Hi Gunnar,
You've pretty well nailed the problem spec and the problems with it.
The most difficult and to data as far as I can see meaningless assessment is
the relative 'value' of different kinds of design in terms of either
'output' of companies, or subsequent 'outcomes'.
Yet. . . . there is a need to understand or have at least a rough feel for
scale of the different design endeavours - if only to help decision making
about national investment.
The Australian CSIRO Future Manufacturing program, of which Ken's design
capacity mapping research is a useful part, is an example of research to
provide information to government about where and how it is useful to invest
for improving national outcomes.
From memory:
Last 4 decades
~50% of research publications in technical design (fields that use
mathematics)
~5%~of research publications from the classic Art and Design fields
~45% of research publications in the other design fields policy design etc
Last 100 years
Much the same proportions for any publications with design in the title.
For design businesses in cities I looked at :
Money spent on design teams:
10% of $ on design teams in classic Art and Design fields
90% of $ on design teams doing technical in engineering, ICT, software.
(no figures for the other fields)
The number of professionals in different design fields is also hard to use
as the basis for sector size. On one hand, there is a dynamic by which
designers are increasingly being replaced by automated design and in
parallel is the increase in number of designers of the computer systems and
software automating design. On another hand is the dynamics of professional
formation. The UK stats indicate only 4% of individuals that undertake
degrees in Art and Design obtain employment as designers. In engineering,
the employment from university is around 100% yet many go into design and
production support roles, and a couple of decades later become project
managers. Again as you say, this depends on how you define design.
The 'number of fields' assessment is not as totally silly as it might seem.
It offers an assessment based on lower bounds. The criteria was 'a
significantly sized (over 50 persons) self-identifying community of
designers'.
The challenge is one of identifying causality. Does the use of designers
trained in a particular field result in better outcomes for businesses. It
is difficult to establish causes and the use of opinions and associative
measures are notoriously unreliable and delusory for this purpose. The use
of such measures by national design organisations can be seen more as
promotional advertising to improve their position of increased funding than
reliable data.
The research on design fields has been undertaken over a lot of years by a
variety of different people. I did some of it in the 90s as part of my PhD.
The DesignWeb people in the UK did some at that time. Design Studies did
some under Nigel Cross. Ken Friedman, Fils Salustri, MP Ranjan and myself
worked together on it a few years ago. Ken has worked independently on it.
Independently, I hired a research assistant for a couple of weeks to gather
and analyse publication data. Ken, the people at IADE (Eduardo, Martim,
Viktor and others) and with myself processing the data worked on an
integrated list. In the UK completely separately is the work at Cambridge
university on economics of creative industries and innovation that comes to
much the same proportions of the sectors.
On fields and sub-fields of design, as you suggest establishing formal
relations between them has proven to be almost impossible. Fils Salustri
put a lot of work into attempting to create a hierarchical map of design
fields and sub-fields. Design Web attempted the same in a semi-automated
online manner. The fundamental road block is fields are only very
approximate language tokens that change over time and do not bear much of a
correspondence with language or design project analyses, outputs or
outcomes.
Finally, there is an evolutionary dynamic that is often overlooked. As
design sub-fields mature, there is a general drift towards increased use and
dependence on mathematics and science. This implies over time a general
transition to the technical group of design fields
So, yes, the figures are dodgy as anything. Yet, they seem to give an
overall picture of the relative scale of the different groups of
professionals undertaking design activity and design research that is fairly
consistent overall and for decision making is better than no picture at all.
Warm regards ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Honorary Fellow
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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--
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gunnar Swanson
Sent: Saturday, 21 December 2013 2:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: 'PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design'
Subject: Re: counting; was: Second Request -- PhD Theses in Design
In response to my question:
>> On Dec 20, 2013, at 2:50 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> the forty or
>>> so Art and Design fields are a small sector compared to the other
>>> 600 or more fields of design.
>>
>> What's the basis for comparison in this statement? Total number of
>> enumerated fields? Total number of practitioners? Total project budgets?
. .
Terry replied:
> From memory, the measure was
> number of fields, amount of publications, amount of research, numbers
> of practitioners, number trained, relative cost of design work in a
region.
and asked if I saw things differently or had other stats. My answer is no. I
don't have stats or even a guess. Having long ago declared that I would not
fight for the bone that is the word "design," I am pretty well precluded
from having an opinion. I can't begin to decide what is a design field, who
is a designer, and whether everyone in a design-related field counts in
comparing design sector size.
It would be interesting to see specifics. The phrase "small sector" is
almost as problematic as the word "design." For instance, let's say we live
in a universe with only five employed designers. We have four graphic
designers who, in some amount of time, produce $10,000 in billings for
creative time for a project that also includes $90,000 in printing costs. We
also have a structural engineer who in the same amount of time bills $5,000
for a project and the other project construction costs add up to $9,95,000.*
[*I don't claim that these numbers are accurate comparisons or realistic in
any way.]
Does this mean that graphic design is four times the design sector size as
engineering because of the greater employment of people we are calling
designers, that it is twice the size because of direct billings by people we
are calling designers, or 1/10 the size because the total project costs of
the built bridge was ten times the total cost of the printed corporate
annual reports?
That is all from the assumption that design practice is what is being noted.
Comparing the size of practice fields makes research irrelevant. If there is
relatively little research in fashion design or established forms of
mechanical design and a massive amount of research on an emerging field with
no profits and only a handful of working designers, it's hard to call
vaporware the giant design sector.
If we are talking about design academics, we have a different version of the
same problems. You have all of the who-is-a-designer problems: Is everyone
in an engineering school a designer? How about everyone in an art school?
(And why?) If all aspects of software creation is design, are the
mathematicians who do the work that is the basis for software counted?
Even if we were sure what made something design or someone a designer, how
do we count an area with a lot of university-level research (say,
information theory) vs. an area with many more students but little such
research (say, graphic design)? Does that make file compression a bigger
sector that the production of files to be compressed?
The one firm belief I'll express is that "number of fields" is a measurement
that can be rejected out of hand. I would think that in a forum where many
people argue for overcoming disciplinary silos, lionizing hyper
specialization would be a non-starter. Is surgery a massively larger medical
sector than general family practice simply because there are so many surgery
specializations?
Who spent how much time parsing the number of fields? What is a field vs. a
sub field? If you ask me if I'm a graphic designer, I'd say yes. If you
asked me if I'm a publication designer, I'd say sometimes. Are those two
different fields? How about newspaper designer vs. magazine designer? I'd
say "yes" or "sometimes" to information designer, packaging graphic
designer, trademark designer, website designer, interface designer. . . Are
those all separate fields? Am I counted in each? Is a field only a field if
most practitioners do not stray from the specialty? If a single person does
that and nothing else? . . .
"Number of fields" may be a measure of specialization but it can't be a
measure of "sector size."
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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+1 252 258-7006
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