Dear Michael,
There is a common misconception amongst designers from the "Art and Craft" traditions of designing that they form the main part of the overall design field. In fact, this is not so. Somewhere, I have a by now rather out dated list of over two hundred different sub-fields of the Design discipline of which the 'Art and Design' domains are very much a minority. There are three main groupings of design sub- fields:
* Design fields based on the Art and Design traditions (Graphic Design etc)
* Design fields based directly on technical traditions (Engineering, software etc)
* Other design fields (e.g. childcare program design, organisational design, behavioural design etc)
'Techical' and 'Other' design fields outweigh design fields based on 'Art and Craft' by a considerable margin in terms of number of designers and financial resources associated with designed output. My estimate is that 'Art and Design' makes up around 5%. The number of sub-fields increases each year and most of these new fields do not originate in the Art and Craft tradrtions. The focus of design efforts of most design subfields lie elsewhere than visual appearance.
You say " But when all is said and done, design is visual." I suggest to you that this is not so. I suggest that the essence of the human activity of designing is better seen in terms of the design activities that distinguish designing in all these 200 + domains from other more domain specific activities such as drawing or calculating.
Best wishes,
Terry
______________________
Dr. Terence Love
Love Design & Research
PO Box 226
Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel/Fax +61 (0)8 9305 7629
[log in to unmask]
______________________
|