Who decides what counts as a good idea
Aesthetic judgement used to be spread across the studio. It is concentrating. A look at a hierarchy reforming from the top down.
When judgement circulated
In graphic design studios, judgement about what works used to circulate. It travelled through ordinary gestures: you show a print to the person next to you, you pin it on the wall, you leave a proof lying around. That circulation was a form of training, and it gave beginners early access to criteria no course ever conveys.
A quiet concentration
Once proposals can be produced quickly and in volume, the bottleneck moves to whoever chooses. In the studios we observed, choice moves upwards, and it moves fast. Across nineteen meetings we counted an average of 1.4 people actually taking the final decision, against 3.1 in comparable observations carried out in 2018.
We look at it together, but she is the one who decides. We used to decide as three, because all three of us had had our hands in it.
A problem of transmission
The clearest consequence is not hierarchical but pedagogical. A criterion that is no longer exercised collectively transmits badly. The juniors we interviewed can say what was kept, rarely why. They describe their seniors' judgement as an opaque skill, which is exactly the opposite of what the studio used to produce.
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