Design art and new craft: Who’s zooming who?

Abstract

Fresh approaches to design emerging in design art and new craft present intersections between the conventionally distinct categories of visual art, craft, and design. In spite of their stated aim to cross-over disciplines, debates within design art and new craft characterise the term integration in different ways according to the value they attribute to conceptualisation, decoration, function, and context. While advocates of specialisation criticise hybrid design because they believe it produces only an homogenising blurring of distinctive practices, what is compelling in the new discourses is that although they intersect they are dissonant and serve to highlight the gaps between visual art, craft and design. While design art acknowledges the influences of design on art of the second half of the twentieth century, and new craft links craft with design’s technology and distribution systems, both reveal the culturally sanctioned parameters of visual art and craft. Rather than blur the boundaries of the fields of visual art, craft and design practice, the concept of integration reveals a number of prevailing conventions that each field produces. By contrasting the specificities of each field integration creates new possibilities for design.