Hi all,
Ken Friedman replied to me and the list, but apparently the list did not
receiving it, so, here is Ken's message:
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From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 2:10 PM
To: Nicola Morelli
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Beyond Definitions, was Industrial Design
Dear Nicola,
Good thoughts.
One of the challenges we facein describing the context of design
activities is the fact that we still live in an industrial economy as
well as in a post-industrial economy.
Over 10,000 years ago, human beings moved from a hunting-gathering
economy into the agricultural economy. Following several developmental
revolutions, the first of at least four or five industrial revolutions
began in the Middle Ages. How many there have been depend on how you
count.
In 1940 or so, a British-Australian economist named Colin Clark
described three economies, from the primary economy of agriculture,
fishing, and forestry to the tertiary economy of services. In 1976,
Daniel Bell elaborated this into an economy of five sectors in his book
The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. To place this in the context of
design and design research, I have reworked Bell's structure into seven
sectors -- starting with a Zero Economy for the nearly billion people
who are shut out of much of the world's economic activity to Economy
Six, the ultra-post-industrial experience economy.
The key fact of all these is that they operate side by side. All the
productive economies exist and need each other. At the height of the
third or fourth industrial revolution in the late 1800s, for example,
the majority of the world's people still worked in the primary economy
to feed and provide raw material to all the rest. In most advanced
economies today, three farmers feed all the rest of us. Nevertheless,
without their work in the primary economy, the other five economies
would collapse.
The shifting proportions between economic sectors means that some of the
world lives in a post-industrial knowledge economy or an experience
economy. At the same time, we still need computers, cars, trains,
telephones -- even chairs, dinner plates, drinking glasses. Industrial
designers have a role to play in the important industrial economy that
continues to make the post-industrial economy possible by supplying the
goods that people use in their daily post-industrial lives.
Since much of this also involves the flow of information in automated or
programmed services -- manufactured through another kind of industrial
process -- your inquiry into the nature of a definition offers a
valuable insight into the logic of the designation "industrial design."
Thanks.
Ken Friedman
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Associate Professor Nicola Morelli, PhD
School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University, Denmark
Web: www.aod.aau.dk/staff/nmor
skype: nicomorelli
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