WHO KILLED
THE WORKSHOP
The promise of creative automation devoured the very hands that built it — and nobody mourned the loss.
I spent two weeks last winter in a decommissioned printing press hall in Kazan, watching a crew of six type-setters dismantle their last machine. The foreman, Grigory, kept his hands in his coat pockets the entire time. "We don't set type anymore," he told me. "The algorithm sets type now. We just watch the screen." That hall once produced fifteen thousand pages a day.
The Last Drafting Table
The shift did not happen overnight. Between 2019 and 2024, every major production tool introduced generative layout. Firms in Berlin, São Paulo, and Tokyo cut their design teams by forty percent. The remaining operators were retitled "prompt engineers" — a euphemism that fooled nobody. The drafting table, that sacred surface where ideas met material, was replaced by a text field and a loading spinner.
"We traded craft for velocity and called it progress."