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

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