A Short Rant about Design and Art

Written June 28. 1999, at 05:00 GMT.

I and my wife were out walking last night looking for a soft, green spot where we could lie down and cuddle while the sun sat. As we were walking I was thinking about design and whether it can be said to have purpose. When we stopped walking I felt like I had reached some sort of conlusion. My mind was more at ease than when I started thinking about it. What I formulated was something like:

The basic purpose and function of design is to detect and analyze a need and satisfy it. Through a short dialogue with my wife I felt I was able to generalize a bit more and say that both art and design aim to detect a need and try to satisfy it.

The analyzing may happen unconciously and "artists" tend to fix more on their personal and emotional needs whereas "designers" tend to focus on more general and concrete needs.

Finally I realized that what I just said could easily be applied to every kind of creative process.

• Every creative process is a reaction to some sort of need.
• A creative mind needs to detect and define the need and then sucessfully find a way to satisfy it.

Something tells me that I'm probably the N-th person to come to this exact same conclusion...

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