I was always told that the difference between art and design is that the artist creates the problem, and the designers solve them.
I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.
I wish ancient Greek techne τέχνη hadn't gone through the split that left "art" on one side and "technology" (or work?) on the other.
The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful.
And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're talking about didn't exist and encouraging folks not to frame the world that way.
Am I right in saying the conclusion of the experiment was: people who spend more time thinking about a problem before acting tend to find it more engaging and were therefore more successful?
I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.
No.
People who are confronted with a task that don't search for a solution but for a priblem within it are more creative.
The consequence was that some barely produced solutions within the time constraint. Those were more succesfull as artists, the article states, while a quite a few of the other folks dropped out of art. Consequentially I'd like to add: They found the solution to the problem of living as an artist in quitting art - quite reasonably
This whole thing strikes me as coming from the wrong direction. Tying artistic and financial success, trying to apply some cargo cult "problem" engineering mentality to art. I feel like these articles illustrate quite well why the academic plastic arts have become so irrelevant today that we could say they are not part of human culture at large, in the sense that they have vanishing influence on public discourse.
Yes, that's a failing of science. Reading the early volumes of Nature from the 19th century shows how much more of an open dialogue it was back then: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes
Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.
I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.
I wish I remembered who I am quoting here
The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful.
And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're talking about didn't exist and encouraging folks not to frame the world that way.
If we think of Leonardo da Vinci he created both art that created problems, and inventions that solved problems. But these world where very separate.
I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.
Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.