Dear Eduardo,
This last couple of posts caught my eye. Please let me add my two cents.
The insistence that there is only one kind of design profession is too limited, at least in my view. It is inadequate to limit the design profession to those whose work it is to make normal things beautiful. (In another thread, Mike Zender addresses this topic very well.)
It is a problem of language when you claim that some design professions don’t exist at all. It is incorrect to say that there is no profession of organisation designers. Several professions practice organisation design. The activity of organisation design has been a professional practice for over three thousand years, an issue I discuss in a chapter of Sabina Junginger and Jürgen Faust’s new book from Bloomsbury titled Designing Business and Management.
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/designing-business-and-management-9780857855688/
Some design professionals use the label “designer” in their job title or university degree. Others do not. This has to do with historical contingency and practice. But people do purposely design organisations. It is a real job,and those who practice it are often well paid. I used to teach organisation design when I was a professor of leadership and strategic design. All the first year students studied organisation design. Those who became genuinely fascinated went on to specialise in this practice.
If you want an overview of the kinds of issues one deals with in designing organisations, I recommend Daft, Murphy, and Wilmott’s Organisation Theory and Design. The international edition is now in its second edition:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Organization-Theory-Design-Richard-Daft/dp/1844809900/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452273528&sr=1-1&keywords=Daft+Organisation+Theory+and+Design
The North American version is up to the 14th edition:
http://www.amazon.com/Organization-Theory-Design-Richard-Daft/dp/1285866347/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452273725&sr=1-1&keywords=daft+organization+theory+and+design
Academics would take a PhD in the subject, while professional practitioners generally became consultants. Those who practice organisation design within a specific firm usually do so as part of a more complex job involving several responsibilities.
If you are not interested in organisation design, no need to go further. But it is incorrect to say that there is no profession of people whose job it is to design organisations. There is, and it’s a serious job with choices and issues that affect nearly all of us who work in organisations. When the people who design these organisations do their job well, working life is far better than when organisations are designed by those who lack the requisite skills.
Some members of professions that you describe using the label designer use — or once used — different professional names. People who design type and set type for printed pages were once known as typographers. And there was a profession of people known as mechanicals who rendered the instructions of a typographer or book designer into finished pages. These people were known as mechanicals. They are now labeled as designers. Still others did the work of typographic design or page design as an adjunct to their main work. Printer’s devils and journeyman printers often had this role.
There are people who design as a professional practice without the word “designer” in their title. Anyone who actually designs chemicals understands what it is to design a chemical. This is perhaps different to the work of chemical engineers whose job it is to manufacture chemicals that others have designed.
There is no logic to the proposition that people who design neckties should be designated as designers, while the people who design a computer interface or word processing program should not be designated as designers. These days, I use a necktie three or four times a year. I use my computer every day. I can tell you that the people who design my computer interface are far more important to me than whoever designed my ties. While I don’t wear them as often as I once did, I value my 12th Royal Lancers (Prince Albert’s Own) tie, my Churchill Dot tie, and my Royal Scots Greys 2nd Dragoons tie. These are normal artefacts made beautiful. The people who designed them are designers, but not in greater measure than the team of people who design the interfaces for my Google services.
There seems to be a perpetual argument that “designers” are the people who do what it is that “we” do, whoever “we” may be. Other people “enginate,” “chemistrate,” “legislate” or something. We design! Whoever it is that we are …. (“We few, we happy few, we band of designers.” Apologies to Shakespeare.)
And if we intend to explain what it is designers do, we need to consider more closely what design is — and who does it.
Yours,
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
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