I like the distinctions being made by Gunnar and the quotes he has
provided, because they point to what might be called the agony at the
center of designing.
For me the agony goes like this:
If the object can be sat on, then it functions as a chair and hence it
is a chair in its use.
If the object was made to be sat on then it is a chair in its
designing.
If the object looks like a chair but can not be sat on then it might be
art but it is not a chair and it has not been designed as a chair.
Making joke chairs (subversion) is fun and such chairs obviously need
to be designed if they are to function as a joke chair. Such designing
does not have the central agony of making that Gunnar points to. Such
joke making is pulled towards an aesthetic freedom that diminishes the
agony (like saying there are no rules in wrestling, you can just shoot
your opponent - it's fun, but not wrestling).
Interestingly, Dada produced no written works that escaped the agony at
the centre of communication - language is an excellent ironic machine
but it retains the core issue of communication no matter how extreme its
flirtations with the merely aesthetic. In many ways the same is true for
design. To set out to make a faulty tap is a crime of the heart unless
it's exhibited in an art gallery where it's just a joke and not much of
a joke.
Graphic design students often like to play the idiot game of breaking
down letter forms until there are graphic marks but no longer parts of
letter forms. As soon as the eye announces: "looks like part of a
letter", then the agony has emerged. While the fragment retains its
freedom as not a fragment of a larger form, then it is just a mark.
Keith Russell
OZ Newcastle
>>>>>>>>>
Gunnar Wrote and quoted
Thanks to David Durling for the "art & design" explanation. Most
graphic design education in the US is in art departments so most of our
arguments about the definition of graphic design tend to center around
whether and how (graphic) design is like or unlike art. ("Art," of
course, suffers from multiple definitions even more than "design" does.)
Kathryn Simon asks "What is art? What is design?" I'll let a couple of
my favorite writers take a stab at that one.
Kenneth FitzGerald's review
<http://www.ephemeralstates.com/2008/06/do-not-read-me-i-am-boring/>
of Stefan Sagmeister's -Things I Have Learned So Far in My Life- says
"art and design differ only in the segment of the marketplace in which
they operate. The essential activity is the same. They just answer to
separate validating structures."
Natalia Illyin's "The Man in the Irony Mask"
<http://www.stepinsidedesign.com/STEPMagazine/Article/28843> suggests
a distinction of attitude: "Contemporary art*s quarter-century-long
vogue for taking things apart, for subverting the distinction between
'high and low,' for irony, for pastiche, for the abjuration of concepts
of totality, unity and determinate meaning, for fragmentation*well,
that vogue never really has sat well with design. We*ve tried, but it
just doesn*t. 'Erasing the distinction between art and design,' which
we*ve heard so much about in recent years, is impossible for this
reason: Design, by its definition, is generative. It is the process of
making things. Taking things apart is the opposite of design.
Irony*creating distance*is the opposite of real communication,
which is the underlying aim of graphic design.
"We designers are a 'making' tribe. Unlike the Dadaists, whose pose we
emulate, we live in a world already fragmented. As to the avant-gardism
we still lean on--that long-ago radicalism that set out to shake up a
Victorian worldview--its notions of chal-lenge and subversion are still
important to contemporary art. But the importance of those notions in
design has been eclipsed by greater urgencies. We live in a challenged,
confused and subverted world. We don*t need to put any burrs under any
saddles. We have enough burrs for a lifetime. We have enough distance.
The great challenge now is to find relationship."
Gunnar
----------
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville, North Carolina 27858
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258 7006
at East Carolina University:
+1 252 328 2839
[log in to unmask]
