Dear Martin,
Good post. It makes no sense to ban or regulate home workshops or garage-level, owner-worker factories where the only employee is the artist-designer or designer-craftsman, or craftsman-manufacturer whose home factory it is. Many of these factories use very modest equipment. While some garage factories use high tech 3-D printers, others use such old fashioned techniques as silkscreen, and still others use ancient technology such as weaver's loom or ceramic kiln.
For example, I am a partner in a small art-design venture where we use a large, high-tech computer printer to prepare films from which we make silkscreens. I work on the art side. One of my partners does the design, and our other partner produces prints from the silkscreens on three materials -- linen, paper, and acrylic plastic. For our project, my manufacturing partner works out all kinds of production and prototyping details, but the crucial production activity takes place in his silkscreen studio. He and our design partner have another venture for which they reproduce historical wallpapers, and they also make modern wallpapers working with different artists. It's a small workshop. They own the workshop, and -- most of the time -- he is the only production employee. It's hard to see what sorts of OHS regulations would apply.
While it would be interesting to get statistics on how many people across all the creative industries have such manufactories and mini-factories, your main point is well taken.
There are reasons for which we might wish to designate different aspects of an activity by different terms. This is especially the case when activities than can be undertaken by one person can also be performed by different people. The lack of careful vocabulary around design would never make Wal-Mart a design school. But neither would definition exclude any important human activity.
Care with words allows us greater access to distinctions and understanding. The lack of an appropriate range of terms reduces our ability to describe subtle ranges of human action. As Shakespeare said, "one man in his time plays many parts." Distinction allows us to understand the parts. The value of a vocabulary that allows us to discriminate among different roles and activities is that we can focus on, better understand, and better form and perform each role.
This is something I have occasionally been able to observe in the work of masters in several fields. In some fields, all the roles come together in the work of the lead master in a studio or workshop. This is the case of a kitchen where the chef de cuisine, the executive chef, and the owner of a restaurant are the same person. It is also visible in industrial firms or factories where the CEO spends a lifetime learning the trade and rotating through different functions to understand the life and work of the company before taking on a role in coordination, management, and strategy.
In my view, definitions and descriptions that shed light on the subtleties of human action are useful for many purposes. I observe that great coaches and teachers of activities that require embodied action have a capacity to demonstrate what it is they expect of novices while also describing the issues and principles behind the choice of one action or approach rather than another.
Dave Lowry's (1985) wonderful book on teaching and learning the physical skills of the swordsman gives a glimpse of this, as do Miyamoto Musashi’s (1982) reflective yet intensely physical descriptions of using the sword. To be able to describe action as well as to model it gives others deeper access to the world into which we bring them through our thinking and expertise. It also allows people a range of ways to understand, perform, and enact an art, a practice, or a way of being.
Yours,
Ken
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Reference
Lowry, Dave. 1985. Autumn Lightning. The Education of an American Samurai. Boston and London: Shambhala.
Musashi, Miyamoto. 1982. The Book of Five Rings. (With Family Traditions on the Art of War by Yagyu Munenori.) Translated by Thomas Cleary. Boston and London: Shambhala.
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On Mon, 23 Mar 2015 08:30:03 +0000, Salisbury, Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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I know that it is notoriously difficult to monitor the freelance/ micro businesses. I think the estimate that I saw was that this area constituted around 24% of a the multi billion UK creative industries sector as a whole (of which 'design' is a part).
--snip--
Any definition that tries to exclude such a fundamental, historically important and growing area of design is not useful. The last sentence is just silly. But not as silly as banning creativity at home for health and safety reasons!
--snip—
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Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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