Dear Francois,
Thank you for your questions. My apologies for the delay in responding to
you. If its ok with you, I'll try to answer the questions one at a time.
You asked what is probably the most significant question for all from the
Art and Design fields about maths,
<snip>' Why should I be in need of maths in order to model reality anyway?
In which way(s) maths based models of reality are better than or superior
to intuitive or otherwise reasoned models?
Great question. Right to the point!
The roles of maths that I've been pointing to are very different from what
Oguzahn described in his paper and possibly different from what you seem to
be thinking.
The roles for maths I'm suggesting are essential in design have more to do
with the essence of being a professional. They have everything to do with
design ethics and creating successful design outcomes for clients and
society at large, and, in contrast to Oguzhan's wonderful paper, next to
nothing to do with graphics and visual methods of designing.
This is from a perspective of seeing how design as a field seems to be
evolving in terms of professi0onalisaiotn and addressing design situations
that are more complicated and complex.
Reading the above, I'm realising I need to do a huge chunk of background
explaining.
For any professional offering advice, the central and essential ability is
to be able to accurately and correctly predict what will happen as a result
of people taking their advice. For a designer, in essence, 'providing a
design' is 'proffering advice to the client'. The advice is embodied in and
around the design.
To be able successfully to participate in the professional exchange between
design t and client, it is important for the professional to be able to
accurately predict those design outcomes and be responsible for them.
As a practical example, imagine a government health services as a client
that requires a poster that will reduce the proportion of obesity in the
population by 2%. The intended design outcome is the '2% reduction in the
proportion of the population who are obese'. The design outcome is NOT the
images on the poster. The images on the poster are the intermediary to
achieve the design outcome. The design product is also not the appearance
of the poster, it is plan for the emotional and influential processes by
which the poster will result in the design outcome. The content of the
poster is a part of that. The actual images on the poster can be *anything*
that works to result in the design outcome of reducing the proportion of
people with obesity by 2%.
The design problem then is about understanding and modelling why and how
people will be influenced by particular kinds of poster content to the
extent that the designer can take responsibility that they can unsure that
the poster design they might envisage will have the design outcome of
reducing the proportion of people with obesity by 2% or more.
I suggest that visual design methods and visual design languages for the
poster by themselves are insufficient to enable the designers to
*guarantee* the design outcome of 2% less people with obesity. A simple
test. Would you be happy for you to pay the costs to the government agency
and all the individuals who might otherwise have avoided obesity if the
design for the poster did not achieve its design outcomes of the 2%
reduction? Would using visual language methods *guarantee* you would achieve
the designed outcomes (the 2%).
That kind of financial responsibility for design outcomes and advice is the
kind of responsibility and liability usually expected of professionals. It
is also what results in mathematical modelling methods being used to predict
the design outcomes, at least to the extent sufficient to have plausible
deniability.
Being able to predict and guarantee the design outcomes, in this case the
2% reduction in obese people (NOT the appearance of the poster ), requires
considering many factors and their interactions, including the exact effects
of elements of the poster on triggering sequences of human behaviours to
achieve the desired design outcome.. It requires being able to accurately
and reliably predict the changes in behaviours of the future resulting from
one's 'advice' (i.e. the poster design). To do this requires a language
that can be manipulated to accurately predict the future and which spans all
disciplines. This problem is found in all professions and over the last
3000 years, mathematics in all its forms has been developed as that
particular language for that purpose. Put simply, mathematics fulfils
those particular essential roles in professional design activity and those
roles are different from the role of visual language.
For those wishing to participate in the evolving future of design as a
profession and have the skills to profitably address complex design
situations, I suggest mathematical modelling will become essential,
especially in smaller design businesses. It appears from where I stand that
the industry of practicing of traditional design activities is likely to
die off substantially under job and price pressure from software automation,
DIY desktop publishing and a host of other factors, and as clients expect
designers to be more responsible, financially and legally, for the broader
social and financial outcomes of their designs. Regardless, if one remains
in that traditional form of design practice, there may be no need to use
mathematical approaches to ensuring you can correctly and accurately predict
the consequent financial and social outcomes resulting from your design
work, and visual language and visual thinking may be sufficient.
The above is one of the reasons it is useful to use maths instead of
intuitive or visual design methods to model reality and the outcomes of
designs. Others include that the designer can address more complex problems
more safely in ethical and professional terms, and it offers a way of
creatively thinking about more aspects of a design than can be managed using
visual reasoning methods. Mostly though, the value is in reliable prediction
of outcomes, particularly where they are changing over time.
For making the transition from traditional design education, the trick will
be finding approaches that give the benefits of maths without having to
learn much of it. System dynamics is one of the paths that offers that kind
of leverage of knowledge and particularly supports predicting design
outcomes.
On a completely different tack, I'd love to hear what you are doing in
Rwanda and how as a designer you made the transition from Canada to Rwanda.
Can you say something about it?
My best wishes and my apologies for the delay in responding ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI
Honorary Fellow
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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