions keep blurring, I meet or
hear about artists from other countries who have a much less exclusive
view of their role in the world and even in the UK I am seeing artists
who are interested in working collaboratively on social or institutional
issues at least partly defined by others.
In my own current research, the main "design researcher" that we are
employing, James Brown, is an artist. That is he has a fine art degree
and has a central interest in how certain techniques might be used to
create or modify experience. However his role, as opposed to his
motivation, has always shifted between the two domains of artist and
designer. A lot of his work has been as a technical facilitator for
galleries and individual artists and his work with me is mainly defining
the combination of hardware and software that will support both
practical institutional aims (of museums) and a shared inquiry (of an
interdisciplinary research group). It seems to me that his motivation is
three-fold - he understands and is interested in the aims of his design
clients, he is fascinated by the difficult software design problems
involved and he sees this work as a vehicle for developing tools that he
may use in future artistic practice.
And anybody who thinks that designers are entirely servants of other
people's problems is not recognising that designers will be very
independent in defining the problem and shaping their response to suit
their needs, experience and ideology.
best wishes from Sheffield
Chris
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