Dear Martin,
Thank you for your message.
What I was trying to address in my original post many years ago in which I
quoted the '4%' were the problems of 'seeming' and rhetoric and their
adverse effects on decisions about the future of university design education
and the design industry.
This occurs when one looks at particular statistics and then associatively
projects them in ways that are not valid. That is there are fallacies in
deducing either what 'seems' to be happening, or what the decisions are that
one 'seems' one should be making. An example would be the assumptions that
'the design industry in the UK must be healthy because universities are
increasing the number of design graduates each year'. There are many reasons
that the number of design graduates might increase and almost all of them
are unrelated to the health of the design industry. The deduction is simply
a matter of fallacious thinking. I suggest, this typically occurs when
conclusions appear rhetorically well supported yet are incorrect.
By observation, academics and participants in design are more prone to the
above problem because rhetoric is more dominant in their subconscious
processing than logic. This leads to more opportunities for fallacious
reasoning. The problem with 'seeming' and rhetorical reasoning is there is
a high level of possibility of deluding oneself, coming to false
conclusions, misunderstanding, being influenced by hidden biases etc.
Science and mathematics was developed from the earliest times to reduce
those problems.
A well accepted solution to the above problems of fallacious thinking in
respect to understanding design education and the design industry is
careful use of logic, mathematics and formal reasoning.
As an aside, in addressing these issues without rhetoric, it is useful to
avoid emotionally loaded terms such as 'contemptuously'. For getting to the
root of the reality and avoiding 'seeming' I suggest it is better instead
to use 'correct', 'incorrect', 'true' and 'false'.
There is a problem in going further discussing this issue with you. You
don't seem to know or understand the body of literature about the problems
of rhetorically-based thinking and the errors in decision making that ensue,
and why science and mathematics provide powerful tools important to
address those problems. In addition, as you say, you do not understand how
to use the scientific and mathematical tools themselves.
How would you suggest we move forward on this?
Don Norman, on this list and elsewhere, has argued for increased use of
science and maths in design. I'm suggesting the same scientific and
mathematical skills are needed by senior academics and managers in design
education and the design industry.
As a rhetorical, rather than logical, argument in support of the above, I'd
like to point to the relative trajectories of the design fields that adopted
science and mathematics and those that have not yet done so. Remember,
engineering design was a similar 'art' to that currently seen in the
art-based non-mathematical design fields such as graphic design and
illustration, and some might argue was a lesser partner with smaller scale
and scope. After its adoption of mathematical approaches, the scope and
scale of engineering design rapidly increased to greatly exceed that of the
non-mathematical design fields. This is now to the extent that the
non-mathematical design fields almost totally depend for their existence on
mathematically-based design fields. For example, try to imagine how book
design would operate at its present scale without the mathematically-based
engineering design of printing, mass communication technologies, advertising
media delivery, book distribution, financial processing, etc.
The above issues are not matters of emotion. I'd suggest using the least
emotion possible is the best approach to these issues. When you read what I
write and attribute emotional values to it, please consider that it is you
that is bringing emotion in and interpreting it that way. There are many
roles for emotion, but understanding the details and causality of
situations and making decisions are ones in which I'd suggest emotion is
problematic. For these kinds of understanding and decision making the use of
emotion is traditionally associated with all the problems of subjective
biased thinking and, I suggest, better avoided. And, as I write this, I can
imagine you reinterpreting all of the above from a set of simple statements
about easiness of thinking, to a personal attack, and responding in that way
because of the habits of emotion in design work. Is that so?
Best wishes ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Honorary Fellow
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salisbury, Martin
Sent: Tuesday, 24 December 2013 1:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: 'Usefulness' of design fields now and in the future
Dear Gunnar and Terry,
I know I am making a mistake in taking this conversation too seriously, but
as it has come around yet again in an almost identical form to its previous
appearance, I can’t resist it.
Gunnar asks Terry to substantiate the figures that he bandies about, in
particular the mystery one of 4% that apparently has some meaning in
relation to the size of the Art & Design sector compared to other areas of
‘design’. I am aware of the importance that Terry places on mathematics. I’m
no mathematician or scientist but are we really to take this seriously?
Terry starts with a vague ‘memory’ of this percentage and then does a
selective trawl around various sources and applies some tenuous algorithms
in order to try to retrospectively arrive at an approximation of the
original figure. Is this an example of ‘mathematical rigour’?
We do know that here in the UK the creative industries constituted 6.4% of
the economy in 2007 (£67.5bn) and that the sector was and is growing faster
than the economy as a whole. It is also characterized by a high proportion
of ‘micro companies’ and self-employed. The publishing sector is the largest
overall constituent.
Many surveys are conducted on recent graduates and their employment status.
Those of us in Art & Design are inured to the misleading statistics that
place our graduates low in the tables because of the high proportion of
self-employment and the equally high proportion of those who take more than
the first year out of university (when the surveys are conducted) to get
established. These are the ones that Terry describes contemptuously as
‘employed only by being ‘self-employed’ ‘. As my own Masters graduates
return each year from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair with hundreds of
thousands of pounds worth of international publishing contracts, I am aware
that they are of course ‘only ‘self-employed’’. Besides, are we to accept
that the sole purpose of an Art & Design degree is to be an employed artist
or designer? Do we judge those who take a degree in History on whether or
not they become historians?
If this is a ‘straight bat’, Terry, I would venture to suggest that it is
about as straight as the bats of the current England cricket team, whose
hapless exploits within your shores you will be familiar with. Let’s have a
bit of honesty about these irrational, old fashioned attacks on ‘creativity’
and the Art & Design sector, rather than hiding behind bogus, spurious
statistics.
Merry Christmas all!
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration Director, The Centre for
Children's Book Studies Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html
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