Hi Terry,
Great trip.
The examples you give of automated wood shaping and knitting machines
are simple differences in order of complexity, by comparison with the
the hand tool to the power tool example I gave. The graphic
equivalents of these types of tools—adobe products, xml, document
composition software, cms, etc—have not changed what we do, only the
manner of its production, though they have enabled us to increase the
scale and scope of our work. Viewed from that perspective, your 800%
is far too small and likely to be several order of magnitudes higher,
though I would hesitate to give it a number.
However, our practice has changed, undergoing a number of transitions,
as a result of philosophical and empirical design research into the
nature and types of design processes we use. I gave an account of some
of these changes up to the mid 1990s in a paper I wrote at the time.
(It's called Transitions in information design: http://communication.org.au/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=88)
The increased speed and flexibility of technology has helped
accelerate those changes, particularly such things as digitising,
object oriented programming, and rapid prototyping, but I cannot see
that these in themselves have required us to make any philosophical
changes in our thinking about the nature of design, which still draw
on ideas from the late thirties and early forties of the last century.
The recent philosophical changes, at least in our work, have arisen
because of evidence-based design research. Simply put, we have had to
change our ways of thinking about design because the evidence no
longer supported earlier ways of thinking. Importantly though, this
evidence has not come from or through the technology, but rather
through evidence collected from people and organisations. What people
do and the rules we can generate out of their actions have been the
catalysts for changes in design methods. Also, important in this
current thread, is the fact that research in areas such as cognition
or neurology have become less and less relevance in our work, and the
mentalist thinking around 'intention', 'needs', 'creativity' etc. have
all but disappeared from our considerations and from our vocabulary.
In other words, an evidence based approach has taken us in quite
different and more parsimonious directions than the current elaborate
abstractions and speculation to be found on this list and many others.
All of which is a million miles away from the teaching of
undergraduates in graphic design which seems to languish somewhere in
the early 20th century clinging to the last gasps of romanticism, and
getting excited about futurism.
I wish it were not so.
David
--
blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
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