My sophomores are designing magazine spreads of a PJ O'Rourke thing about economics so we've been talking about Ricardo's Law and the (economic) advantages of specialization. I also just read a nice piece about Fluxus that Ken sent me in an off-list extension we had of the recent "art" discussion here. I'd never thought of the similarities of Clement Greenberg's approach to art criticism (where each medium is considered in terms of itself as opposed to the Fluxus--and in more recent years, pretty much the whole art world--approach of deliberately crossing boundaries) and David Ricardo's approach. In Ken's article, he mentioned Fluxus member Robert Filliou who started out as an economist but seems to have taken a very non-economist approach to life and work.
I haven't had the time to think whether there's really anything here but we talk enough on this list about transcending disciplines that I wonder if anyone has anything to say about different notions of specialization--Ricardo's idea that the British should stick to making cloth and the Portuguese should make port wine and everyone should trade, the value and pitfalls of academic specialization, the competitive advantages of specialization in design, the IDEO (et al) notion of the T shaped person. . . .
Clearly, I don't have anything solid to say about this but I know I won't have time to solidify anything in the near future so I thought I'd toss it out to see if anyone can make better sense of it than I have.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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