Re-designing the design sector: new evidence from the sector in Piedmont (Italy)

The research represents a first attempt to taxonomize a sector of the creative industries, namely that of design, and describing its structure and functioning. The study aims therefore to deepen and contribute to the results and insights offered by the scientific literature that has dealt with creative industries and design.
Describing and measuring the design sector and its contribution to the regional economy is not an easy task, since the available data can be misleading and risk not to be comparable at the international level. Moreover, in the Italian case, there is still an ongoing academic and institutional debate about a proper definition of what is meant by design and for the profession of designer. From this conceptual “fuzziness”, it comes a lack of a precise definition of the many professions that characterize the sector, qualified, theoretically and empirically, by the Italian ATECO code 74.1, corresponding roughly at the NACE code 74.1.
At the Italian level, to identify the most recent and detailed contributions, the main reference is the Symbola Foundation’s research which since 2017 has carried out a study and classification of the design sector on the national territory. Starting from the ATECO classification and Symbola’s studies, we introduced a new taxonomic proposal to describe Design in Piedmont distinguishing between the Core Design and Driven Design sectors.
Specifically, all the activities of the Core Design are associated with the scope of the design offer generated by that group of companies and freelancers who generate those design goods and services that distinguish the production of the Core segment. Core Design responds to the demand for design expressed by the companies of the Driven sector, namely all those companies that use design services for the development of their products and services (eg. car, jewelry, household appliances…).
In addition to distinguishing productively the two sectors, that of the Core that provides design services and that of Driven, which receives and embeds design services in specific products and services, our proposal aims to define more precisely and qualitatively the sub-sectors that characterize the Core Design sector.
Hence, our research aims both to compare and highlight differences with respect to the Eurostat and Istat data on the class of activity defined as "specialized design" and indicated by ATECO 74.1, which groups together capital companies, partnerships and individual firms mainly dealing with activities such as product, communication and multimedia, spaces, fashion, interaction, strategic and service design, but also services and products provided by technical and graphic designers.
It relies therefore on a specific selection of companies that, exclusively or predominantly, operate in the field of the design (Core Design) as presented in table 1.

Tab.1 The composition of the Design Sector in Piedmont.
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Source: our elaboration from several sources of data

Our analysis aims therefore to take into account the specificities of the sector and the co-existence of three production modes, that of designers, technical and graphic designers, through a description of the sector that distinguishes between a “restricted” sample of analysis composed of those who carry out “pure” design activities (Super Core Design) and those who deal with design in the broad sense, that is also technical and graphic designers, and who constitute a larger sample (Extended Core Design).
The selection of activities that led to the construction of the sample mainly concerned the exclusion of economic activities unrelated to design, although present among the companies with the ATECO code 74.1, and relied on a detailed analysis of the activities carried out by design firms researching information on the web (official websites, LinkedIn, Behance, Instagram, Facebook) in order to understand and verify if the activity registered in the Register of Companies of the Chamber of Commerce actually concerns design.
Note that this set of activities defined by the reference ATECO includes the categories of both graphic designers (ATECO 74.10.2) and technical designers (ATECO 74.10.3). For both categories, however, it can be made a reflection on the consistency of their activity with that linked to the design offer. For instance, advertising agencies, printing and graphic arts centers providing pagination services, wrapping companies (74.10.29), web designers (74.10.21) are excluded from the analysis of the design sector in its narrowest sense. Only a share of the 74.10.2 activities can therefore be considered consistent with activities really related to the design offer. Similarly, for category 74.10.3, which groups together those who, being technical designers, are mainly active in the profession of surveyors and mechanical draughtsmen, engineers, consultancy firms and industrial plant design, industrial and mechanical automation companies, machine companies for production lines, there is no consistency with activities that can be traced back to the design offer.
We will present the results of the study in terms of turnover and employment, distinguishing both between the Core world and the Driven world, and between the Super Core Design and the Extended Core Design sectors. The analysis will therefore focus on the description of different legal classes in the extended and restricted sectors focusing in particular on the socio-demographic characteristics of freelance professionals who, compared to other legal forms such as partnerships and corporations, they represent the prevailing legal form characterizing more than 60% of the composition of the Core segment, in its "extended" and restricted version.
In addition, the analysis will highlight the performance of capital companies over the past fifteen years, showing trends in turnover and employment.
This study could represent an important contribution both to highlight the taxonomic complexity of the design sector, and in general of the creative industries, opening the way to a possible comparison with similar sectors at the European level.

Abstract

The Korea Arts & Culture Education Service (KACES), which plays a central role in South Korea’s arts education domain by making policies and providing subsidies, announced the discontinuation of ‘the Arts Education Local Post Establishment Project’ from FY2023. The objective of ‘The Arts Education Local Post Establishment Project’ was to help forge local governance networks at the local level. Since there are diverse acting agents (e.g., teaching artists, cultural centers, and foundations) and public demands depending on available cultural and financial resources and different circumstances in towns and cities, creating opportunities with matching grants at the initial stage was believed to work for ‘grassroots-based’ arts education to settle and flourish (KACES, 2019). However, due to the budget cut and failure to prove its policy effectiveness, regretfully the long-term project planned for over three years had to be discontinued after having been operated only from 2020 to 2022. To cope with the cessation of the program, the KACES and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (MCST) have sought out a way of providing indirect supporting measures for arts education at the local level (MCST, 2023).

This policy effort of decentralizing policy structure and funding led by the South Korean government and the national public agency to forge and structure grassroots-led arts education networks at the local level raises the following concern. Acknowledging the high level of dependency on public funding sources of the arts and cultural communities in South Korea and the different environments of rural areas and cities, how indirect supporting measures led by the national arts education policies can be legitimate to meet the different policy demands and build sustainable governance structures for the arts education communities at the local level. Especially, rural areas, where securing human and financial resources tend to be short, experience a more challenging reality with political disinterest. Gray (2017) once correctly points out that “the arts have always been a distinctly minority interest in local government” (319). He continues demonstrating why the arts sector has remained at the periphery of political consideration and has been suffering with the limited staff and financial resources by addressing its weakness of lacking or difficulties in providing evidence of policy success.

With the given circumstances, this paper examines the legitimacy of the current arts education policy direction in South Korea by discussing the readiness and responses of local arts education communities. By conducting three cases of local-level governance in arts education, this research intends to demonstrate different settings from rural to city circumstances in South Korea and aims to provide policy implications. The selected cases are all formerly recipient organizations from the KACES’s ‘The Arts Education Local Post Establishment Project’ between 2020 and 2022. In order to identify different issues that may arise, we have carefully selected different local organizations operating arts education programs from metropolitan to rural settings as follows, a public foundation in Seongbuk-gu in Seoul (a district in the metropolitan city), a cultural center in Daedeok-gu in the city of Daejeon (industrial district), a private arts organization located in Gurye-gun in Jeollanam-do (rural area).

This research adopts a qualitative research approach. For data collection, we have conducted focus group interviews, site visits, and document analyses.


References
Gray, Clive. (2017). “Local government and the arts revisited,” Local Government Studies, 43:3, 315-322, DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2016.1269758
Korea Arts & Culture Education Service. (2019). “A Program Book of the Support Project for Structuring Arts and Cultural Education Hubs at the Local Level.”
Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. (2023). “20223-2027 Comprehensive Plan for Arts and Culture Education.”
Yim, Haksoon, Hyesun Shin, Bori Na, and Kyoung-Shin Park. (2023). “A Study on Developing Indirect Support Measures for Arts Education Hubs at the Local Level,” The Korea Arts & Culture Education Service