Application of technology has some unfortunate unintended consequences. Operational cost efficiencies are at the expense of skills – that was intentional. The unintended aspect happens after the skills have been lost. Surrendering to technology is not the same as leveraging it. History, as always, is instructive.
In the 1980s the reprographic industry comprised many highly skilled individuals who took a design idea from concept through to printed media. Creative directors led teams of thinkers to devise a concept. The concept was sketched out as ‘thumbnails’ – small, loosely drawn scribbles that captured the essence of the idea. These were worked up as ‘visuals’, lovely hand-drawn illustrations with squeaky Pantone markers. Illustrators, photographers and copywriters could be commissioned and guided by the visuals.
Photographers typically delivered their work as transparencies or large format photographic prints. Perfecting the image might take place in the dark room with clever techniques or by airbrushing the photographic prints. The text would be proofread and edited in its typed form and then sent to a phototypesetting bureau to create a ‘galley’ of text in specified fonts with specific instruction given for criteria such as column width, alignment, kerning, leading and hyphenation rules.
The typeset galleys would then be cut and mounted on boards with Cow Gum, or 3M Spray Mount – ‘pasting up’. The positions of images were marked out on this artwork and a piece of tracing paper was overlaid with instructions such as what colour the text should appear. The photographers’ transparencies were marked up with chinagraph pencils, specifying what size to enlarge to and what area to use (‘cropping’). Other details concerning colour gradients and tints would be indicated on the overlay. This whole pile would then go to a reprographic house.
Here, through a complex combination of processes in a dark room such as scanning, tint-laying, reversing and compiling, composite colour-separated (CMYK) negatives would be produced of the whole artwork. Sometimes there would be more than the four process colours (CMYK) to consider – special colours perhaps, or a mask for print finishes such as UV varnishes or foil blocking. Part of the reprographic people’s skill was setting colour traps to avoid white edges between adjacent colours, and managing the weight of ink for sheet-fed or web-offset lithographic printing.
The repro-house would then create a proof to see the whole design. DuPont Cromalins used a dry process which produced a glossy proof. Cromalins tended to boost colours so were not entirely representative. One either had to account for this, through experience, when judging the proof or bear the cost (and time) of producing ‘wet proofs’ – a short print run to check that the colour separated negatives produced the desired results.
If all was good, the proof and colour separations would be sent to a printer or publisher. So many processes, so many skills …so much jargon!
Then all this disappeared almost overnight in the early 1990s with the advent of Desktop Publishing (DTP) and the Apple Mac. Software empowered a graphic designer to take an idea to press themselves. These new super-powers had their teething problems – most creatives knew little of the reprographics skills their new equipment had displaced – so the software industry responded to rescue designers from their ignorance.
Software creators effectively took over the directing of business process.
A quarter of a century later, this technology is so sophisticated anyone can design something and have it printed. Import photos from a digital camera. Sketch on a tablet. Type some words in any font. Like what you’ve created? Send it to a printer.
Judgment of what makes a great idea, a great image or great prose is bypassed. Unqualified people with professional tools can make slick-looking things without checks and balances. The best designers, photographers, artists and writers find themselves judged as ‘expensive’ by super-powered computer users who fail to appreciate let alone value skills, experience and fundamental knowledge. “Wow! Look at this cool effect!” is no substitute for a professional’s judicious application of creativity. Thrilled by the cost savings of DIY, value is forgotten.
We are in the era of the Black Box. The software is very clever, but what you get out is only as good as what you put in. Too often: rubbish in, rubbish out. Tools the software boffins toiled to make foolproof have ironically produced at least a generation of super-powered fools, not to mention causing a considerable loss of skills.
The same pattern has occurred in many other areas of business. It is possibly at its most terrifying in accounting. More than a generation of accounts people have become accustomed to entering data in accounts systems. Just as DTP users produce a pamphlet and consider they possess design skills, accounts people input data and consider they know about accounts. Many have next to no idea how entering a pile of invoices into the Black Box makes a P&L or Balance Sheet report – “the computer just does it”.
One might think ‘the accountants’ provide a safety net but the external accountants cannot distinguish whether a receipt was for a direct cost or an overhead expense. They can check the maths and manipulate assets to optimise taxation but accountants have to presume expenditure was properly analysed at point of data entry.
The lack of fundamental understanding in accounting today is an unintended consequence of Black Box systems. Black Box systems are powerful tools for those who actually understand the tasks the technology is supercharging – but that was limited to the first generation of users. I see the problem with worrying frequency in businesses of all sizes (the absolute worst was discussed in this two-part story).
Great faith is put in software systems – indeed the software industry’s sales spiel invites it. This is all well and good provided directors of an organisation can properly direct their systems rather than have the software direct them. As I said at the start: surrendering to technology is not the same as leveraging it.
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