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Muriel Cooper spent much of her career working at the forefront of computer-aided design as founder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and was concerned throughout with 'the significance of participatory and non-authoritarian communication forms'. In 1989, she concluded the essay 'Computers and Design' with a cautionary note, writing that the 'changes that will be effected by computers and the information revolution are pervasive. Every aspect of every profession and every life will be changed by it. Little of that change to date has been in the hands of the design professions, the educators, or the citizenry. It is imperative that we […] educate ourselves and participate in the direction of this polymorphous medium.''
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While it is clear that computers have had a profound impact upon social and professional life since then, what about the other point - who directs the change?
If there was already concern that designers would be excluded from the development of their new digital tools at that early stage in their adoption, what should be said about the way the field of graphic design is largely governed by Apple and Adobe, who wield vast power over the working practices of designers?
Though Apple and Adobe produce different kinds of products (computers and software respectively) considered together, they exert a kind of duopoly over the practice of graphic design. As 'industry standard' tools, Apple computers and Adobe software are today synonymous with both the production of graphic design and the identity of the graphic designer. Students are trained through them in school; studios and freelancers depend on them for their day-to-day business; and they act as de facto sponsors at design conferences around the world through their ubiquitous presence on stage (and dispersed among audiences).
But while the word duopoly expresses an economic reality, 'hegemony' is an equally appropriate term to consider, to comprehensively understand what the dominance of both corporations means. As cultural critic Raymond Williams explained it, hegemony exists when our ways of seeing the world ;are not just intellectual but political facts'; when a particular way of seeing the world depends 'not only on its expression of interests of the ruling class but also on its acceptance as “normal reality” or “common sense” by those in practice subordinated to it'.