Hi Terry:

Is this official, now?
I mean, Disegno means Design?

Best,

Eduardo

PS: Instead of Venice you meant Florence didn't you?



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terence Love" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 21, 2005 3:12 PM
Subject: Re: DESIGN


Dear  Rosan,

You suggest <snip>,
This overarching (field,discipline, tradition) DESIGN,  I
believe, has never existed, but is under
construction...retrospectively...from our present point of view.
<endsnip>

Paul Van Der Lem at IDC2005 in Taiwan a couple 
of weeks ago suggests otherwise in his 
paper  'Search and Research in Design Education' :
available in the IDC2005 conference proceedings. 

Quoting his paper almost verbatim: 

Paul noted that in 1547 the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
chartered  an Academy of Design in Venice 
that operated  like a classical academy of  
Greece. It offered theoretical education in addition 
to practical education for professional arts and 
crafts with different principles underpinning 
academic education and training from 
those offered in workshops of  guilds. 
Academic regulations [of the Academy of Design]  
stipulated the need for an intellectual search to 
establish the necessary approach to work, 
called disegno. 
The term forms the starting point for our current 
understanding of what we mean by design.
Disegno was seen in the Renaissance as an 
intentional process which outlines an idea. 
The end product was no longer defined as an object 
but as a subject, a non-finite theoretical concept that 
needs to prove the validity of an intellectual process 
in advance of the realisation of this idea in practice. 
[As I interpret it,  the focus was on making a theoretical 
representation built on a reasoned theoretical 
pathway from other knowledge whose validity 
can be checked] 
Leonardo da Vinci, articulated the contemporary 
view of the members of the Academic court to 
treat Disegno as a scientia, a science using mattematiche 
demonstrazione to depict (designed) reality. 

It implies the picture of 'design' currently held 
in  Art and Design subfields, that substantially dropped 
the central foci of validity,  theory and 
intellectual rigour, happened sometime more recently.

Paul also notes that:
Research... created the idea of making contributions 
to the subject of study as an ideal through a re-search 
of principles of previous searches for knowledge. 
This idea, established through the high standard of 
German scholarship in the 19th century, created a 
new concept for postgraduate level of education 
and the degree of PhD emerged. The title Doctor of 
Philosophy indicated abilities to review not only the 
facts but the underlying philosophical principles in a 
subject. It was something separate from the existing 
traditional doctoral degrees demanded for university 
teaching posts or the doctoral degrees for complex 
professional practice outside the university which 
were first invented in the medieval universities 

Again these 'original' pictures of design and PhD 
study are very different from recent proposals
for 'design'-based PhD's especially from those arguing 
that practice, rather than theoretical reasoning, 
is research.

Best wishes,
Terry


-----Original Message-----
From: Rosan Chow
Sent: 21/11/2005 8:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: DESIGN


Dear All

It is a habit of some to suggest that Art and Design is a
sub-(field,discipline,tradition-you pick the word/concept you like) of
DESIGN. This overarching (field,discipline, tradition) DESIGN,  I
believe, has never existed, but is under
construction...retrospectively...from our present point of view.

am i right or am i wrong?

Rosan