Design as Art: Bruno Munari (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The designer of today, is the one who tries to establish a connection between art and the general public, he humbly responds to the needs of the common man. His paintings contain lighting and perspective distortions that can only be seen through manmade lenses. I approached Munari's book with high expectations (since it's so highly rated), but ultimately found little of interest to latch on to.

Art vs Design – A Timeless Debate | Toptal® Art vs Design – A Timeless Debate | Toptal®

Revisiting Munari’s iconic words is at once a reminder of how much has changed, and how little— but mostly a timeless vision for design’s highest, purest aspiration. One of the most influential designers of the twentieth century ... Munari has encouraged people to go beyond formal conventions and stereotypes by showing them how to widen their perceptual awareness' It has been argued that the difference between fine and applied art is context and has more to do with value judgments made about the work itself than any indisputable distinction between the two disciplines. Furthermore, comparing “art” and “design” is, though a lofty endeavor, perhaps a quixotic one, as neither can be defined absolutely because they are always changing—boundaries are constantly being pushed and will hopefully continue to be so into the future. This debate, after all, is timeless. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 CANCEL MONTHLY SUPPORT The insistence on a distinction between art and design has been like a constant, low-grade fever that’s bothered me for the last 15 years—first through my industrial design training, then during a fine arts graduate degree, and on into my career in branding and illustration.Today it has become necessary to demolish the myth of the ‘star’ artist who only produces masterpieces for a small group of ultra-intelligent people. It must be understood that as long as art stands aside from the problems of life it will only interest a very few people. Culture today is becoming a mass affair, and the artist must step down from his pedestal and be prepared to make a sign for a butcher’s shop (if he knows how to do it). The artist must cast off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men, well up in present-day techniques, materials and working methods. Without losing his innate aesthetic sense he must be able to respond with humility and competence to the demands his neighbors may make of him. While Munari’s precise level of ideological involvement with the regime remains a question of some controversy, his body of work far exceeds any facile reduction to propaganda, or even politics more broadly. Munari remained his own man, producing a mind-boggling range of experiments which straddle different media, discipline, genres and affects. His Illegible Writings of an Unknown People (1973) reveal a light-hearted meditation not only upon typeface design and legibility, but anthropological and linguistic mysteries (the latter evoked, too, in his famous 1958 Talking Fork). So, too, his Theoretical Reconstruction of an Imaginary Object (1971) combines the practical mechanics of engineering with an almost metaphysical play upon systems theory. Perhaps most striking on view at Kreps – amidst a striking range of experiments – are two Fossils from the Year 2000 (1959), which sandwich unrecognizable valves and mechanized parts between some transparent substance. Recalling Duchamp’s The Large Glass ( The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915–23), the works conjure up a future where even the ‘futuristic’ apparatuses of modernity bear all the obviated mystery of some fossil frozen in amber.

Design as Art by Bruno Munari | Waterstones

Any knowledge of the world we live in is useful, and enables us to understand things that previously we did not know existed." (82) Bruno Munari, Curve di Peano P64.1, 1974, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm. Courtesy: Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Similarly, Design as Art is useful for designers and architects interested in communicating their projects effectively, as Munari does in this book, narrating the development of some of his most interesting projects. Philips, a UX designer and lead editor for the Toptal Design Blog, takes the position that art and design may intersect, but they are distinctly different fields. Art and all its disciplines, including design, require a mix of objectivity and subjectivity. Of course, there will be designers who roll their eyes and declare, “Art is purely subjective. It can mean different things to different people.” The obvious counterpoint? “Same with design!”In this book, I like the Munari's insight of 'wearing' best. He asks us to look at how objects become worn in their everyday use. Should we design objects on the sole merit of personal aesthetics and upon the Platonic plane of Ideal Geometry? Or should we design objects according to a limited sampling of user-needs study? Or as Munari suggests, should we design objects according to how it has been worn across time?

Design as Art by Bruno Munari: 9780141035819

Born in Milan in 1907, where he worked as a graphic designer from a young age, he opened his first studio in 1929 with Riccardo Castagnedi, another important figure in Italian design. He adheres to Futurism, from which he breaks away to develop a path characterised by curiosity and a desire to overcome conceptual and technical limits. Having laid down this crucial understanding, Bruno Munari goes on to explain the intricacies of visual design, through shapes of words, symbols and signs, and colours, of industrial design, through micro-art and spontaneous art forms, of research design, and of machines designed as theoretical reconstructions of totally imaginary objects. For example, in Don Norman’s seminal book “ The Design of Everyday Things,” he talks about design and the concept of affordances. (The concept of an affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his groundbreaking book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.) Norman writes:

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A designer is a human being with his own tastes and preferences, but he does not suffocate his work with his personal ideologies, he tries to be objective.

Bruno Munari’s Design as Art | Frieze

The designer of course does not operate in nature, but within the orbit of industrial production, and therefore his projects will aim at a different kind of spontaneity, an industrial spontaneity based on simplicity and economy in construction. There are limits of how far simplicity of structure can be taken, and it is exciting to push things to these limits. Bruno Munari in his Milan Office, 1988, photo ISISUF – Istituto Internazionale di Studi sul Futurismo. Penguin published many handy and interesting little books like this around the 1970s which are really insightful and informative, by the likes of John Berger and Susan Sontag, and many others, covering many fields of art and culture in new (for the time at least) and refreshing ways. As a UX designer, I always need to dig deeper, beyond the facade that one might call a potential “design” and look at the bigger picture holistically: the target audience, the use case scenarios, the context, and the device the design is intended for: TV to mobile, desktops to tablets, to ATMs, etc. And when it comes to product design, let’s not forget validation and usability testing. If design were just art, how could you test it?

A natural material ages well. Painted material loses its paint, cannot breathe, rots. It has become bogus”. Maxim Gorky: "An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form."