Dear Martin,
I feel you would be impossible to persuade regardless of evidence or
reasoning (or better writing skills!).
I suspect the differences between us are far deeper than whether some kinds
of maths may be of help for designers to produce better designs.
For instance I'd suspect that you believe that you can understand and know
what designing is by reflecting on your thoughts and feelings while doing
design? And, that you can understand what others are doing while designing
by the same method?
You also seem to think that in some magical way designing in technical
realms is totally different to designing in the traditional art and design
fields.
Perhaps you need more technical understanding to appreciate the
similarities?
Learning some maths might help?
Best wishes ,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Honorary Fellow
IEED, Management School
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salisbury, Martin
Sent: Friday, 9 May 2014 6:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Why designers need maths
Dear Terry,
You addressed your answer to me but, happily, others have jumped in with
useful contributions before I have managed to find time to return.
Thank you for having a stab at addressing the questions. However, your
'answers' are so muddled and contradictory that I have found them impossible
to unravel and respond to directly. The assertive writing style makes it
difficult to disentangle those parts intended to be presented as 'fact' from
those which are purely opinion. You don't appear to differentiate between
them.
You begin by saying that there are 'three parts to the answer' and then you
list 'three big change factors in professionals' lives.'. It is not clear
whether these are in some way the three parts of the answer you refer to or
are another digression/ red herring. Either way, I still can't fathom where
you are coming from. If, as you suggest in your subsequent message to Ken,
the problem is that you are 'not explaining things well enough' perhaps, as
Eduardo suggests, the best way forward is to get a computer to write for
you. On the other hand, the problem could be that this is all nonsense. But
in order to know which, we must await your forthcoming post that will
finally explain and evidence the propositions clearly and unambiguously.
I would only say that the sense that I am getting is that you completely
misunderstand what 'design' means within the creative/applied arts. I sense
that your perception of Graphic Design is limited to one of a process of
arranging things. I believe that you are also confusing tools/ process with
content. You have once again painted yourself into a corner by making wild
assertions about areas with which you are not familiar and certainly have no
experiential knowledge of, and are trying retrospectively to justify them.
You say:
"In visual design fields, human professional design development is
predicated on sensitisation to existing and past designs using a range of
criteria (contrast, balance, gestalt, purpose, rhetoric etc). From this,
humans identify and critique possible new designs. The limit is only the
limit of the number of designs a person can see in their lifetime and their
sensitivity to them. This and the use of emotions and thinking provides the
creative competence of designers."
You seem here to be saying that what informs a designer is the range of
designs that the designer has seen- with the use of 'emotions and thinking'
as an afterthought. Try adding to that afterthought 'life experience',
'empathy', 'humour', 'pathos', 'graphic wit'. IDEAS!. The implicit
projection of a personal life story'. Or perhaps you are only referring to
functional information design? I sense that you have gone away and done some
very rudimentary research into these areas of creative endeavour that you
are not too well up on in order to try to find a way out?
My colleagues on the Graphic Design programme here once enrolled a severely
autistic student. He received excellent support throughout his studies and
of course made some astonishingly clever things that did not connect in any
way with user/ audience.
"Remember if computers can learn to produce designs on the basis of best
designs and best design practices of the best designers, it is going to be
increasingly harder to stay ahead of the creative designs of the computers."
In relation to graphic design, this one clearly is nonsense. It refers to a
world of endless recycling and imitation, a world of low level, local print
shop design.
My own students at Masters and PhD level, are very quick to learn that the
computer is a wonderful tool and that the problems only arise when one
expects it to design or think for them. Where this leaves us in relation to
the need to learn Maths, I still have no idea.
Looking forward to your next post.
Best wishes,
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration Director, The Centre for
Children's Book Studies Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html
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