What are the roles of intermediation in the design industry?

This master thesis investigates into the role of intermediaries in the design industry under the Chinese and European context. The comparative analysis centers on the question of what enables and supports an ecological environment for design creativity, the production and consumption of design, and how the dynamics works in relation to key intermediary factors for creative enterprises. The central argument of this thesis is that to stimulate a sustainable creative process, it will not be enough simply to empower the individual; individual creativity will thrive when it is part of a larger creative "system", through which different ideas and talents can add to each other's value. Engineering such a system is the role of the creativity intermediaries, enabling connections across boundaries and encouraging people to exchange ideas and to collaborate in their mutual development. It was found that strong organizational intermediation offers more scope for both business development and artistic innovation in the design industry. It does so by reduce or eliminate transaction costs associated with a design transaction process, and on the other hand, it offers an environment in which independent designers get the freedom to nurture creative ideas and gain better surplus from their work. By analyzing three transaction dimensions of the design industry, namely asset specificity, uncertainty and transaction frequency, it is inferred that the ideal structure of the design industry should be hierarchical; however, such a deduction is in conflict with the reality in which the design industry is featured with a network of small companies. Therefore, the other variable creativity is brought into consideration. It is found that the specific qualities of the design industry require a creative atmosphere that only independent designer studios or small companies can provide. But that brings a dilemma between reducing transaction costs and nurturing creativity. Faced with such a contradiction, the role of intermediation is brought forward as a solution. This study has established that intermediaries play a very important role in the development of the design industry. In addition, it confirms that the creativity problem of creative industries can be partially solved by an efficient mechanism arrangement. The thesis’s findings build on alternative meanings of the word intermediary as found in Caves and theory associated with transaction cost and creativity, which have been found to be central and indispensable for the design industry. In this light, this study extends the existing discussion of the intermediation mechanism in creative industries, while going further into a specific industry context-design, which has rarely been discussed in the literature of cultural economics.