Art and design

I often feel that the greatest accomplishments in product design, and experience design, look feeble compared to the greatest accomplishments of art.

Think about how rich a [great painting](http://images.google.com/images?q=van+gogh+starry+night&imgsz=xxlarge) is, letting the observer dive as deeply as they want into the experience. To me even more, then, a film: hundreds of thousands of deeply-rich images, telling a story, with an aural landscape setting the mood.

Now think of our most advanced products–say, [the iPhone](http://images.google.com/images?q=iphone). As impressive as it is, the quality one gets from it is not the awe you get from a great piece of artwork. It’s simple in appearance; simple in experience. In the end, it’s just a tool, designed so that anyone can approach and use it.

As a product designer, I toil day after day for months on product designs, working with great teams of brilliant people, and the sum total of our effort is usually just a tool that no one will mistake for art.

Why is this huge effort so unable to evoke the same feelings art does?

Does art simply tap into our appreciation for nature, and natural things? A simple painting is closer to natural beauty than a computer casing, and stories are a fundamental part of the human cultural experience. Additionally, stories and imagery have been well-appreciated for millennia. Might art just have a head start on its craft?

Or does the use of an item actually mean it cannot be art? Does the fact that something is used, for a purpose, deny it the status we give to beautiful, yet “useless”, pieces of art? Even more, does designing something for efficient, inexpensive and regular use preclude the elaborate and rich designs that we might give it; that our artists give their work?

I think it’s likely a bit of both. Product and experience design are young professions, and we are still growing into our roles–still figuring out how to make our designs work better with our nature. And designing a tool to be used does remove it from the hallowed grounds of art, as making any item accessible to human beings makes them realize that it too is part of their mortal world.

Yet I also think that we as product designers are ignoring some of the potential to make great art of our creations. Does utility mean that beauty cannot exist? Of course not. Can we take the same care with the pixels on a screen, or the bevels of a casing, that we can with a painting? Of course we can. The craftmanship of products from before the industrial age proves it.

We engineers, as the people responsible for most things that are “built”, need to take up the cause of art in our work. We have a duty, as much as any profession, to make our products worth caring deeply and emotionally for–as our artists do for us.