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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