Dear Nicola,
Good thoughts.
One of the challenges we face in describing the context of design
activities is the fact that we still live in an industrial economy as well
as in a post-industrial economy.
Over 10,000 years ago, human beings moved from a hunting-gathering economy
into the agricultural economy. Following several developmental revolutions,
the first of at least four or five industrial revolutions began in the
Middle Ages. How many there have been depend on how you count.
In 1940 or so, a British-Australian economist named Colin Clark described
three economies, from the primary economy of agriculture, fishing, and
forestry to the tertiary economy of services. In 1976, Daniel Bell
elaborated this into an economy of five sectors in his book The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society. To place this in the context of design and design
research, I have reworked Bell's structure into seven sectors -- starting
with a Zero Economy for the nearly billion people who are shut out of much
of the world's economic activity to Economy Six, the ultra-post-industrial
experience economy.
The key fact of all these is that they operate side by side. All the
productive economies exist and need each other. At the height of the third
or fourth industrial revolution in the late 1800s, for example, the
majority of the world's people still worked in the primary economy to feed
and provide raw material to all the rest. In most advanced economies today,
three farmers feed all the rest of us. Nevertheless, without their work in
the primary economy, the other five economies would collapse.
The shifting proportions between economic sectors means that some of the
world lives in a post-industrial knowledge economy or an experience
economy. At the same time, we still need computers, cars, trains,
telephones -- even chairs, dinner plates, drinking glasses. Industrial
designers have a role to play in the important industrial economy that
continues to make the post-industrial economy possible by supplying the
goods that people use in their daily post-industrial lives.
Since much of this also involves the flow of information in automated or
programmed services -- manufactured through another kind of industrial
process -- your inquiry into the nature of a definition offers a valuable
insight into the logic of the designation "industrial design."
Thanks.
Ken Friedman
----- Nicola Morelli wrote: -----
But here I think it would be much more useful to reflect upon why do we use
the word Industrial Design, especially in the post-industrial age, in which
the use of this term may sound obsolete.
I believe there is something relevant in the term, that refers to the
traditional industrial logic: in my view the reference could be to the fact
that the "industrial logic" is about reproductibility of products (or
solutions) the formalisation of knowledge the organisation of work and
competences.
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