Dear Ken
I read your post and will need to read it again to digest further. As you
say, it's complex.
I suspect the engineer I initially referred to who invited perspectives
from art and design about urban systems, will have had his own
interpretation of what this might have meant.
In the meantime, that you should have committed so much time to writing a
response deserves acknowledgement, as it has helped me structure different
perspectives on the issue.
As a beneficiary of this, the generosity shows this list off at its best
and I though it worth stating.
Regards,
Rob
Dr. Robert Harland | Lecturer in Visual Communication (Graphic Design) |
School of Arts, English and Drama | Loughborough University |
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/staff/robert-harland/
On 22/03/2015 13:05, "Ken Friedman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Dear Rob,
>
>Thanks for launching a terrific thread. I have been reading it and
>reflecting on these excellent contributions. This got me going on some
>various thoughts ‹ I¹ve been sitting here for a couple days with mind
>maps and concept maps to trace out different strands of the inquiry. I
>started out with a brief comment and kept sketching. Please forgive what
>has become a long post.
>
>It seems to me useful to place your query in the larger context of five
>issues: 1) changes in language over time, 2) the context of
>manufacturing, 3) changes in culture across time and space, 4) changes to
>the university over the 20th century, and 5) boundaries and overlaps
>between and among art, design, craft, and manufacturing.
>
>1) Language. While substantive adjoined term ³art and design² has been
>current for several decades, we sometimes use the same terms for
>different things ‹ and we use different terms for the same things. The
>term ³art² doesn¹t mean what it did at all times in history. What it
>means to be an artist has shifted changed several times over history. The
>era of the master workshop to is quite different to the era of the
>private studio. The master¹s workshop was also a small factory where the
>same group of people might do the woodwork for an altar, and the
>communion service as well as the altar painting. Today, people doing some
>of the work would be called ³craftsmen.² Others would be called
>³artists.²
>
>In post-industrial world, the layers become further confused. For
>example, consider a distinguished contemporary artist such as Denmark¹s
>Bjørn Nørgaard. He was commissioned to do tapestries for a royal palace.
>Later, he was commissioned to do the sarcophagus for Denmark's
>still-living Queen Margrethe II. Nørgaard¹s work on these pieces would
>often have been called craft, but they are also designated as art by one
>of Denmark¹s most important artists. Earlier still ‹ in the Renaissance,
>for example ‹ these works would have been the work of a master and his
>workshop, with their role in society having far greater significance than
>the label these works carry.
>
>In addition to using Google n-gram as Carma Gorman suggested, I¹d suggest
>some historical research on these several terms, separately and together.
>I¹d use the definitions and historical exemplars provided by Oxford
>English Dictionary, Oxford Reference, and Merriam-Webster¹s Dictionary at
>Britannica Online.
>
>2) Context of manufacturing. Manufacturing was always originally a case
>of making by hand. Many early manufacturers can be called ³artist,²
>³designer,² or ³craftsman² equally. They designed and decorated the work
>they manufactured, but the manufacturing process in a black figure vase
>workshop was not the kind of manufacturing we do today for a computer.
>Different kinds of marks, symbols, and brands have identified the work of
>a specific workshop, master, or a master with journeymen and apprentices.
>
>As Gavin O'Brien noted, people signed the Mac case much as artists sign
>art works. This is a statement in a era of laptops powered by MicroSoft,
>but craftsmen and designers have done this for millennia. In many
>important buildings through history ‹ such as the great cathedrals of
>Europe ‹ stonecutters marked the blocks they cut and dressed. In other
>cases, work crews identified their contributions by a common mark, as,
>for example, in the bricks of ancient cities in the Middle East. (For
>examples, see Mollerup 2013)
>
>3) Culture, professional roles, and social status. Third is the context
>of culture and the ways that different societies have considered ‹ and
>educated ‹ artists, artisans, craftsmen, and designers. The formal
>training for people who did these different kinds of work had different
>names. Training practices differ, languages differ, and cultures differ.
>
>For example, consider the culture, traditions, and practices surrounding
>the art of the swordsmith in feudal Japan (Blomberg 1994: 48-71). These
>issues don¹t directly affect the use of the term ³art and design² as a
>substantive adjoined term, but they do affect what any of these terms
>mean, how we consider and account for them, and who it is that makes
>things within a context.
>
>A great master swordsmith ranked far higher in feudal Japanese culture
>than someone who made paintings or furniture. To own a signed sword by a
>renowned smith was a symbol of high achievement for the samurai nobility.
>A sword is one of the three sacred treasures of the imperial household.
>The social status of a master smith was similar to that held by the
>master painters of feudal Europe, the artists employed to paint the
>portraits of royalty and the nobility or commissioned to make great
>altarpieces. The art of the swordsmith was of such status that the
>retired emperor Go-Toba (1180-1239, regn. 1184-1198) established a forge
>on retiring from the throne, using the last decades of his life to make
>swords (Blomberg 1994: 48-71). The education of the apprentice, and the
>life of journeyman and master long preceded formal university education
>in both the East and the West (for Eastern traditions, see Morinaga 2005).
>
>Between the era of the master workshop and the modern factory, there was
>a long era of small factories. At one time, all manufacturing was hand
>manufacturing or manufacturing in the small factories. Small factories
>date back to the classical era and earlier. Some kinds of archeological
>artefacts are even named for early industry. For example, Roman
>³firmalampen,² ³factory lamps² were manufactured in factories in the
>Roman republic. Many Greek ceramics in the classical city states were
>produced in what could be called hand-made mass manufacturing. The same
>is true for the weapons trade, armoury, and other kinds of artefacts. In
>these factories, artist, designer, and craftsman were roughly the same
>person ‹ while hand-workers did much of the repeat work, the master
>artisan designed the originals and often worked on the great pieces in
>much the way that Peter Paul Rubens worked on crucial features of some
>paintings while his assistants painted backgrounds or clothing.
>
>Small factories were typical of the industrial revolutions of the ancient
>world, the middle ages, and the early modern era. Adam Smith¹s (1976:
>8-12) famous example of division of labor in a pin factory involved a
>tiny factory that might have employed ten people or fewer. In these small
>factories, the working distance between masters, artisans, designers, and
>manufacturers was not as great as in today¹s world, and many people
>crossed the boundaries of these roles.
>
>In the era of artisan craft guild manufacturing, the real distance was
>the social distance between master and journeyman, journeymen and
>apprentices. The live of the apprentice was unpleasant and difficult.
>Robert Darnton (1984: 75-106) describes the life of Parisian apprentices
>the 1730s. This wasn¹t much different to the life of any apprentice in a
>small workshop, atelier, or factory over the several millennia when the
>master artisan had full authority over the apprentices, including the
>right to govern life and, on occasion, the right to maim or remove limbs
>(f.ex., Blomberg 1994: 52).
>
>While there must have been some kinds of distance between workers on the
>shop floor and the work of design in the factories of the early
>industrial revolution, there was also some kind of social mobility.
>Richard Arkwright, for example, was the son of a tailor, apprenticed to a
>wigmaker. As always, there was value in social capital that provided
>access to education and opportunity. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for
>example, was the son of an engineer, and the beneficiary of a first-rate
>education. Others, like Benjamin Franklin, moved from apprentice to
>journeyman to master of his own firm, inventing, designing, and
>manufacturing in different forms during a long career.
>
>In today¹s terms, education and division of labour between different
>kinds of work has taken a different form. The word ³design² involves
>planning an artefact by making plans and prototyping those plans. The
>designed artefact will eventually be manufactured by a completely
>separate group of people in a factory. Today, a factory is an industrial
>organisation where engineers and mechanics program machines that produce
>the object planned elsewhere by designers. In many cases, artefacts are
>manufactured by other artefacts ‹ machines on an assembly line or even
>robots.
>
>All this comes together in the overlap of the history, meaning, and terms
>in which we consider the many different forms of formal education in art,
>design, and craft.
>
>4) Universities. Fourth, comes a key factor in the growth of the
>administrative category of art and design. It is true that art and design
>is an administrative category. It is important to recognise two central
>factors in how we have come to understand this category. One is the
>factor of historical contingency. It could have been different, and there
>are differences in how we educate artists and designers between
>universities in North America, in the UK and Australia, in continental
>Europe, and elsewhere. In some places, such as North America, the
>emphasis in higher education has always been on universities and
>colleges, with only a handful of independent academies of art and design.
>In this context, art and design education blossomed in universities where
>it came. In continental Europe, with a strong tradition of independent
>academies and art schools, many schools are now designated as
>universities, and the great classical universities do not teach art or
>design.
>
>In the UK and Australia, a set of somewhat different government
>priorities has merged formerly independent schools into universities. (To
>answer your question, nearly all art and design programs in Australia are
>in schools or faculties of art and design or of architecture, art, and
>design. The only university-level faculty of design in Australia
>disappeared a few years back to become a school within a larger,
>reorganised faculty.)
>
>While the administrative category of ³art and design² is historically
>contingent, it takes place against a second historical factor that vastly
>increased the significance of the administrative category. This was the
>explosion of universities and colleges in North America, both in numbers
>of institutions and in numbers of students.
>
>In the United States, the GI Bill meant that returning veterans of World
>War II and Korea could afford to attend college or university, often the
>first in their families to do so. This had never been generally possible
>in earlier times. When the post-War ³baby boom² came of age in the late
>1960s and early 1970s, it was a common social decision that children
>should go to college and university. This was especially important in the
>United States in the post-Sputnik era that called for a massive increase
>to the number of engineers and scientists in all fields. This approach to
>higher education became common in most advanced industrial economies.
>
>In North America, the number of colleges and universities stood at around
>1,000 in 1900. These were primarily four-year institutions. They offered
>an undergraduate education to a relatively small proportion of the
>population. By 1970, this had grown to around 4,500 colleges and
>universities by 1970. (This number has decreased slightly in recent
>years.) Many of these 4,500 colleges and universities are four-year
>colleges and full research universities. Others are two-year public
>colleges that offer associate degrees. Nearly all have art and design
>programs.
>
>The growth in these numbers came in spurts. The largest spurt of growth
>came when the ³boomers² entered universities in the late 1960s and early
>1970s. This era saw many teachers¹ colleges and normal schools become
>full universities, while it saw many full universities grow into massive
>institutions.
>
>But the growth in number of institutions has been massively overshadowed
>by the growth in numbers of students. Over the 20th century, the number
>of college and university students in the US alone grew dramatically. In
>1900, there were roughly 160,000 college and university students in the
>US. In contrast, the total number of students in higher education today
>has grown to more than 17,000,000 students ‹ more than one hundred times
>as many students. Every education, curriculum, or degree program involved
>far more institutions and far more people that ever before. The terms
>used to describe these had far greater coverage and far more use.
>
>During the post-war years, art became a standard subject field at most of
>these institutions. For several reasons, colleges and universities
>located most design and craft programs in the same administrative units
>that managed art programs. The reasons were sensible in one way, not in
>others. At the same time, design was a tiny field at the time, and a
>field without a research program connecting it to the rest of the
>university. With no research faculty to provide a voice among higher
>level decision makers at colleges and universities, art would have seemed
>as likely a place to locate design as any other.
>
>Whatever the virtues or flaws in this administrative conjoining of ³art
>and design,² it is a fact that millions of students have earned art
>degrees or design degrees of some kind in departments, schools,
>faculties, or colleges of art and design over the past fifty years. All
>those many graduates now include the overwhelming majority of people who
>teach in or administer art and design at universities and colleges today.
>Custom and the situated habits of mind have made the use or ³art and
>design² a common substantive adjoined term.
>
>Your response to Martin Salisbury raises an interesting point ‹ could
>³design and art² have become the preferred term. If this had only been a
>matter of higher education in the UK, it is not impossible to conceive of
>such a world. Given the dominant role of the United States in the global
>education and global science following the Second World War, it is hard
>to imagine. What happened in the United States and the closely related
>Canadian system became the global standard. This was in great part the
>case because of the massive international student population that came to
>North American universities for higher education, especially for research
>and post-graduate degrees, and especially those students who later joined
>the ranks of university administrators. When they returned to their home
>nations, they took with them customs, habits of mind, concepts, and
>vocabulary along with academic degrees and training in subject
>disciplines. The widespread exchange of scholars and researchers among
>anglophone universities also means that the US and Canada influenced the
>UK and Australia with respect to these issues.
>
>In the 19th century, German universities exerted a decisive influence on
>doctoral education, scientific training, philosophy and philology. This
>influence made German the language of science and scholarship, and it
>influenced the administrative shape and academic conception of the
>world¹s great universities. It also influenced the smaller colleges and
>universities that emulated their great counterparts. US universities
>played a similar role over the past 50 years, particularly in the younger
>university disciplines and in fields where scientists at US universities
>have won massive numbers of Nobel prizes. This is the case for the
>younger university disciplines of art and design. This doesn¹t affect
>Oxbridge or the ancient Scottish universities ‹ but these universities
>don¹t teach studio art or professional design.
>
>Don Norman¹s confusion is entirely reasonable in this confusing world of
>ours. It is often difficult to work with the differences of design as
>distinct from art, especially where deans, heads of school, and
>department heads are artists or art historians. (Or ‹ as it often is in
>Australian universities ‹ design is considered a subsidiary discipline to
>architecture). To paraphrase several Nobel Laureates and a number of
>comedians ‹ if you think you understand what¹s going on, it only shows
>how confused you really are.
>
>5) Boundaries and overlaps. There is also a question of where the
>boundaries belong between art, design, and craft ‹ or whether there
>should be any. The most famous 20th century expression of a new
>relationship between art, design, and industry was the Bauhaus. Frank
>Whitford¹s (2013) history gives a nice overview. But there is also good
>reason to reconsider the entire meaning of craft in relationship to
>design and to art both. Glenn Adamson¹s (2007, 2013) books examine these
>issues, as does Christopher Frayling¹s (2011) reflection on craftsmanship.
>
>Richard Sennett¹s (2008, 2012) considerations of craft delver even more
>deeply into the meaning of these issues in larger social context ‹
>following, in a sense, from Sennett¹s (1998, 2006) earlier books on the
>discontents of modern capitalist society. In a sense, Sennett seems to
>see the enactment of craft as an art of making ‹ and an art of living ‹
>as an antidote to the ills he describes in his earlier books.
>
>The question is whether this is so. On the one hand, Steve Jobs¹s Mac
>team can sign the computer case as an artistic statement, perhaps even a
>statement about the return of art and craft to industry. In much the same
>way, William Morris and his colleagues in the Arts and Crafts Movement
>made a statement about industry in their era without much affecting the
>society they hoped to influence. On the other hand, these issues ‹ all of
>them ‹ are embedded in a larger society where central economic issues
>affect us all.
>
>David Sless noted the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement to the
>birth of modern art and to the development of art and design schools.
>This is quite right. Even so, the Arts and Crafts Movement had far less
>influence on the evolution of industry and the industrial economy than
>its adherents hoped for. So, too, the Bauhaus was a great success with
>respect to its influence on art, design, and architecture, but not in the
>way its founders had hoped. The same is true of Ulm, and of many
>important and influential ventures.
>
>The question of boundaries and possibilities take place in a context as
>well. Many factors determine what people study and how they study it, as
>individuals, as groups, and as potential practicing professionals.
>
>Sorry to have been so long at this, but the question you asked ‹ ³if and
>how the adjoined term Œart and design¹ has been used earlier, in or
>outside the UK, to represent a formal period of study² ‹ is complex, and
>it involves issues that stretch back through at least three thousand
>years of human history.
>
>Warm wishes,
>
>Ken
>
>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
>
>Email [log in to unmask] | Academia
>http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
>
>‹
>
>References
>
>Adamson, Glenn. 2007. Thinking Through Craft. London: Berg.
>
>Adamson, Glenn. 2013. The Invention of Craft. London: Bloomsbury
>Academic.
>
>Blomberg, Catharina. 1994. The Heart of the Warrior. Sandgate, Kent: The
>Japan Library.
>
>Darnton, Robert. 1984. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in
>French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books.
>
>Frayling, Christopher. 2011. On Craftsmanship: Towards a new Bauhaus.
>London: Oberon Masters.
>
>Mollerup, Per. 2013. Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of
>Trademarks. London: Phaidon Press.
>
>Morinaga, Maki Isaka. 2005. Secrecy in Japanese Arts. Secret Transmission
>as a Mode of Knowledge. New York: Palsgrave Macmillan.
>
>Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal
>Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton.
>
>Sennett, Richard. 2006. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven:
>Yale University Press.
>
>Sennett, Richard. 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
>University Press.
>
>Sennett, Richard. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of
>Cooperation. London: Allen Lane.
>
>Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
>Wealth of Nations. Edited and with an introduction, notes, marginal
>summary and index by Edwin Cannan. With a new preface by George J.
>Stigler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
>
>Whitford, Frank. 2013. The Bauhaus. London: Thames and Hudson.
>
>‹
>
>Robert Harland wrote:
>
>‹snip‹
>
>I was intrigued to read recently a call back in 1988, from engineers, for
>'art and design perspectives' on better understanding urban systems
>(White 1988: vi). It had me thinking about what this might mean.
>
>Hence, I'm searching to determine if there is a formal definition of Œart
>and design' as an adjoined term, and when 'art and design' emerged as a
>more substantive term in academia. It's not in any of my dictionaries.
>
>It's often used in discussions (often on this list) about formal UK
>education dating back to 1835, and the formation of Government Schools of
>Design. But it does not seem to really take hold until the 1960s, when in
>the UK it became possible to study for a three-year Diploma in Art and
>Design, coinciding with changes in name from Schools/Colleges of Art to
>Colleges of Art and Design (e.g. in Nottingham).
>
>Might anyone be aware of if and how the adjoined term 'art and design¹
>has been used earlier, in or outside the UK, to represent a formal period
>of study.
>
>‹snip‹
>
>White, R. M. (1988). "Preface", in J. H. Ausubel and R. Herman, (eds.),
>Cities and their Vital Systems. Washington: National Academy Press.
>
>‹snip‹
>
>
>
>
>
>
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