Dear Glenn,
Thanks again for your note. I have been following the flow of
different threads as I travel. This month has seen a rich range of
issues brought forward. For the past week, I have mainly been
reflecting on the implications of the "metaphor and analogy" thread.
This thread points back to Ben Matthews's note on symbolic
interactionism in an interesting way. Klaus Krippendorff's comments
on the uses of metaphor parallels the use of sensitizing concept in
symbolic interactionist approaches to research.
Your note on China brings up two ranges of issues. The first range
involves global economics and geopolitics. The second range involves
the domain of design process and the activities of the design
profession. Jacques Giard and Karen Fu responded specifically on this
last point. I may come back to it.
At this moment, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the role of
China and Asia in the coming century. The challenge this poses for
what has been a primarily Western profession is worth considering. It
is my sense that this challenge is slightly different nature than you
feel it to be. The rebirth of Asia as a global power center will
affect every aspect of Western life.
Wealth and power follow the concentration of energy. The most
important long-term source of energy is human capital.
The world's largest pool of human capital is concentrated in Asia.
For this reason, Asia has generally been the most powerful center of
global power, economic, political, and military. This has been the
case for some 9,500 years of the past ten thousand.
The agricultural revolution and the birth of the first cities took
place in Asia, primarily in the great hydraulic empires and riverine
empires. At different times, this meant Assyria, Sumeria, Egypt,
China, Korea, Viet Nam, and India. The durably powerful European
civilizations - and Empires - were also Asian or part Asian. Greece
was in great part Asian, Alexander's Empire was primarily Asian, and
- for much of its history - the Roman Empire included the vast
Eastern Empire.
There is natural order to the concentration of wealth and to the
shifts that mark control of the power that flows from concentrated
wealth.
For all but the last 500 years of human history, the largest pool of
the world's wealth measured in human capital and in goods was
concentrated in Asia. During the past five centuries, the world's
wealth has been concentrated in the West. For the relatively brief
period of the past five centuries, the West used technology, policy
and finance backed by military might to dictate the management of
human capital. The West has thereby been able to control the world's
wealth. This era is ending.
Today, the great concentrations of human capital, financial power,
manufacturing power, and informated power are once again accumulating
in the East. This subject is a central theme of influential books and
papers of the past quarter century. Major works of the past fifteen
years include Fernandez-Armesto (1995), Fingleton (1999), Halberstam
(1987), Kennedy (1988), or Stiglitz (2002). I have also been thinking
and writing on this for many years (f.ex., Friedman 1987, 1995, 1998,
2003).
During the last two decades, we have witnessed a transformation. The
post-industrial society linking manufacturing economics to a new way
of structuring work has given birth to the information society and a
knowledge economy (se, f.ex., Bell 1976; Castells, 1989a, 1989b,
1989c; Quinn 1992; or Zuboff 1988). The flow of information and the
flow of ideas join the flow of human energy to become a governing
flow that controls the shape of world. As we move from the
post-industrial era into the knowledge economy, that flow becomes a
flow of symbolic energy and formative energy. Several things are
happening.
While the condition we describe as postindustrial society or
knowledge economy grows in importance, the agricultural and
manufacturing sectors do not shrink. Rather, the proportional ratio
of their importance changes.
Agricultural commodities are alike and all material - any commodity
product resembles another, and all take physical form. These
commodities defined the agricultural economy. The industrial era was
defined by physical artifacts, primary heavy goods or worked goods in
which the value added by knowledge was used at the point of
manufacture. Even though information made the difference between good
manufacture and poor, between successful manufacturing and
unsuccessful, information was represented more by the manufacturing
process than by the manufactured product. The greatest proportion of
value in the product was physical. Only in the high-value-added
precursors of high technology goods such as fine clocks or highly
technical equipment did information represent a significant
proportion of the value of a product.
Today, the proportional value represented by information in
industrial products is far greater than the value represented by
material. This includes the information stored within the product as
well as value added by manufacturing, distribution, and service. High
technology products now contain vast amounts of information. These
now include such including former heavy goods as automobiles,
airplanes, or washing machines. The information technology
incorporated in an automobile, for example, would have been
unimaginable in the automobiles of even two decades ago. Information
comprises a significant proportion of service products such as
banking or travel. In fields such as computers or software,
information comprises most of the product. Telecommunication service
products are nearly 100% information.
One of the difficult issues of contemporary industrial economics is
the degree to which manufacturing organizations are ALSO service
organizations. Most organizations are now service organizations and
all service organizations are knowledge organizations. An increasing
percentage of organizations have become pure information
organizations enabling other organizations to produce or deliver
goods and services. Nevertheless, industry and agriculture will
remain central forces in a balanced economy as long as people need to
eat and as long as they require manufactured products.
The continued and GROWING importance of manufacturing in the world
today is the core argument of Fingleton's (1999) book. His point is
that those nations that are developing their manufacturing base are
building comparative advantage over against those nations that are
shifting toward a pure service economy. This is particularly the case
because the former great manufacturing economies are being hollowed
out in favor of service industry unconnected to manufacturing, and
often in favor of low-level service work such as flipping burgers,
cleaning offices, or running jails, rather than high-level service
work in the knowledge industries.
The concern I read in your note regarding the growth of Chinese
industry and its effects on the design domain seems to involve two
issues. One is the shift in industrial power. The other is a shift in
the knowledge base.
It is useful to remember just how long a history China has had as an
industrial and scientific power. In the eleventh century, China was
the world's leading industrial power. Chinese industrial production
was so great that some industries - such as iron production - would
not be surpassed until the British Industrial Revolution seven
centuries later (Kennedy 1988: 5). In the 15th and 16th centuries,
China was arguably the world's largest, most powerful, and
best-organized imperial state (Kennedy 1988: 3-10). Japan was also
powerful, though fragmented. Immense wealth, knowledge, and civilized
energy were concentrated in these two Asian centers.
The sudden shift from great power status to dominated nations took
place when China and Japan withdrew from the world to avoid cultural
and social change. The withdrawal involved an attempt to control
technological development.
Technological development often seems to force chaotic change on
human culture. One response is to ignore it. Another is to purposely
attempt to block it in the effort to preserve a successful, or at
least comfortable, past.
China's "Great Withdrawal" from the world began when the Imperial
government decided that everything worth using, worth knowing, worth
having was already in China. In 1433, when the first edicts of
withdrawal were passed, the Chinese had an enormous fleet of over 400
major warships and many other ocean-going vessels. By 1474, the fleet
was reduced to 140 ships. In 1525, coastal officials were ordered to
destroy all remaining ocean-going vessels. In 1551, going to sea in a
ship with more than one mast was defined as an act of espionage,
punishable by death. In the 1400s, China reached its historical high
point as a great Pacific nation that traveled the waters of Asia,
Africa, and even the Americas. The end of Chinese power was visible
in the 1500s when China closed itself to the world.
Daniel Boorstin (1985: 201) describes the paradox: "Fully equipped
with the technology, the intelligence, and the national resources to
become discoverers, the Chinese doomed themselves to be discovered."
China would be discovered by colonial powers bent on political and
economic domination.
The implications are startling. For example, before the Great
Withdrawal, China had some of the best and most advanced clocks in
the world (Boorstin 1985: 58-63, 76-77; Gimpel 1992: 150-152; Landes
1983: 23-24; Needham 1965; Needham, Ling and de Solla Price 1960: 6).
Control of clocks and calendars was control of cognitive authority
and even of legitimate authority (Boorstin 1985: 60-61; Gimpel 1992:
150; Needham, Ling and de Solla Price 1960: 6). China turned its back
on this technological lead for many of the same reasons that modern
nations have avoided the power of information technology. The fate of
the clock in China mirrors the technical and economic fate of China
itself.
The mechanical clock was among the early forerunners of the computer.
A timing mechanism is the heart of every computer. Coupled with
China's early lead in printing arts and documentation, China's early
lead in mechanical timing devices could well have become an early
lead in information technology. Even so, China turned its back on
technological leadership while the Western powers were still in the
Dark Ages. The immediate result of the refusal to develop advanced
technology was military disadvantage. When the Western powers arrived
in Asia, they came with the tools of modern warfare and an
overwhelming ability to manufacture and deliver them. The Western
powers used military force to exercise a dominant role in Asia. This
domination began a transfer of wealth from Asia to the West, to
Europe and later to the United States. The first stages of this
transfer began at around the same time Europeans arrived in the
Americas. The flow of wealth that began in those years determined the
shape of world culture over the next five centuries.
A similar event took place in Japan in the early 1600s when the
Tokugawa shogunate sealed Japan off from the rest of the world
(Beasley 1990: 22). The shogun promulgated the Sakoku ("closed
country") policy to strictly limit the contact of ordinary Japanese
with international knowledge. Japanese were forbidden to travel
outside Japan and the little knowledge that managed to seep through
arrived in brief, clandestine meetings, crossing barriers of language
and culture (Blomberg 1994: 200-203). China's isolation was built on
arrogance, Japan's on fear. Japan's withdrawal was a form of cultural
hygiene intended to guard Japanese society against the effects of new
knowledge and new technology and the new culture that they would
bring with them. The knowledge was Western knowledge. The technology
was gunpowder. Japan had gunpowder weapons before the rise of the
Tokugawa, some of the extraordinary quality. The samurai ruling class
turned away from gunpowder technology to maintain a rigid social
order and the role of the samurai within it.
The Chinese used gunpowder only for fireworks, festivals, and
ceremony. The Japanese forbade its use. The effects were equally
problematic.
In cutting themselves off from transforming effects of technology,
China and Japan cut themselves off from progress. It is a reverse
study in Schumpeter's (1981) theories on progressive change. China
and Japan avoided the disruptive power of technology at the price of
their future growth.
For the past five centuries, Asia was dominate by Western powers --
imperial powers, colonial powers, and later the United States. This
has been visible across Asia from the Mediterranean to the Pacific.
The aftermath of World War II marked the end of the imperial age and
the colonial era. A new flow of global wealth began in the 1970s. It
has increased since the end of the Cold War and it has grown as
nations divert resources from military spectacle to economic
productivity.
It should be noted that this is a dramatically simplified summary.
For one thing, the arms trade is still one of the world's largest
industries, and many nations still indulge in needless (and directly
problematic) military expenditure. For another, there is no way to
analyze seriously the multiple trends and currents in five centuries
of world economy without attending to dozens of issues I have not
mentioned.
What I wanted to do was to point out the large historical background.
China, India, and the other Asian powers are not suddenly rising to
challenge the West. They are regaining a measure of the relatively
great power they held for ninety-five centuries.
This is not necessarily bad for the design domain or the design
professions. This issues that I noted here point back to an earlier
thread on the nature of design and the design domain, as do Jacque's
note and Karen's. The key issue is that a significant range of
professional design processes lie outside the realms for which people
receive traditional design degrees, and people who design without
being labeled designers conduct many. I do not suggest that we label
all these people as designers, but rather that we reconceive the
range of issues and activities involved in design and distinguish the
larger domain and those who work within it from the former
guild-based professions that we sometimes label the design
professions. I will try to respond to the second range of issues in
another note.
The renewal of Asian power has many meanings. Much of what is
happening will ultimately be good for the West. Some aspects of what
is happening will not. The population of Northern America is now
roughly 322,000,000, Western Europe about 393,000,000, and Eastern
Europe 122,000,000. The world population is now over 6,308,413,047
(U.S. Census Bureau 2003: unpaged.) it is had to imagine a world in
which North America and Europe with fewer than one billion people
continue to control world resources and dominate a world population
of over six billion people.
If China moves beyond centralized dictatorship, reborn China will
contribute much to the world. If the other Asian nations grow in
productive ways, this too will contribute much. It is my belief that
a global shift has much to offer even those regions and nations that
will lose relative power in an enlarged world polity.
Kishore Mahbubani (1995: 107), Dean of the Singapore Civil Service
College, wrote an article on these changes in Foreign Affairs. "The
Pacific community," he writes, "will be a completely new creation. It
will not be an Asian community, nor will it be an American community.
If the Pacific has emerged as the most dynamic region of the world,
it is because it has drawn on the best practices and values from many
rich civilizations, Asian and Western. If this fusion continues to
work, there could be explosive creativity on a scale never before
seen."
In a few days, I will offer some thoughts on how these changes may
affect the design domain and the realm of design practice.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
References
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--
This post Copyight (c) 2003 by Ken Friedman.
Permission granted to quote or reproduce freely
with proper attribution.
--
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
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