> That is, to make irrelevant the current skills of designers - and enable
> designers to move on to something else.
>
> Firms such as Adobe and AutoCAD have relied on design research to enable
> this.
Terry,
Back in the mid '80s, when various companies were introducing their versions of expensive graphic design computers that would later be superseded by cheap Macs running Illustrator and such (does anyone else remember the Aesthedes, a very cool Dutch computer that cost about as much as my house did?), most of the graphic designers I knew were terrified and all of the production artists I knew were thrilled. I never got that. I used to say "Your [the designers'] job is going to be roughly the same and you [the paste up people] will be unemployed" but that didn't change anyone's emotional reaction.
Certainly, any school that mainly teaches how to use the Adobe Creative Suite or AutoCAD (or any school thirty years ago that mainly taught how to do paste up) isn't contributing much to the future of design. On the other hand, the phrase "learning with your hands" and a cluster of related ideas about learning by doing are vital to really understanding design. People become designers by designing. And nobody at Adobe could have done the design research required to replicate graphic designers' hand skills if graphic designers didn't have those skills in the first place.
Gunnar
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