Impositions of order: A comparison between design and fine art practices

Abstract

This paper explores explore the similarities and differences in the strategies used by designers and fine art practitioners to impose enabling constraints on a project. Enabling constraints are defined as devices, arbitrary, pragmatic, aesthetic and other which artists or designers impose to create coherence in a work or to create a discipline for the working process. The paper draws on the literature on how designers impose order, juxtaposing this characterization with a case study of a long-term collaborative fine art practice. It concludes that further understanding of design creativity arising from prepared minds might come from investigating other forms of creative practice; and that long-term collaborative practice is a more appropriate focus for understanding how order that enables creativity is imposed than studies focusing on single projects. ► Study of strategies of how order is imposed in creative design and fine art practice. ► Examines collaboration in fine art through the lens of how imposing order in design. ► Explores practices constraining work: thematic, material, procedural, and esthetic. ► Discusses the influence of preoccupations in shaping successive projects. ► Long-term collaborative practices key to project-spanning creative development