100% HUMAN

At Transparent Drawing, the only drawing that has value is one that is produced analogue.  If the graphic is not 100% analogue, you can’t call it a drawing.  See ANALOGUE DRAWING.

And the only design method that has value is one that is produced analogue.  TD provides the means and methods with which to produce a design via analogue.  Analogue in.  Analogue out.  Pencil on paper.  100% human.

High provenance (DESIGN PROVENANCE) will dictate what has the highest cultural value as the machine continues to take over.  Analogue design demonstrates that human thinking was involved.  And people will pay for that.

Everything else is simply machine generated dross.  And nobody will want to or even need to pay for that.  The machine will do it for free.

These sets of human / analogue / high provenance economic models are in play now.

We pay more for an egg if it came from happy free range chickens rather than ones that never see daylight.  The entire slow food movement is about provenance and knowing where what you put in your mouth comes from.  Let’s call that food provenance.

We pay more for Apple products because the provenance of the company is well known;  we know who Jonathan Ive is;  who is the designer of Android devices?  Device provenance.  Why do you think it says on the back of your iPhone, “Designed by Apple in California.?”

We pay more for a hand knit sweater over a machine knit one.  Why do we pay more for an original watercolor rather than a print?  This list is endless.  And now we are adding design to the list.

Human generation of design solutions will have the highest cultural value.  We might establish another quotient;  analogue.  (SEE OPTIMISM QUOTIENT).  The analogue quotient will verify that the concept was generated with analogue means and methods.  While TD is certainly one analogue design method, we started a list of others at DESIGN PROVENANCE.

Just as it is possible to certify that eggs come from happy chickens, it will be possible to certify that the design solution came via analogue.  The higher the analogue quotient, the closer to 100% human the design will be.  Just as it is possible to determine that the sweater was hand knit, it will be possible to determine that the design was from unique analogue sources.

The machine, increasingly, has the capability to design as if it were human.  AlphaGo just defeated 18 time world champion Lee Sedol in Go, a feat that most thought was 10 years in the future.

Analogue processes will allow us to maintain our unique, 100% human, design voice as the waters of machine design rise around us.

And people will pay for that.