On May 8, 2014, at 8:59 AM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> An example, in the late 1990s, large graphic design firms cut their design
> staff by around 75% and at the same time were able to increase output. In
> that case, the reduction in staff and increase in outputs were mainly due to
> the increased productivity enabled by products from Quark Express,
> Macromedia and Adobe.
This doesn't track with my memory of the graphic design business (at least in the US.) The cuts were earlier, those not attributable to economic downturns were not as deep, and the nature of the cuts was not exactly as you describe. Or at least not neatly so.
The first big wave of job destruction was at suppliers for design firms. Typesetters and 'stat houses disappeared except for the few that converted to computer graphics service bureaus and produced film from designers' QuarkXPress, etc. files. (At that point, printers had big staff reductions in the stripping department. Strippers--the people who created and put together the various pieces of film to make plates--had been the most skilled and best paid people in printing.) Designers inherited much of the responsibility that formerly belonged to typesetters, 'stat houses, and strippers, so the efficiencies of computerization affected designers' outside expenses more than their employment.
This brings us to the question of what you mean by "design staff." The computer took over much of the role of the production people at design firms. Were they "design staff"? Maybe. Were they designers? It depends on which firms and who is describing them. One could argue that what they were called is more of a political question than anything else but it gets back to the eternal problem on this list: What do we actually mean by "design," "designer," or "design staff"?
> other changes due to automation that were increasingly substituting instead
> of designers' designerly knowledge and expertise.
Yes, although initially, the opposite happened. Designers who had looked like they really understood type complained that "the Mac isn't up to good typography" because they never understood how much detail work was done by their typographers. They now needed to make decisions about kerning and such that they had previously not faced. As you imply, much of that was subsequently taken over by better software.
> Designers' natural human
> reactions against automation of their roles
That was the weird thing. What I saw was just the opposite. When computer systems started looking viable (in the pre-Mac days), most of the designers I knew expressed fear and most of the production artists I knew were excited at the labor saving opportunities. This despite the fact that it seemed clear that the designers would go on designing and the production artists would be unemployed.
> The software is capable of
> doing far more of the human design decisionmaking than designers and many
> other in the design industry have been aware.
Yes. To some extent. In typography, for instance, it makes decisions that just plain weren't made before and routinely makes decisions that were only made in rarified, high budget situations.
> and critique possible new designs. The limit of designers learning and
> attributes is only the limit of the number of designs a person can see in
> their lifetime and their sensitivity to them. This and the use of emotions
> and thinking provides the creative competence of designers.
Perhaps the biggest change for graphic design is that realistic prototypes can be created extremely fast, allowing more iterations on tighter time and/or money budgets.
> One reality is that quite small computer systems can now process more than
> humans. More importantly, by processing large amounts of data they can learn
> the intrinsic tacit properties of that information and make it available to
> a wide variety of other processes. Graphic design is relatively unusual in
> that it has codified much of its knowledge and this makes it easier for
> computers to extend faster into the arena of meaning and automating human
> processes in graphic design.
So it seems to me that the biggest net role for computers in graphic design (as opposed to production for graphic design) is in ideation. We teach a clear set of ideation procedures in the graphic design program here at East Carolina University. It's hardly exclusive to us but it involves set actions of finding keywords, expanding the list of keywords, identifying resonant items, expanding on them, doing the same thing with images, then looking for useful combinations by observing shape similarities and other opportunities to combine ideas in meaningful ways. . .
I can imagine an AI system that delivers some of this very efficiently. (Off your topic--it would be interesting to see how the possible elimination of some of the drawing in the process affects the understanding on the part of the designer. It might be romanticism on my part--although I think not--to believe that gathering clippings doesn't promote the sort of synthesis that drawing thumbnails does.) So there would be some loss that might be completely outweighed by the volume and efficiency of an automated visual thesaurus, etc.
> For the near future, this suggests many if not all of designers traditional
> design activities may become computer automated. This is already in place
> for automated generation of advertising images and messages.
Can computers fairly easily replace the level of designer that sells services on the $100 logo websites? I suspect so.
> MIT review describes other examples of
> automating creativity .
I'd love to here more about this.
> Yes, I can almost hear you say, 'What has that to do with designers
> learning mathematics?'
You have very good ears. I thought I was using my indoors voice and you're half a word away.
> Currently, humans are slow at interpreting meaning, and computers are
> extremely slow at it. In contrast, in terms of rate of variety, humans are
> slow and computers are extremely fast.
I finally gave up but I used to spend time talking to anyone doing parallel computing and such about an AI idea for logo design. You'd scan your sketch and the computer would analyze it and come back with a series of questions: This part looks like part of a circle/do you want it to be part of a circle? This part looks to be about half the size of that part/do you want it to be exactly half? This almost lines up horizontally with that/do you want it lined up? The transition from this part of the line to that part of the line is just barely abrupt/do you want it smooth? This seemingly important thing is near the center/do you want it in the center? etc.
Another approach would be to not ask the questions but just produce iterations and let the designer play a game of "warm". . . "cooler". . . "hot". . . "that's it" with the auto-illustrator.
> If designers start using maths to manage abstractions of behaviours of
> designed objects, criteria and characteristics and then use maths to
> abstract the behaviours of those abstractions THEN there starts to emerge an
> advantage in favour of humans. This is because abstractions of the behaviour
> of abstractions about objects means the objects being addressed by humans
> (abstracts of abstractions) potentially represent large numbers of objects
> and hence massively increase the rate of variety. More importantly, the
> maths can be used to focus selection of elements towards optimal solutions -
> of advantage in competing against brute force management of variety.
Sorry. I couldn't decode that. Remember, I'm a graphic designer. You have to talk s l o w l y with us and in short sentences. This may be where you explain the math thing. I'm still wondering.
> Remember
> if computers can learn to produce designs on the basis of best designs and
> best design practices of the best designers, it is going to be increasingly
> harder to stay ahead of the creative designs of the computers.
Which, of course, leaves computers with the problem of how new stuff gets produced to use as a model when the old stuff gets old. And graphic design may be second only to fashion design in the how fast can old stuff get old* race.
[*I invented a punctuation mark that I call a quemma. It's a question mark with a comma replacing the dot. I think we need something with less of a pause than a quemma to indicate the internal question in that last sentence. The fate of the interrobang makes me think it's unlikely to happen but if computers do take over writers' and editors' jobs, maybe I just have to convince some programmers to sneak it in. I suspect that programmers won't go for my at-persand and at-percent symbols. I like the way they look but I can't figure out a need for them so an algorithm for use isn't exactly at hand.]
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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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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