Feed

A chef's first job is to feed someone. The customer comes and eats the food served. Over time, the chef would keep practicing preparing dishes to recall a childhood memory perhaps. May be how a drumstick curry tasted on a rainy afternoon. The moment is so valuable that they'd want to share it with a guest and welcome them to join them on that rainy afternoon. That's self-expression of that chef. The moment the chef stops feeding and starts sharing is when design ends and art begins. That's where the best cooking lives too!

A designer building an appliance with a light‑glow feature to indicate a function might simply use an LED strip with a warm colour temperature to get the job done. But the designer may also want to express the feeling of warmth, homeliness, and safety they remember from being a child at home at 6 p.m. They want users to feel that same way when they buy the appliance for their own homes.

History remembers the Eames chair, the Braun T3, Leicas, the original Mac, and the list goes on. They are art pieces. Nobody remembers the 'ergonomic home office chair' that topped usability testing in the year XXXX. History is a great filter. It has always preserved objects that make you feel something and discarded the ones with only functions.

Design solves a problem. Art is self-expression. Art is what history will remember. It comes from living with enough texture of experiences that it eventually bleeds into the work you're doing. Live a life worth designing from.