159: The Fashion Certificate Program

The Future of the Traditional University

Excerpted from The Evolution of Everything, How New Ideas Emerge,  (c) 2015 by Matt Ridley ISBN 978-0-06-229600-9

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. Why pay huge fees to spend three years on one campus, earning the right to be paid not very much more in the real world than non-graduates, rather than putting together your own combination of online courses, marked and graded online, using the lectures of the best teachers in he field where ever they happen to be? When Sebastian Thrun, an artificial intelligence expert, sent out one email announcing that he would tech a course to just to his students at Stanford but to whoever wanted to listen in on the internet, tens of thousands took the course. Over four hundred of them got better grades than the top student at Stanford.

• Matt Ridley’s books have sold more than one million copies in thirty languages world wide. He writes regularly for the Times (London) and The Wall Street Journal, and is a member of the House of Lords. He lives in England.

Engineering technology is at the heart of modern apparel production

During the First and Second World War we were at war, but we weren’t at war here. The Allies needed clothing, primarily uniforms. The apparel industry sent orders out to small manufacturers who were producing other products using low-level engineering procedures. The small manufacturers developed apparel’s industrial procedures now used throughout the world. However, because of line assembly almost no one, even in the designing departments, knows how it all works.

I was fortunate to have excellent mentors when I worked in the industry where I learned everyone’s job. I’ve written it down, college classroom testing it as I went, so it can be used in the home with minimal equipment. What I have written is best learned hands on, which enables a thorough understanding of the fashion computer programs’ procedures.

It took thirty years to write my eight-book fashion technology series. Why so long? Without modern technology, one book would probably have taken an estimated three life-times to write, so long in fact that one wouldn’t even attempt such a project.

It took time to test that the material was understood and could be used by lay people. During the last thirty years I have tested my books with degree and continuing professional education college students.  My students told me what they needed to learn. Students included design-room personnel. Those students who wished to enter the fashion industry were very successful.

We live inThe Age of Information

The impact of modern technology equals the invention of the printing press.

Here is why such a project as mine is now possible:

• My son Andrew, a graphic designer, set up InDesign‘s paragraph styles for me. I am now probably am more proficient at InDesign than he is because I use it daily for just about anything I write. It’s a fantastic program, used by writers and editors all over the world. I taught myself how to use InDesign from the program’s instruction books. I also taught myself CorelDraw, a drawing program that I use to produce scaled technical drawings, which
• I index the material as I enter it.
• I assign the appropriate copy (writing) various paragraph styles to the captions, general writing, paragraph heads, and

  

  headlines.

• Just a touch of a button upgrades the TOC (table of contents), the various paragraph styles directing the upgrade to list the entries as seen in the TOC.
• Upgrading the indexing also requires only a touch of a button.
• I have a special program for cross-referencing so as to be able to refer an entry in one part of the book to another section of the book.
• Entering new pages for additional material again just requires a touch of a button. The entire book upgrades instantly.

This kind of technology was undreamed of when I was a journalism student at Syracuse U back in the early sixties. I used to set the headlines and titles for the Daily Orange by hand into a tray. It was very tricky to get just the right wording so that the headline or title would lie in its space on the page.

During the sixties my mother copy-edited galleries – long strips of printed material, from which her corrections had to be hand typed back into the book’s format, when she copy edited for the United Church. All of that is gone.

The world has changed

I now write, illustrate, and publish; plus market, and ship my books. The industry needs trained technical designers. Through out the world women sew for money. All need this information.