On Design
Art vs. DesignDraft
Last updated October 2026
Creativity is the human act of making. Art and design are two different relationships people can have with what is made. I won't be picky in this essay about the mediums that human creations can take. I'm inclusive of the typical fine arts (painting, music, sculpture, prose, and poetry), as well as film, animation, new media, remixed work, and curation as craft. To me, all of these can be considered acts of creativity when humans take on a particular authorship role and an artifact is manifest by way of their point of view and manipulation. Both art and design enact creativity in this way; as far as this writing is concerned, ceramics and websites alike can be mediums for both art and design.
Most attempts to separate art from design look at the maker and ask what the work was made to do. Art is said to express, and design to solve a problem of function. I want to step back from this lens and explain why this definition overvalues creator intent, which is much more fluid and iterative than finished works suggest, and how it undervalues a creation's social situatedness. I argue that the difference between art and design really lies in the way people, including a work's maker, relate to a work, and that these relations change with context and the passage of time.
I'm motivated to clarify the difference between art and design because there are empowering benefits—and implications—to seeing things as artworks versus designed objects, and to knowing when to wear the hat of the artist versus the designer in the various creative situations life throws us into.
First, picture the machine
I want to paint two pictures, one abstract and one visceral.
First, imagine all this planet's phenomena to be represented by on a simple geometric plane. Imagine on this plane all human creations as little uniform nodes, coexisting together. These nodes make up our experienced world. The glass vase for your kitchen flowers is a node. The album buzzing through the speaker at the nearest restaurant is a node. The hundred-something planks of hand-dyed wood that make up the flooring of that restaurant are all nodes.
Between each node are faint, infinitesimal threads connecting one to another. These threads represent social contexts
I am a node connector in the machine of the world
the node it occupies in the larger machine of human relationships.
..because judging a designed object as art can excuse it from working, and judging an artwork as design can demand it justify itself.
Second, picture the mother
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To make that case, I distinguish three terms. Creativity is the act of bringing something new into being, whether by making an object or by seeing a new possibility in one that already exists. Design is putting a thing to use: when someone assigns an object a purpose, it becomes designed, and that person becomes its designer, whether or not anyone intended the object for that job. Art is attending to a thing for its own sake, apart from any purpose. Art and design, then, are not kinds of objects but kinds of relationships, and the same object can be either.
This shift changes the question of authorship. If art and design are made in the relationship rather than the workshop, authorship doesn’t end when the maker puts down their tools. Anyone who puts a thing to use is a designer. Anyone who selects, frames, or recombines existing things so they can be seen anew (the curator, the DJ, the collagist) is doing creative work in their own right, not borrowing someone else’s. Remix and curation stop being secondary practices and become what they have always been: ways of authoring new relationships with things that already exist.
Creativity is the act of bringing something new into being, whether that’s making a new object or seeing a new possibility in an existing one.
Design is putting a thing to use: assigning it a purpose. The person who assigns the purpose is the designer, and the design is judged by how well the thing serves that purpose.
Art is attending to a thing for its own sake, apart from any purpose. It isn’t judged by whether it works, only by what it gives you when you look.
My argument chips away at the capital 'A' Art and capital 'D' Design pedagogy in favor of practical and colloquial understandings of art and design. I believe deinstitutionalizing them makes them more useful in a changing landscape of mediums.
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