Dear All,
There are two slightly divergent sets of questions going on here.
Martin Salisbury responded to Terry Love’s question. Terry asked whether photography constitutes a design discipline because it is often located in art and design schools. In my view, Terry is confusing institutional location with professional activities. Whether or not photography is a design discipline, it would not be so because it is located in an art and design school. Art and design schools contain the fine and applied arts along with the design disciplines. There are probably a few places where music and the creative arts are hosted in art and design schools. If someone teaches musical composition in an art and design school, this does not make music a design discipline.
There is also a plain vanilla fact of facilities management. Let’s assume that students in several fields need to learn and use photography for different reasons. The include several different fields of the arts (fine art photography, dance photography, illustration, perhaps others); design (multimedia, digital photography); professional studies (journalism); the natural sciences (medical photography, medical illustration, high speed photography for chemistry and physics), and the social sciences (visual anthropology, sociology). But let’s say that any one of these fields other than art has only a handful of students. It might make perfect sense to maintain studios, laboratories, darkrooms and digital facilities in one area — say art and design. This would not make dance photography or medical illustration a design discipline, nor an art field.
I understand Martin’s slightly perplexed answer. I was perplexed, too. I could have well asked Martin's question, “... wondering why the questions need to be asked.”
If one did ask this kind of question, however, one would have to understand how and why universities allocate resources to different sets of activities.
If the goal of this thread was epistemological clarity, epistemological clarity should begin by distinguishing among kinds of questions. Terry’s question jumbles several categories of issues. The include: institutional administration (where people work or how universities divide and assemble the disciplines); labor economics (who gets paid within a specific administrative unit for different tasks), facilities management (how many darkrooms and photo labs a university can afford; why a university might place everything in one unit to save on equipment and lab space). Once we sort these out, we can ask whether or how photography might be a design activity. Personally, I don’t see any reason to ask.
Asking this question about a new design field such as service design is a different issue. But it is also worth noting that one can wade into similar problems if one focuses on the wrong kind of question. Service design appears in schools and programs for business administration, general management, hotel management, cooking, restaurant management, events management, design, logistics, economics, applied sociology, applied anthropology, operations management, medical management, and likely more.
I appreciated Salu’s reply — one need not think of photography as a mere point and shoot exercise. In this sense, photographers engage in some forms of design much as all professionals do. But I’m not sure that this makes them professional designers — professional designers are people who solve problems for legitimate stakeholders. The photography director for an enterprise is probably a designer — the individual photographers may be designers, depending on their remit — someone taking pictures for private reasons may not be.
Here, we need to start with a clear choice of terms or a clear definition. There’s no point calling for theoretical clarity when one set of terms yields a totally different outcome than another set of terms. If one combines the wrong choice of terms with questions that confuse administrative bureaucracy with professional classifications and confuse those yet again with activities, the result is a melange.
One may serve a melange at a restaurant where an anthropologist and the chef de cuisine have developed a unique approach to service design. The melange must have a theme appropriate to the meal and season.
On one occasion, Winston Churchill was offered a rather confused melange for his dessert after dinner. He gave it a peremptory glance, indicating that he would not serve it to his dinner guests. As he waved it off, he proclaimed, “Take away that pudding—it has no theme.”
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | 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
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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