I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between my design practice and my art practice. They’re often spoken about as if they belong to different worlds, but for me there’s a wide middle ground where they meet, overlap, and inform each other.

People often describe design as functional and purposeful, and art as expressive and ambiguous. There’s some truth in that divide, but in my experience the real difference sits in intention, not in method. I also think the boundary is far more blurry than we admit. Designed artefacts can carry an unmistakable artistic quality, and artwork can be shaped, structured and refined through a design process.

The way I approach both begins with the same question: how will someone encounter this? What will they feel when they meet it?

Design taught me to think from the outside in. To consider the person who will use something, navigate it, interpret it. You think about clarity, structure, pacing, emotional tone. You learn to edit, simplify, and remove anything that stands in the way of the experience you want someone to have.

When I’m making art, I notice I’m using that same approach. Even when the work is personal or conceptual, I’m still thinking about the viewer or listener. Not in a prescriptive way, but as a presence in the room. What atmosphere am I shaping around them? What are they being invited into? What might resonate after they walk away?

There’s a shared craft between design and art. Both require sensitivity to flow. Both demand a balance of control and intuition. Both ask you to shape a material into something intentional, whether that material is sound, space, memory or interface. And both require knowing when to refine and when to leave an edge rough because the piece needs it.

Listening feels like the deepest point of connection. In design, you listen to people, to context, to constraints. In art, you listen to the material, the space, the emotional undercurrent of what you’re making. Either way, listening guides the decisions. It tells you what to keep, what to remove, and when to stop.

I don’t feel the need to force these practices into one category. They each have their own logic and histories. But the distance between them is smaller than it appears. What sits between them is a way of paying attention, a kind of care for the person who will encounter whatever you’re making.

There’s no conclusion to this. It’s simply something I keep noticing. That art can be designed, design can be artistic, and the space between the two is where a lot of my practice seems to live.