Dear All,
Before Terry responds to my last post, I'm going to preempt the question of mechanical entities making genuine design decisions with a simple argument.
Any genuine design decision requires judgment. This depends on phronesis, the exercise of applied wisdom based on experience, ethical distinctions, and embodied knowledge. Putting this another way, for the "designerly" aspect of many design decision we address and rely on the hermeneutical quality of decisions that engage the embodied faculties that one can find in human beings and perhaps in some other animals that develop the repertoire of understandings that emerge from living through time in an experiential and historically contingent life world. In humans, this gives rise to the critical faculties and sensibilities that allow us to decide on or to determine the preferred future states that are the goal of design decisions. Among the conditions for developing this foundation for judgment, we have the senses, and the empathic ability to engage in symbolic and social interaction of a kind that machines will never be able to replicate until they can replicate the feeling and consequences of emotional and sensible engagement in the world of those whom designers serve when we design.
Machines and automated systems can take on many tasks formerly requiring human skill and intelligence. This means that machines and automated systems can take over some specific design tasks, performing specified activities as the mechanical amanuenses of designers.
Design and design decisions, including certain forms of creativity and generative thinking, are another matter. These require judgment. I do not see how machines or automated systems can take on the characteristics and responsibilities of embodied judgment. To do this, they would need to take on the bodies and mortality of human subjects.
The entire trope of the judgmental automaton rests on the fact that these entities cannot think or judge as we do because they lack the qualities that make us human. From the Golem and Frankenstein's Monster to Asimov's robots and the Terminator, the differences between these imagined creatures and human beings shed light on what it is that makes us human.
The ability to design is one of the qualities that makes us human. Without rehearsing a full argument for design as a way of knowing different to and comparable to the sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts, I'd argue that the capacity to design is not likely to be replaced by machines. That's like saying a computing machine can do mathematics, as contrasted with saying that a computing machine can perform mathematical operations. Mathematical operations can be completely described in algorithmic form and computers can perform them. Doing mathematics requires philosophy and judgment, something computers do not yet possess and likely never will. So it is with the difference between performing many of the operations associated with design and doing design. One involves identifying and applying algorithms. The other requires choosing and working toward preferred future states on behalf of a client or in service of a goal.
Yours,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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