Art. Design. What’s the difference?

Commenting in the Washington Post about Facebook’s user interface, Bill Moggeridge makes an excellent distinction between art and design:

“One of the big differences between art and design is that art is mostly about commentary — it’s making a statement that you’re expecting other people to contemplate and be moved by, emotionally, or altered by, in terms of their perceptions.

“Whereas design is really about solving a problem that makes something more pragmatic, and useful, and valuable or valued, and of course you can add qualities of aesthetics to that, that make it also a delight. At the same time, if it fails on the functionality side, all is lost, whereas if it fails on the delight side, it might still fit into a lot of people’s lives in a satisfactory if not an exciting way.”

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Bill Moggeridge is director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

(Thanks, Before & After)

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