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
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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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