Hi Terry,

I have been watching the discussion between yourself and Erik with  
great interest. My view aligns very closely with Erik's position. You  
seem unable to see the designer world through anything other than an  
engineering lens (though maybe I have an equal but largely opposite  
problem!). Much of what you say simply doesn't fit my understanding  
either of design education nor the advances that are being made in the  
best design practices. And it certainly does not fit with the  
intensely hands-on subject specialisms such as fashion, crafts,  
jewellery, ceramics, glass and so on.

I certainly remember Letraset and scalpel work. However, in your  
comment below, this refers merely to fashions and fads that pop up  
from time to time, whether related to tools or not. Because a tool  
does this new thing, a good many looking for something different use  
it, but the excitement fades after a while - there is more importance  
in other aspects of designing.

One example of counter argument - and one that I believe is a much  
more serious issue - is the loss of understanding of 3D form, texture,  
and user handling through the unthinking use of CAD tools. As an  
external examiner I have seen so many examples of undergraduate  
students using sophisticated CAD tools and producing product designs  
that look terrific in the visuals, and seem convincing at a certain  
level, but would be quite impossible or difficult to manufacture or  
use. In some design schools this has been accompanied by managers  
seeing the possibility of reducing the costs of practical workshops by  
reducing their size, machinery, opening hours, technician staffing,  
etc. The more weakly creative students - those who find it difficult  
to think in the round about designing - will always resort to  
glittering tools to produce designs that on the surface are  
attractive, but that's often as far as it goes. The better designers  
are not 'dominated' by the technical tools, they use them as  
extensions to their creativity.

And if you let engineers - with aspirations toward being product  
designers - loose with good CAD tools, you get.... Dyson vacuum  
cleaners. Clever intricate mouldings that would be difficult or  
impossible to create through [non-CAD] manual means, but so much  
visual clutter and clever bits that break after a while or are just  
too fiddly to actually use. Design should not be like this.

Finding where we are in the use of CAD tools means also evaluating  
what we lose by their use, and how that might be remedied.

David
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David Durling FDRS PhD   http://durling.tel
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On 20 Sep 2009, at 10:05 am, Terence Love wrote:

> Remember the old days of graphic design? Remember Letraset and rubbing
> scalpel-cut slivers of coloured sheets of transparency onto a  
> backing paper?
> Remember the kinds of designs that used to be produced that were  
> based on
> these tools? Remember when Adobe allowed one to use a transparent  
> view of a
> graphic within a letter outline and suddenly all web pages had letter
> outlines that were windows into photographs... The type of creative  
> design
> output that designers produce is dominated by the technical tools of
> designers  - far more than the illusion that designers are  
> 'intrinsically
> creative'.