Design was primarily a moral act.

''Don’t let the machine determine what you make/design'' (Fisher).

As a designer, your values are the key driver of societal change. 

It’s what you choose to do with technology, not technology itself that drives this change: it is but a tool in a designer’s arsenal - to help carry out what one wishes to impart on the world. Today, you can accept it. Ignore it. Work alongside it. Mindlessly follow or break away from it: create new things using old ways to keep alive the nostalgic sense of the artist’s touch - that evocative ''character of the handmade surface'' (Kaufmann Jr. 61).

It is, in my opinion, an admirable independent distinction in this technologically-driven age to hand-draw your font, to paint your poster’s text, to letterpress print a logo, to whittle a chair.

To move away from the standardization of things.

With the loss of the commercial craftsman at the introduction of the industrial age, so too did we lose individuality in design - but now, full circle, the fortunate designer can choose to hand-make in a sea of technology-aided production, and technology can also aid in finding a commercial audience! Both the traditional methods and the benefit of the new are for there for the taking.

The use of an old printing press, for example, is not to 'revert back' - but is rather a moral branch out from the firm base upon which design and technology as we know it today are based: a foundation we as designers are innately aware of the need for (Kaufmann Jr. 61).

''One must realize that it (society) embodies at one and the same time everything that it has been, is, and will be in future'' (Raizman 63).

If our values and traditions as designers are abandoned, with technology instead
solely driving change - where does that leave design?

Photo Sources: 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, 9/10, 11/12.

Title Excerpt: (Kaufmann Jr. 59)

Works Cited:

Fisher, Maxe. Class Notes (On William Morris). DHIS 201: Design Culture II. Emily Carr University. Vancouver, BC. Sept. 12, 2012.

Kaufmann Jr., Edgar. ''Nineteenth-Century Design.'' The MIT Press, on behalf of Perspecta. Perspecta, Vol. 6 (1960), pp. 56-67. Sept. 23, 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566892>

Raizman, David. ''Chapter 4: Design, Society, and Standards.'' History of Modern Design: Graphics and Products Since the Industrial Revolution. <http://courses2.ecuad.ca/pluginfile.php/32735/mod_resource/content/1/Reading%20THREE.%20Design%2C%20Society%20%20Standards.pdf>