Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true “designer” with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.
This from László Moholy-Nagy in 1947 in Vision in Motion, a compendium of the modern movement. Moholy-Nagy, best known for teaching at the Bauhaus until 1928, and director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 until its closing one year later.
Whether in academia or profession — or, more telling, places that blur the lines between — as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.
