Terry, you wrote: "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."
yeah, I bet it would...
Eduardo
sorry, I couldn't resist this one
On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html
>
> -
>
>
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