"…There was no common language"

Quote:

The whole potential of the [design] industry is completely turned upside-down now. The things that were really difficult for me when I started off… are now so much closer to a young designer or startup designer. So what’s going on at the moment is that quite high-tech industrialized techniques are within reach of people with a laptop…

This was quite inconceivable when I started.

I’m more interested in the connection between design tools and engineering tools now.

Previously, there was no common language between the tools of engineers and factories and the tools of designers, and so those worlds were completely apart. What’s happening now is that the same files can be translated from something which is just a concept to something which is real, automatically.

…

For a young designer starting out, the difficulty is in having enough time to be anonymous. I think that for a lot of people starting out that have one great idea, that one idea belongs to everybody very quickly… I benefited from a non-digital era where I could be, broadly speaking, anonymous for maybe 5 or 10 years with only very few people knowing what I was doing - - allowing me to create my own uniqueness, my own personality.

Designer Tom Dixon, The Creative Class #2