Hi Gunnar,
As usual, you tease out the nuances!
There is a slight language issue that is confusing things a little. When I
wrote about automating design, I see this as a bit by bit process. As I
wrote earlier, it gives the illusion (and this is economically important)
that all is the same except it is better.
A story. I read that in the Hindu Kush (if I remember right) the advice of
bandits to their children was to never rob travellers and kill them.
Instead it is better to rob travellers just a little each time so their
businesses recover and make more money so they can be robbed again and again
each year they pass.
The game is to ratchet things forward by offering slightly more automation
each year, enough to make it attractive to buy the next version and
simultaneously reduce backward compatibility so those who delay can't
interact as well with those who have bought newer versions. The
automatisation drives that process.
On the issue of how will graphic design education move forward, the shaping
factors are probably a combination of government fear of social disturbance
(young people in university and t5raining rather than unemployed),
industries' desires for better trained employees, and universities' guile
in playing off the different factors to appear to be fulfilling both whilst
instead rearranging things to maximise profits . Universities have not been
so wise in their planning of student numbers and it has come back to bite.
Remember all the expansion of business students in the 80s and competitive
training in asset stripping, mergers, slash and burn management methods,
maximising staff productivity to maximise profits, or at leasdt maximise
salaries for the managers. One might see in the dynamics of supply and
demand that lack of employment opportunities for such highly trained
competitive and ruthless types of business managers pushed them into taking
management roles in universities. . . .
In this climate, one of the reasons for massive increases in enrolments of
graphic design students is that it is an enjoyable course to undertake and
in some areas requires little prerequisite certification. It the graduate
employment market issues are ignored there are many reasons why
universities can be enthusiastic to increase graphic design student numbers.
The employment issue is mostly an externality to the universities. In fact,
universities can leverage it along the lines of 'come and study with us, do
postgraduate or a Masters or even a PhD and you will be more competitive to
get a job in this increasingly competitive graphic design employment
market'.
One argument that I've heard presented in a variety of fora is that graphic
design education can provide the new 'Classics' education. I'm not sure it
is anywhere near there in that role, but it seems an interesting avenue to
explore.
Myself, I find it more interesting to see the potential role of graphic
designers in contributing to addressing wicked problems. I'm sure the
current approach to this, using large and small info graphics, visual
analytics and visual representations of problems and contexts simply can't
do that job. Wicked problems involve feedback loops and that involves
dynamic models that you can see their varieties of behaviours changing over
time. Worse the 2D visual approach gives the illusion of being able to
contribute to solving wicked problems which takes people down completely the
wrong paths. I see that as being unethical. I've elsewhere listed the
reasons why such a direction in graphic design would seem to be incapable
of contributing to addressing wicked problems and instead is likely to
result in even worse outcomes.
Where it is interesting is the potential for graphic designers to be
involved in creating of dynamic models of situations in predicting the
behaviours of different aspects of wicked problems. There are three aspects
of using modelling to address wicked problems: a) eliciting the behaviours
and causal links of different parts of the wicked problem and presenting
them visually to modellers and those responsible for checking the data and
calibrating the model; b) creating the dynamic model with its structure and
mathematical relationships ; and c) creating ways of presenting the outputs
of the dynamic models so that they can be understood and played with to
explore possible design choices and outcomes by designers, planners,
stakeholders and others.
Bear in mind that this is a completely new and expanding dimension of
decision making (and design). Graphic designers could easily contribute to
both the first and last stages of this process. The final stage would seem
to be essential to have good graphic communication and current visual
approaches are dreadful (I'm thinking system dynamics here). Graphic
designers could make an instant real contribution to this. Involving
graphic designers in the first stages (of which there are many subregions in
any wicked problem) would contribute to easing the work of the modellers
and those checking the validity of the model. There is no problem in using
2D visual representations and infographics for the situations in the first
stage of dynamic modelling where they do not themselves involve feedback
loops. With some additional mathematical skills , graphic designers could
be involved in the whole process. Any of these would be serious
contributions worth paying for and would be relatively protected from the
vagaries of automation of other areas of graphic design.
There are other similar possibilities for graphic designers working in other
abstract and complex realms. The shift in focus this work implies is the
need for increased skills in abstraction, and understanding and managing
abstract concepts and relationships, mostly as defined by others. Currently,
abstraction in graphic design curricula focuses on visual communication. The
implied shift if this analysis is correct will be to concretise and make
routine the knowledge about visual communication and instead focus on the
use of managing abstract concepts and their relationships in the logic of
other fields in which the graphic designer will participate. You can teach
that in many ways.
Gunnar, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. I'm always surprised
by what you write!
All the best,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gunnar Swanson
Sent: Friday, 16 May 2014 8:53 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design
Subject: designers, design education, and robots
I changed the subject line because this has drifted in several directions.
On May 16, 2014, at 3:23 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It's the same sort of reasons that drive the people in Apple and
> Adobe, and others (e.g. members of SIGGraph) that are automating
> graphic design,
Terry,
If Apple and Adobe decide to automate graphic design, that will represent a
new business model. Their current business models include selling
semi-expensive stuff to graphic designers. If they actually automated
graphic design, how would that work?
Would they sell stuff to graphic-design-firms-sans-graphic-designers who
would sell the machines' production? Since there would be massively fewer
customers, Apple's and Adobe's prices would have to raise enormously to
maintain their current incomes. The few who would spend the money would have
little product differentiation so would almost inevitably end up competing
based on price which would almost inevitably cause many of them to go broke,
reducing Apple's and Adobe's potential market even further.
Or would they sell their automated graphic design systems very cheaply to
the current potential customers of graphic designers? That might be a
bargain for larger buyers of graphic design services. They'd have to
convince many more people that they need graphic design or they'd have to so
thoroughly embed graphic design in other products that they wouldn't care
about the lost business.
Or is it possible that what you describe as "automating graphic design" is,
in fact, automating functions done or purchased by graphic designers but
that "automating graphic design" is an overstatement that ignores the point
you seem to be trying to get to: a clarification of the nature of design
(or, in this case, the nature of graphic design)?
You start to make a couple of worthy points. Hardware and software has made
some big changes in the economic structures of graphic design. (For
instance, I used to make a fair amount of money marking up billable items
like type and photostats. That was something akin to a casino's vig. That is
no longer an income stream for a graphic designer. I used to hire production
artists to work with me on projects. Only the largest design firms have
production staff these days. . . .)
It used to be that students would graduated from school and work as
production artists or semi-production-artist junior designers where they
would start learning the trade. Graduating students now have to be much more
ready for a role that I would more comfortably call a designer.
I read various miserable statistics about employment rates of graphic design
program graduates but most of ours seem to get design positions. The
objectively bad quality of many programs combined with the massive number of
graduating students could be expected to produce great
unemployment-as-graphic-designers, however. You, perhaps rightly, predict a
downward trend in new graphic designer employment.
Let's assume for a moment that you are correct in your assumption that
robographicdesigners will eat up most of the current demand for new graphic
designers. Where does that leave design education? You seem to advocate
switching from training graphic designers to training the same people to
create robographicdesigners instead. That doesn't seem like the solution for
a couple of reasons.
The first is that in the automated future you describe (which I will not
entirely discount), it would seem that the world needs 100 creators of
robographicdesigners, resulting in lost jobs for hundreds of thousands of
graphic designers. Training tens of thousands of robographicdesigner
creators each year would not result in sustainable employment. Especially
since the people teaching programming should be teaching metaprogramming
where software writes the software.
The second (which you might want to describe as the solution for the first)
is that it is very rare to find someone who is talented (and I use that word
advisedly) at both the job of a graphic designer (as currently seen) and the
job of a programmer, software developer, etc.) This is not to say that
graphic designers have not thrived in such positions. Many have. But I will
say that many graphic designer and many graphic design students would be
very poor candidates for those roles.
So graphic design educators have interesting questions facing them
surrounding the problem of what to do to prepare young designers going into
a marketplace that will inevitable change.
One aspect of that is still what to do to get them employable and able to
move through the first few years of their careers. Even if your predictions
were prefect, that's still a big part of my job. And most programs promote
themselves on that basis so it is incumbent on schools to deliver on their
promises or to stop making explicit or implicit promises of employability of
graduates.
Another aspect of that is how to prepare students for whatever changes we
assume will come in the medium term.
Another question side-stepped by your predictions is how do we prepare those
students who would now study graphic design to have a worthwhile place in
society (and what can that place--or those places--be) if graphic design is
not an option?
Some other questions that fall on the backs of (at least some) graphic
design faculty include how we make sure that graphic design moves forward.
One problem with the vision of machines replicating current design is that
replication isn't enough. We need variation and selection for evolution to
take place. How would that fit into the business models of Adobe and Apple
or whoever replaces them?
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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+1 252 258-7006
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