Dear Terry,
Ranjan’s reply on the potential uses of the image sorting software you brought forward raises significant issues. I must amend my earlier views.
This software seems to have potential for design practice and for design research in the ways that Ranjan describes (below). Once these uses become clear in practice and research, this may have implications for education as well.
As the Phys Org article describes this, it is not an automated image rhetoric system, but it may offer benefits in ways that support narrative and story-telling.
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
--
M P Ranjan wrote:
—snip—
Thanks for the link. I have been thinking about the implications of automated story constructions to design practice and education since we use visual storytelling a lot in ethnographic research and now with the availability of ubiquitous surveillance cameras in public and private spaces this could become a compelling tool for design research.
Story telling is about Form and Structure. Structure produces meaning in the narrative and automated alternatives along with learning algorithms can produce a compelling tool to aid visual imagination and would form part of an essential toolkit for designers just as photo editing tools have become a core capability for design education and practice. Form creates the effect and impact through timing and sequence.
Designers should watch this space not because they fear being replaced but for amazing new possibilities for research into human behaviour and pattern recognition that is best left to automated tools when tons of data are to be mined.
I have been asking my students involved in animation storytelling and video production to understand structure using visual models and this as been based on theory articulated by Gilles Fauconnier in his books Mental Spaces (1994) and Mappings in Thought and Language (1997) which discuss the generation of meaning through alternate mappings in space and time, the very heart of story telling.
I have been using digital photography as a tool for intense documentation in my classes where students build models and explore design thinking and each class produced over 4000 images of group work and these were shared with all students at he end of e class as an aide memoir, a very effective method of internalising learning which I have used since I got my firtst digital camera in 1997. I now have a collection of over 500,000 digital pictures from my own camera and growing rapidly with pictures from Facebook and other sources. This kind of tool will be useful to make new sorting and meaning from such data that is being collected in vast quantities.
Interesting space that need to be watched. Thanks.
—snip--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|