Is it art or is it design?

Today I had the lovely experience of trying to explain my objective for the final project for the Appliance Studio to my mother for the first time. Oh boy. So she asks the most basic and straightforward questions and I cringe inside as I'm struggling with the words to best describe what it is I have been working on for a month. The conversation was an interplay of explanation, Q & A, suggestions, criticism and overall frustration.

I tell her my main focus is about the emotional attachment between the user and a personal belonging. I tell her that I don't know who the intended user is and I'm not quite sure what "practical" function the object will perform. I ask her whether or not objects need to perform in order to be kept or for the attachment to last. And in return she tells me her thoughts and reactions as an average consumer. She says that she's a practical person. She only buys things if they are useful to her. She can only justify buying something not practical if the product is very attractive or cute.

My roommate, who's a senior in ID, told me that consumers don't care about the concept behind a product.
They do only care about having a product cater to their immediate needs. I guess people never think about products fulfilling an emotional need. Anyways, all this discussion led to question whether my final is more of an artistic expression or a designed object?

My preconception of art is that it is a result of a highly personal investigation or inquiry into a subject. The piece of artwork is evidence of a process that tries to convey the sense of meaning felt by the artist to the people who eventually experience the artwork. Art lives in galleries or museums or sometimes at various sites as sculptures or installations. Design lives out in the real world as objects that people use and interact with everyday. The house I live in, the chair I sit in, the clothes I'm dressed in, etc. Art is for the few and design is for the many. My experience of art is very different from my experience of design. When interacting with art, I can appreciate it aesthetically as well as conceptually. However, when interacting with design, I usually appreciate whether or not it's doing its job well. When did I, as a consumer, buy something based on the concept behind a product?

While looking at the examples presented in lecture, part of me thinks of those examples as art. I admire Max Lamb for his innovative process, but as for the final product, I'm not too fond of it. Tokujin Yoshioka, I totally love the final products but once again, way too expensive and limited in production to be considered design in my mind. If someone like my mother looked at hot-shot designers like these, what would she say? Something along the lines of interesting....but?