Gunnar, apparently I missed your point: sorry. I thought you were saying
merely that the phrase "art and design" wasn't used much at institutions of
higher learning in the USA.

More comments below:

I would say that the phrase "art and design" is very, very, common in US
> universities--more so than say "physical and biological sciences." I've
> never heard the latter used to imply a belief in a science program that is
> both physical and biological (even though we could argue that the
> biological is physical) or imply a part of physical science that is more
> bio than some other. It was that sort of "art and design" that I was saying
> was rare in the US.
>

​Okay, good, we both agree after all that the phrase "art and design" is
very common. But I'm still having trouble following your argument.

When you say that "that sort" of "art and design" is rare in the USA, are
you saying that the intertwined sort is rare, or the distinctive sort is
rare? I can't quite follow your train of thought in the paragraph above,
particularly because some of the observations you made in your previous
email could support either argument. (Most faculty's own very clear, if
possibly idiosyncratic, sense of themselves as either artists *or*
designers could support the former point of view, whereas the fact that
many graphic design students earn BFA degrees in art rather than design
could support the latter.)

Or are you instead saying that when used in the nomenclature of US schools,
colleges, departments, etc., the phrase "art and design" *falsely implies
(or is misunderstood to mean)* that the two fields are closely intertwined?
And that it would be preferable to think of "art and design" as two
separate things, as in the nomenclature "physical and biological sciences,"
in which no substantive intertwining is implied/understood?

I usually find these definitional discussions to be frustrating and/or
> tedious but there are some interesting things in this one (in addition to
> Robert's original interesting question about the "adjoined" phrase.
>

​I am also not personally interested in trying to delineate the
contemporary definitions of art, craft, and design (though I do find
historical discussions of the shifting terrain those terms encompass kind
of interesting, and I am especially interested in studies that address how
and why specific people and programs adopted one term or another to
describe what they did).

The reason I find this particular discussion interesting is that it is
about *applied *definitions: in other words, it addresses the historical
question of how and why people have chosen to structure and name academic
units​ in particular ways in various places and times. This question has
always been of academic interest to me, but has become more urgent, I
think, in the face of some prominent design programs' (re)location within
schools/colleges of business, engineering, or design that are entirely
separate from the fine arts and even architecture. I'm thinking of
Stanford, in particular, but also CalTech's initiative in data
visualization, <http://www.caltech.edu/content/seeing-data> which grows out
of its programs in computer science as well as (apparently) mechanical and
civil engineering.

I can think of a number of reasons why faculty and administrators would
have chosen to couple design programs with art programs in the past. But I
tend to think that design programs in the USA, at least, would often fare
better now were they uncoupled from art programs. This is especially true
of programs that include industrial design and any other kinds of outcomes
that are potentially patentable or design patentable. US intellectual
property laws are still very different from international norms as regards
design protection, and I think that because artists and art schools can
rely on copyright, they often do design students a grave disservice by
failing to teach design students anything of substance about patent, design
patent, and trademark law. But that's a subject for another thread.

Carma


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