Dear Ken, Martin and Salu ,
Thank you for your responses. Ken read my email correctly. I Was trying to pose an epistemological query. Perhaps I didn't explain it well enough.
My post as intended to raise the issue of whether on current design theory, photographers working in the graphic design realm should be regarded as professional designers. By implication if there is a contradiction, it implies change is needed somewhere.
The three questions I posed I suggest act as a reasonable test of whether photography is a design activity/design discipline or not in current design theory terms.
The three questions can bring to light some subtle and not so subtle points of theory that may have been overlooked in the assumption that 'photography involves a design process and results in a design'.
Ken drew attention to the issue of solving problems for stakeholders as a measure of design activity. Alongside that, I see one of the other distinguishing features of design activity as differentiation between the design output and the product/service created using the information in that design. Typically, where the design and the output are the same thing, then the process is of craft or art rather than being a design activity. Similarly, when there is no specific design process, this typically indicates an activity that is art or craft rather than professional design activity.
The issue as a whole emerged in the context of writing questions for the equivalent of the UK AS level examinations in Design. It became clear that it is not obvious that photographers produce a 'design' (using a design process) that is then used in 'manufacture' of the photographic image (the product). It is straightforward to ask students of product design to explain their design process and identify the design output that results from that design process (usually SolidWorks/Autocad files or production drawings) and explain how that design output is used in the manufacture of the product. There seem to be problems asking photography design students to answer the same about their design process and design output...
From experience, this kind of confusion/conceptual problem is often an indicator the accepted theory view of a situation is flawed and needs review, hence me asking for input.
Epistemologically, I see this as much the same query as needs to be explored about new design fields.
Regards and thanks,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Tuesday, 15 September 2015 5:52 PM
To: PhD-Design
Subject: [SPAM] Re: Design theory - do photographers design?
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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