Dear All,
A quick footnote on the numbers that have been mentioned in recent posts.
A decade back, several of us tried to get a rough notion of how many different professions and specialities, fields and sub-fields, disciplines and sub-disciplines there are in different design sectors. The people who did this work included Terry and me. At that time, we reached the number 700 or so. This number is not comprehensive, we made no attempt to define the rubrics, and the number has probably changed with the development and differentiation of new fields and the entry of design practice into new areas.
We made no attempt to establish a clear definition for any of the 700 areas, and some of the rubrics that had one label may really indicate several fields. For example, “design history” is a field, but “design history” has many sub-fields and specialties that we did not cover. In contrast, because of Terry’s expertise, we have many sub-fields of “engineering,” all of which require design, including “chemical engineering,” “civil engineering,” “mechanical engineering,” “software engineering,” “systems engineering,” “electrical engineering,” and more.
One early source of our rubrics was the list of self-identified areas of subject expertise that reviewers gave for the Design Research Society conference in Lisbon. There were over 500 subjects, fields, and sub-fields on that list alone. Terry also identified many design fields in the work he did for his PhD.
In my view, it is relatively easy to identify fields and sub-fields. It is far more difficult to determine what percentages of the design field population any group occupies. I part company with Terry on any population percentages in the sense that I see no basis for estimating percentages of the population without a massive amount of data on education and labour. This data is readily available in some nations and places and not in others.
As I indicated in my response to Terry, I am uncomfortable with the “art and design” label altogether. Nearly no design schools of any kind were found in universities at the time of the Humboldt reforms of the early 1800s. Those kinds of design linked to artisan craft skills and art were taught and practiced in the apprentice system, some design skills linked to fine art or architecture were taught in the academies, while technical design linked to engineering was taught in the military academies and some of the specialised schools that became polytechnics and what Europeans in different languages referred to by such words as “høyskole,” “hochschüle,” “högskolan,” etc. In North America, design entered universities in the 20th century. Universities grew rapidly with the return of military men and women to civilian life, especially with the provisions for education made possible by the GI Bill — along with the demand for a better educated and more highly skilled civilian population. It is an historical legacy that many forms of design education were located in departments, schools, or faculties of “art and design.” This may also follow from the fact that many of the skills taught in art departments were also useful in design programs. In relatively small colleges and small general universities, it did not make sense to maintain separate programs or departments.
In my view, this is a legacy that can often be problematic — by the late 20th century, we understood enough about the nature of design to know that design requires several kinds of thinking — and different kinds of creativity and application than those forms taught in art. Designers may seem to do some of the same things as artists, but they do them for different reasons and in different ways. In addition, much design requires research — at the very least, the kinds of clinical research and diagnostics that professional practitioners undertake to understand the service they must provide to the clients and legitimate stakeholders who employ them to find, identify, and solve problems. Artists solve problems for themselves. Designers solve problems as a service for others. For this reason, design needs a different kind of education.
That said, some of the same places that once taught “art and design” in a relatively unified program have now created the specialist educations and differentiated forms of education required for effective design practice. In other cases, these forms of education have grown in entirely new and specific schools that grew out of other schools — while some new schools, programs, and projects have been created specifically to understand and meet the needs of the specific though interdisciplinary fields known as design.
Without a better definition of “art and design,” it is hard to say anything meaningful about “art and design.” What is it? Who does it? How many people engage in design practice of any kind? To answer these kinds of questions, we need to start with careful definitions and rubrics, and to answer questions involving percentages and population figures, we need data. No one has done much of this work, at least not in responsible, published form based on reliable evidence. In this, Gunnar is right to ask Terry for better definitions and figures.
For my part, I don’t know how Terry can make these kinds of claims about the large global population of all people who practice design of any kind — I have reason to question the one specific claim Terry made about the population of the Design Research Society. Based on the population of the group identified as Fellows, it is not correct to state that the vast majority of DRS members are involved in “art and design.” But given that this is a skilled and highly published population of researchers, the fellows may not be representative of the general membership. In a population of around 500 or so, we can find out the numbers easily. My point is that if Terry is not checking the evidence for a simple claim, I can’t see how he is able to measure the global population.
What I do know is that The Design Society seems to represent more engineers and engineering designers than the Design Research Society. This is visible in the information it publishes. Neither society is as large as the Design Management Institute, a professional society with over 27,000 members coming from many kinds of backgrounds, as well as from management — including people who come to management and design management from many kinds of design backgrounds.
The figure that Yoad attributed to me was based on studies that we did in Denmark just before I came to work at Denmark’s Design School. What we found was that of the people educated in the school, only 10% remained in the design professions 10 years after graduation. I found something similar when I was Dean at the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology. I have no idea about the creative industries in general and I’ve never attempted to say anything about them. I was only discussing design school graduates — people who graduated with a degree of some kind in design. I couldn’t give you the exact source of the figures, though. The advantage of published, peer reviewed data is that we can examine it in published form an evaluate for ourselves what it means. The studies I described were internal, proprietary, and to some degree, they involved the kind of research we called “quick and dirty” when I got my PhD. That’s what you need to do when you have too little time and too little money, but you’d like to know something useful. When you must make decisions, some information is generally better than none.
As a distinguished scholar recently explained to me, “78% of all statistics are wrong, including this one.”
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
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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