The definitional argument of art has been around since art was invented in Europe four or five hundred years ago. It defines a category of craft that often given value beyond its material components if it has any. The things that fall into the category of art have changed over time, tending towards an increasing number of things. It's not just oil paintings and marble busts that are considered art. It is now common for fiber arts, long seen as “women's work” and therefore not art, to be considered a fine art. Music too is sometimes considered art.
I took one art philosophy class and we spent a ton of time going over different types of definitions for art. The first is the institutional definitions, meaning that museums or people with proper training decide what is and isn't art. I think that is so wrong that and there isn't much more to say about that. There is the aesthetic definition, which basically says that an artwork is something meets this criterion: A person fashioned this with the belief that it would be possible for it to impart an aesthetic experience on a person. Which is nice because it doesn’t have to be good or bad, and it can be something different for different people. The problem with the aesthetic definition is that you need to have a definition for an aesthetic experience, which is just as hard to define as art without just trying to use examples.
The definition that I personally like the most comes from an interview with Brian Eno. He talks about art as if it's the foil to functional objects, but ever present. His idea is that everything that is meant to serve some mechanical function is not art, and everything else is. So you might say that a tool is not art but painting is, but it's more interesting than that. Eno uses the example of a screwdriver throughout his explanation, it works well because it's linear and represents the spectrum from art to function. When you think of objects as multiple parts you can see that the head of the screwdriver that fits into a screw is the functional end, and if you look at all the Phillips screwdrivers in the world they are all pretty much the same. The closer you get to the opposite end, the handle, the more the screwdrivers differ from one another. The handle is the part that is art; it has a color that most of the time doesn't serve a purpose, it has shapes and knobs and divots. You could add that some of these features are “ergonomic” but a lot of them are not. A different way to address the ergonomic idea would be to say that the non-art part of the screwdriver doesn’t come from a mechanical need, but an ergonomic fact. The screwdriver is scaled to the size of our hand, and the screw to our fingers. They twist into objects because our wrist is suited to that movement, and the hardness of the materials used in the screwdriver tend towards what they contact, metal and flesh corresponding to metal and plastic.
Could you say that everything is either ergonomic or aesthetic (art)?
Maybe. (This next part is an attempt to follow this line of reasoning to some conclusion, to investigate for myself whether or not this idea makes sense to me)
Maybe not, when I think and talk about ergonomics it comes with the romantic feeling of something that is art. I'm really not sure but I think I like the distinction.
The breakdown of the screwdriver into parts goes even farther than the handle and the head, the fact that the + shaped head is symmetrical or perpendicular is partially aesthetic and partially due to manufacturing constraints. Every object can be broken down infinitely into its constituent ideas, forms, colors, and patterns and arranged somewhere between aesthetic and ergonomic, and that mix along the spectrum is rich and complicated like soup.
Real machines — machines that don't have any interaction with actual humans, that just ka-chunk away making widgets and cogs for other machines—don't have either ergonomics or aesthetics. They are alien to our tangible (Tangible: perceptible by touch) world.
I contend that these machines are in one way like a natural process, apart from civilization. This assumes that art (and ergonomics) requires intent, you can go into the forest and find something beautiful, ugly, and powerful, but it is not art. While I do believe that everything is Nature — nothing is outside it — consciousness is a rare anomaly within it and only from it do the immediate and personal creations like screwdrivers and paintings arise. Tool making and art making require consciousness, a biological process can not result in these (memes). It's not only humans that have this, to some extent we stand with apes, elephants, octopi, crows, dolphins, and others. From here on I will use capital N Nature to refer to everything in the universe, and lowercase n nature to refer to the things only affected by biological and physical processes, not conscious molding. If we take it that objects in nature cannot constitute art —or fall on the aesthetic-ergonomic spectrum — then we should also take it that machines ought not to fall on this spectrum either. I think that there we are so far down the line of machines making machines to make things that they have no ergonomic relation to humanity, and they are certainly not aesthetic that they are their own kind of reality. They are ONLY functional. This is where the distinction between function and ergonomics matters. Ergonomics deals in molding the world around us to fit ourselves, leaving a human imprint. The machine, functionality,  is an inhuman process which operates on its own to deliver products and consume resources. If it's not clear by now I don’t only mean drones and cog-makers, I really mean capitalism as a massive machine. The stock market is run by machines that have long ago surpassed humanity in their ability to trade millions of times every minute, controlling economies as the business operates with the goals of profit, unable to follow any other program.
So it seems that Nature could be split into three categories: nature, machine, and the ergonomic-aesthetic spectrum, which might be more aptly called the sentient imprint.
I’m really not sure if this is too convoluted, but to me, it serves to partition out this kind of area I am interested in which is the interactions between aesthetics and ergonomics and to define it in relation to the natural and machine ecology.
