The Ends of Art and Design

The design arts are to our age of experience what the fine arts were to the era of representation but with crucial differences. Whereas the fine arts offered critical-reflective experiences to independent subjects within the era of representation, the design fields now produce experience-events in a post-subjective world. An experience-event is a configuration of social energy across various platforms and media: images and texts, clothes, architectures, spaces, the dynamic whole of everyday life. To begin to ask questions about the creation of events in everyday life we need to find a new way to talk about design culture. The Ends of Art and Design proposes a new way to think about the relationship between design and culture as well as new roles for design education within the Humanities and for the Humanities within design education. If the design fields are the primary agents of contemporary culture, they should be the primary focus of contemporary cultural studies. The Ends of Art and Design is not a polemic on behalf of the design disciplines, whether creative or critical: it is a polemic on behalf of the way we live today.