Dear Martin,
Thanks for your message. You asked me to answer about my suggestion that
maths was of benefit for designers,:
<snip>
(1) Are these skills important for ALL designers? If so, why? If not, why?
(2) If these skills are not important for all designers, for which designers
are these skills important? Why?
<endsnip>
I've avoided answering those questions in part because of the length of
answer needed and in part because of the nature of the answer.
There are three parts to the answer. The first is longest and all I'll
manage in this email.
Three big change factors in professionals' lives over the last five decades
(since the 70s) have been:
1. Computer support for everyday professional activities
2. Increased contribution from research and theory
3. Significant amounts of hidden automation
For the design disciplines, these have had significant effects in a variety
of ways.
The most significant disruptive effect has likely been on the graphic and
product design disciplines, especially in the longer term.
An example, in the late 1990s, large graphic design firms cut their design
staff by around 75% and at the same time were able to increase output. In
that case, the reduction in staff and increase in outputs were mainly due to
the increased productivity enabled by products from Quark Express,
Macromedia and Adobe.
At the time, this was seen as simply computerising some traditional hand
techniques used in design. This was true but it also hid the significant
other changes due to automation that were increasingly substituting instead
of designers' designerly knowledge and expertise. Software companies
maintained the illusion that software was only replacing mechanical
non-creative tasks by using terminology and concepts familiar to designers
and presenting the computerised design processes as if they were the
identical to manual design processes.
The reality is more than that. Competitive advantage was being gained by
computerised automation of design decisions. Designers' natural human
reactions against automation of their roles (and hence rejection of using
software) was avoided by the software including incremental changes that
each offered advantages in different directions and allowed and to some
extent encouraged the illusion that the underlying design activity remained
the same. This resulted in all the institutions of design (designers, design
businesses, design associations, and design education) remaining steady with
the illusion everything continued on much the same since the days of craft
design: that design history was continuous rather than radically changed. In
fact, there was a significant change. The software increasingly has been
making significant design decisions on behalf of designers for several
decades now.
The current technical reality is design software has moved on enormously in
ways that have not yet been well acknowledged. The software is capable of
doing far more of the human design decisionmaking than designers and many
other in the design industry have been aware.
First, however, some background to other factors that gave confidence in the
illusion that everything in Design appeared to fundamentally unchanged.
In visual design fields, human professional design development is predicated
on emotional and intuitive sensitisation to existing and past designs using
a range of criteria (contrast, balance, gestalt, purpose, rhetoric etc).
This is a learning process. From this, human designers, create, identify
and critique possible new designs. The limit of designers learning and
attributes 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.
In the past, it was claimed by computer scientists that computers could do
the same as humans in understanding and producing designs and art. In fact,
it didn't work. Computers proved too slow, too insensitive and were
incapable of addressing the subtle human issues that human designers could
do as a matter of course. The idea of expert systems that elicited knowledge
from experts (such as designers) and then created a computer system that
replicated that knowledge died a death eventually in the 1990s.
This followed the rather earlier death of proposals that systems modelling
could exactly represent and predict the behaviour of real human social
systems and organisations. The latter died its death in the 1970s.
A similar failure occurred in the claims for artificial intelligence (AI)
which died its death in the 1980s. Artificial intelligence systems are
hardly ever heard about nowadays.
The result was these potential challenges to the traditions of many areas of
design were averted. Instead emerged several strong themes in design theory
and cultural beliefs of designers about design including: the
unsolvability of wicked problems, emphasis on human creativity and
intuition, assumption that design can only be defined as a human activity,
and belief that design is independent of mathematics.
Yet. . . .
Developments in computer software alongside significant new developments in
research and data collection have now enabled computers to fulfil the
previous claims and more, and in in ways that are hidden to many and perhaps
most designers and design academics.
Artificial intelligence software and algorithms? They are now in everyday
use and have been for some time. Word's grammar and spelling checker is an
example, as is Facebook and other social media. CMS websites have simple AI
engines to drive placement of content regardless of reading device. They
are now called 'templates'. More complex AI algorithms power many every day
processes. In design, artificial intelligence processes are becoming
commonplace in for example advertising design and delivery (e.g.
http://rocketfuel.com/) and game design (e.g.
http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/about/ )
Systems modelling is now widely used for addressing even the most
difficult wicked problems (think integrated socio-military intervention in
Afghanistan, responding to the GFC, understanding the socio-economic
behaviour influencing political responses to climate change, and planning
the socioeconomic, cultural and digital development of cities - if you have
enough cash to access the computers! See, for example,
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/ ).
Things have changed.
How does this potentially impact designers, design practices and design
education?
Remember, the abilities of human designers to design depends on learning
(whether alone, autodidactically, in formal or informal education
activities). In the limit, that learning and the abilities, depend on how
many designs and ideas one can view and analyse and the kinds of concepts,
theories, and other mental and emotional tools one can bring to bear, in a
lifetime.
One reality is that quite small computer systems can now process more than
humans. More importantly, by processing large amounts of data they can learn
the intrinsic tacit properties of that information and make it available to
a wide variety of other processes. Graphic design is relatively unusual in
that it has codified much of its knowledge and this makes it easier for
computers to extend faster into the arena of meaning and automating human
processes in graphic design.
For the near future, this suggests many if not all of designers traditional
design activities may become computer automated. This is already in place
for automated generation of advertising images and messages. Identify the
topic and an audience and the software will create an advert that is
industry standard ready for media distribution
(http://www.switched.com/2010/08/30/creative-artificial-intelligence-may-put
-crappy-graphic-design/). Not yet a prize winning advert production system,
but how long before advertising designers are struggling to compete against
better computer generated advertising graphics carefully optimised to
particular messages and audiences? MIT review describes other examples of
automating creativity .
The pathway for the future is towards reduced numbers of designers in
employment, and with increasing amounts of what is currently taught in
design schools being undertaken, perhaps better, by computerised systems
(remember computers can look at billions of examples of best designs and
analyse them in more detail than humans). Pay for designers will be under
significant pressure as a commodity task.
Yes, I can almost hear you say, 'What has that to do with designers
learning mathematics?'
The leverage computers have over humans is in terms of the rate of variety
that can be managed. That is 'how much new stuff per day/hour/minute can be
processed'.
For visual designers vs computers, it also includes the rate of processing
meaning by humans or computers. That is, how fast can the meaning in an
element of an object be identified.
Currently, humans are slow at interpreting meaning, and computers are
extremely slow at it. In contrast, in terms of rate of variety, humans are
slow and computers are extremely fast.
If designers start using maths to manage abstractions of behaviours of
designed objects, criteria and characteristics and then use maths to
abstract the behaviours of those abstractions THEN there starts to emerge an
advantage in favour of humans. This is because abstractions of the behaviour
of abstractions about objects means the objects being addressed by humans
(abstracts of abstractions) potentially represent large numbers of objects
and hence massively increase the rate of variety. More importantly, the
maths can be used to focus selection of elements towards optimal solutions -
of advantage in competing against brute force management of variety.
This gives advantage to designers over computers automating design work. At
least in the short term, because of course some designers are using the
same maths to program computers to be better at creative designing. . . .
There will likely always be some sorts of design work for jobs for which it
is not cost-effective to automate design processes. In addition, there will
be some design work of high status that will be different from what
computers can produce. The latter is likely to be a shrinking pool. 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.
An anecdote: In 2001, I needed to collate material from several hundred
research reports and scanning wasn't an option. I used a process whereby I
would pick up each report and read selected material and my comments onto
a file using Dragon Dictate software. Sometimes, halfway through a sentence,
I would pause because I wasn't sure exactly how the sentence might go, and
the Dragon Dictate software would jump ahead predicting what I would write -
in many many cases, better than I would otherwise have written it.
Automation can better human performance (or perhaps I'm a really slow
terrible writer!).
In short, I suggest one useful benefit for including some of the relevant
maths in designers education is to enable designers to keep ahead of the
hidden computer software automation processes that increasingly replace or
commodify designers' activities.
The above seem to apply across most design fields.
Best wishes,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
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
[log in to unmask]
--
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Salisbury, Martin
Sent: Monday, 5 May 2014 7:17 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design
Subject: RE: Ten Thousand Hours for Expertise
Hi Terry,
A number of people have respectfully taken your propositions seriously and
devoted some time to composing messages that ask you to elaborate a little
and to answer some simple, fundamental questions in order that we can more
fully understand what you are putting forward. It is disappointing that
these have been met with slippery evasions again. Surely Ken’s first two
questions at least can be addressed if we are to take what you say
seriously? -
(1) Are these skills important for ALL designers? If so, why? If not, why?
(2) If these skills are not important for all designers, for which designers
are these skills important? Why?
All that is being asked for is clarification as to whether we should be
reading you in relation to all areas of design, or just your own. Is this
unreasonable? If the latter, we can move on. If the former, you will need to
do a little better in explaining.
Phrases such as ‘There is a problem in what you ask.’ and ‘your questions
presume a particular outcome…’ are no more useful or relevant than are
avocados and cabbages (reminiscent of Eric Cantona's wonderfully baffling
allusions to sardines and trawlers). I am sure I am not the only one who
would appreciate some answers, rather than wooly assertions. If I understand
correctly, you now seem to have moved to suggesting that the maths would be
useful only to model the likely effects of designs and in basic measurements
e.g. typeface sizes and the strength of the heel of a shoe. This is a
different tack. There is nothing new here.
By the way, I was interested to read this morning in the New York Times
(international weekly- comes free with my Observer) an article titled ‘And
They Call This Progress?’ by Tom Brady. Beginning with the hopeless
inaccuracy of wristband fitness trackers, the author examines the
disappointing failure of ‘big data’ to solve problems and the ‘echo chamber’
effect of so much data coming from the web: “If a big data analysis is a
product of big data, vicious cycles abound, as users of Google Translate can
attest.”
I still cannot quite see what purpose is served by failing to accept that
design is all about bringing together technology and humanity, not trying to
drive a wedge between the two.
Best wishes on a sunny public holiday Monday,
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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