Dear João,
I feel the extent of design automation is something designers and design researchers should be very proud and pleased about in terms of their contribution to a better world. It provides ongoing improvement in what can be designed and the quality of designed outcomes. It offers leverage for improvement that goes well beyond what is possible in terms of educating designers to design better.
You wrote,
<snip> 'Neither Illustrator nor Indesign have ever made a decision for me.... Illustrator makes my life a lot easier and my work much faster. But it doesn't design things for me.'
One of the difficulties of looking into this issue subjectively is that feeling that the software never makes a decision for the designer. Personally, I think it is a great contribution to a better world for many that we have software that can make design decisions
The problem in seeing the automation of design decisions is that of course the software doesn't make a decision that you make. The decisions that you make are yours and remembered by you. The decisions that one makes are the ones that one is aware of. The software makes the *other* design decisions the one's that we don't notice because we haven't had to make them. Additionally, this is a moving scenario that as the designer learns to take advantage of the benefits of the design decisions already taken by the software, the designer sees their own job and what it means to design as incrementally different at a pace that is hard to notice the scale of change over time. A challenge for design software is to avoid alienating designers by doing too much automation at any time.
I suggest that when any aspect of a design decision (however small) is made in the background out of the control of a designer, then effectively part of the design activity is undertaken outside the designer.
For Illustrator and InDesign, on one hand automation is almost completely hidden in the of micro-decisions in design involving layout, type management, colour management. On the other hand, is the automation of design tools that offer new special effects of layout and transformation, or even new formats such as different forms of ebooks.
A fun bit of evidence of the effects of design software on design decisions is to create an historical map combining the new design possibilities offered in graphic design software and the fashions in graphic design in the 2-3 years following. I remember when ellipses became available and suddenly there were many companies with elliptical logos and elliptical graphics in their literature. One of the worst was transparent text with a background image... More recently is the brush tool that paints a stream of graphics (draw it with butterflies...).
Another simplistic example of design automation is is image sliders in web-design . The designer may make macro design decisions but many of the micro-design decisions are automated by the software.
At the larger scale of collaborative and participatory design, software enables rapid prototyping which in turn enables stakeholders to better participate in design decisions. The stakeholder collaborative design decisions are shaped, however, by how things are prototyped (e.g. the quality and gamut of a print), which in turn is shaped by the software, in the background shaping design decisions.
The benefits to the designer are of having better tools. The more design decisions can be left to the software, the more designers can change and extend their roles. This of course implies change in design education and design practices, but offers new and exciting design futures different from the traditions of the past design practices.
Of course any appropriate definition of design might be expected to include all of these aspects of design activity.
Best wishes,
Terence
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Dr Terence Love
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
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www.loveservices.com.au
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of João Ferreira
Sent: Friday, 5 February 2016 9:47 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Simon's glory
Hello Terry,
My knowledge of oil and gas processing plant design is lacking. On the other hand, I've spent enough time with the Adobe package to know that neither Illustrator nor Indesign have ever made a decision for me. I agree we probably mean different things with 'automating'. Illustrator makes my life a lot easier and my work much faster. But it doesn't design things for me.
The reductions in numbers of employees (not all of them were designers) in design companies does not necessarily correlate with improvements in quality of design detail.
Of course this day and age any coder worth his salt can write an algorithm that apes Shakespeare's style of sonnets. Same thing for novels, advertisement copy, social media posts, and the like[1]. But only a very narrow perspective of what literature is would consider those texts worth reading.
There is more to designing than making decisions and information processing.
[1] There is even a (hilarious) website capable of generating automatic "post-modernist" papers http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Eduardo corte-real <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Terry,
> You wrote: "the consequences are visible by the reductions in numbers
> of designers needed by companies (remember the shift from 200 person
> design teams to 20 persons to 5?)”
> Is this a good thing?
> Which side are you in?
> Best,
> Eduardo
>
>
> > No dia 05/02/2016, às 12:39, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> escreveu:
> >
> > the consequences are visible by the reductions in numbers of
> > designers
> needed by companies (remember the shift from 200 person design teams
> to 20 persons to 5?)
>
>
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*João Ferreira*
00351 967089437
0031 0619808750
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