Everyone Seems to be Confused about Design, and That's Okay

Even to David Kelley, founder of the famous Stanford d.school and IDEO, a globally renowned product design company, design “has always been a funny word” (cited in
Camacho 2016, p. 88).

Today, as philosopher of art and culture Tsion Avital (2017) would argue, everything can be presented as a work of art, and everyone thinks that their opinion ultimately legitimizes what constitutes a piece of art.

In turn, any designed artifact can pass as a work of art, as long as someone identifies it as such, and this, according to Avital, lies at the heart of the confusion between art and design.

Jazz In The USSR: Freedom, Popular Culture, And ‘The Decadent West’

Feeling a bit jazzy today? Not in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The USSR and jazz had a love-hate relationship ever since the country’s formation in the early 1920s. To give an example, during his fruitful career, Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich wrote three ballets: The Golden Age, op. 22 (1929-30), The Bolt, op. 27 (1931), and The Bright Stream, op. 39 (1935).

The Bolt follows the story of Lazy Lyonka, a worker in a Soviet factory, who, together with an anti-Soviet plotter, decides to sabotage the factory’s machinery by putting a bolt into it. Their plan, however, is quickly foiled by Komsomol, a political youth organization of the USSR