“When the school asked my company to redesign it, we knew the school was an incredibly vibrant community, where students unceasingly develop new ideas about what art should be.” says Dan Michaelson about art.yale.edu. So, what should art be? The Yale School of Art’s website was made 10 years ago now. If you were tasked with a redesign or update, how might you change it to reflect your opinion?

Art should be intentional, and that's my strongest opinion about art. I also feel, with some conviction, that art should be personal and collaborative at the same time. The vagueness of the terms "personal" and "collaborative" is an asset in this context, because their definitions are malleable enough that they can be bent around almost any art. Every work of art is personal, because a person made it, or made the thing that made it, or had an opinion on it, or witnessed it. Every work of art is collaborative, because no (hu)man is an island, and we are influenced by people around us and art around us, and everything we've ever known is collaborating with us in every work of art that we create. I also feel that art should ask questions or answer questions. It can do either, neither, or both, for the artist and for the viewer.

I think the Yale School of Art's website already does a lot of these things well. That being said, I think its relationship between being personal and collaborative is a bit strained. The collaboration is personal, because it allows one person to change things about it. But the end result at any given time is not the result of all of the previous collaboration, and that is something I would like to see change in the website.

This could be done in several ways, and I'll try to list some examples to show what I mean by a less strained relationship between personality and collaboration. I'd also like to say that I am not all that familiar with the website itself or its history or the way that it functions, so I'm not sure if some of these proposed changes already exist or have existed at some point in history.

• Allow changers to only alter one aspect of the website in a given time period. For instance, each user can only make changes to one div, or one property, per day. Something like that. That allows the website, at any given time, to be made up of the work of many different artists and not all one artist.
• Allow changers to only alter the website if there is someone else actively working on altering the website at that moment.
• Have some sort of navigation that allows the viewer to view previous versions of the website, or select elements from previous versions of the website, in order to make a customized version of the website by remixing elements designed by other artists.
• The website shifts versions of itself every time it is reloaded, travelling back in time to previous versions of itself.

I think that if the School of Art's website is going to call itself collaborative, it can do a better job of showcasing more than just one artist's work at a time, as a mandatory part of its existence. I want to stress that this is not meant to be a harsh criticism of the site - I think it's a really cool concept and executed very well, considering. Maybe I'm trying too hard to be nice.

What is your personal working definition of “design”? (By “working” I mean for you currently and it is okay if this definition is aspirational.) You can reference the articles, and you can bring your own references if desired.

Artists seem to talk a lot about what art should and shouldn't do. All of the assigned readings take some sort of stance on this - design should be transparent (Warde), work should say something (Rock), design should begin asking interesting questions (van der Velden). Sure. I find it hard to take such a firm stance on the purpose or function of design, though.

I think design is about function. This is vague, and it's hard to get much more specific than that. Products are designed in order to accomplish something, but if they accomplish something other than their design intended, I don't think that makes the design "bad", necessarily. I think a lot of what design is, is how it's interpreted. A designer can have all the intentions in the world, but if they do not come across as intended, I don't think that means the design is faulty or bad, necessarily.