Robert Stackhouse

An acquaintance of mine posted a link to this site this morning. As I was reading through the blog, I stumbled on this story. It almost immediately made me recall an experience in a college 3D rendering class. When the other students in the class found out that they would be using open source software instead of commercially available 3ds Max or Maya (which are both incidentally owned by Autodesk as a result of buyouts—the packages were owned previously by Discreet and Alias), they were very close to outrage. Fortunately for him, this professor has a fair amount of diplomatic skill and convinced the students that the theories and techniques of computer graphics are portable across software packages (I am case study in the truth of this statement: I work equally well in Photoshop or Gimp and Illustrator or Inkscape because I understand the underlying technology). Out of curiosity, I googled “extending Gimp” and “extending Photoshop”. There seem to be more articles about extending Photoshop, but I would argue that has more to do with name recognition and bandwagon jumping than the number of well advertised/documented ways of extending the platform. I think I should mention that Gimp can be extended by Python (a language people have a chance of knowing before they encounter the platform) instead of a proprietary scripting language.

That I’ve seen, ways to extend (or even understand) the inner workings of software packages are unfortunately almost never mentioned in software training (even in university classes). Most often such training consists of pushing buttons in the right sequence or remembering hotkeys.

Our society has commoditized (or at least tried extremely hard to commoditize) our creative people and knowledge workers. The underlying management theory is graphic designers, engineers, programmers, etc. can be substituted one-for-one as long as they “know” the right software packages. In my experience, many managers seem to be convinced of the sanity of this approach (even after firing more than a handful of people that weren’t worth their salt—more often a result of a shoddy work ethic or a lack of creativity than a lack of software proficiency).

This stinks to me of the “I don’t give a crap about people” way of being that most companies and corporations seem to have fallen victim to. The worst part is that our workers (and workers in training) seem to have bought into this nonsense hook line and sinker. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve crossed paths with that want to go to work for a software, engineering, architecture or entertainment giant. The thinking is that bigger is better. Although I’ve never worked for them, when I think of Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. I think more of the faceless masses of the proletariat in 1984 than I do of a better life. I’d actually like to meet my customer in the flesh and shake his hand.

When I think of companies that I’d like to work for, I usually think small (perhaps smallish) like: Always Creative or Improving Enterprises.

In schools, we should be training people to make tools, not just use them. We should teach people to be platform independent, to give them the ability to choose the right tool for the job (or build it from scratch if necessary) rather than ever only always going with the devil they know.

In this day and age, every high school aged student should be taught how to program. After all, it is not rocket science. Domain experts than can program (scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.)  have more societal (not to mention economic) value that those that can’t or won’t.

In addition to programming skills, students should be given the opportunity to learn mechanical skills as well. As our world continues to embrace technology, the designers of the future are going to have to understand way more than just aesthetics (oh yeah, we should encourage our kids to draw too).

I agree with Rushkoff in that technology should be used to extend our humanity rather than diminish it. Technology isn’t the issue. Technology just is. We are the problem. Let us train and employ and lead whole people rather than bulleted lists of proficiencies.