DE101 Art & Design Fundamentals

Course Objectives (Week 3)
Formulating through observation and analysis some of the fundamentals of art and design.
Understanding through practice, some of the processes, in art and design.

Is art an expression? If so, is all expression, art?
Is design, 'problem-solving'? If so, is all problem solving, design?

Is art in an object? Is design a product?
Is art sensual / conceptual / intellectual / spiritual?
If design is something that serves the needs of people, how does it respond to the needs of complex and diverse societies, such as India?
What connects art and design? And what differetiates them?
These are some of the questions that the course shall grapple with.

Some Food for Thought
The widespread diffusion of cultures in the 21st century have led to the emergence of a global art circuit that is linked closely with market mechanisms. While artists have sought to infuse their works with references to local
or national cultures, art-works have come to bear an affinity to various other commodities on offer at the marketplace. New forms of art that resist such commodification have emerged, but it appears that the arts no longer serve
as containers for the highest aspirations of human kind, as they once did.

Design, in contemporary times, arose in the West as a humanizing response to the rapid industrialization. In its initial movements it appeared as the Art Noveau movement and at Bauhaus and later at the Ulm school in Germany;
a few decades later it appeared as the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that characterized mid-nineteenth century America.
These approaches were key influences in the formative years of design education and practice in modern India.

Unlike modernism that was characterized by a search for universal truths, the postmodern view was inclined to subjective knowledge as the dominant form of discourse.
Thus notions of design that had characterized the modernist era with its emphasis on objectivity and universally applicable ideas of aesthetics underwent changes that sought to reflect the ‘local in the global.’

Globalization is a relatively new phenomenon the implications of which are yet to be understood. The diffusion of digital technologies and the emergence of artificial intelligence is likely to disrupt our earlier approaches to design.
Unlike earlier forms of colonization (that were physical), new forms of colonization appear to control by a mediated capture of peoples' imagination. How would we distingush the real from the fake?

In times of stress and confusion in our outer and inner lives, it would perhaps be wise to go slow and to turn to a balance between our mind and body; our heads and hands.