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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