Hi, Terry,
These articles are interesting, but irrelevant to design. I have a few thoughts with respect to your question, "What are the implications for design practices, design education and design research?” (Those who wish to read the underlying research in the comments that follow should follow the references and links to the original publications.)
In my view, David Sless is right — this has only minor implications for the design profession, and therefore no implications for design education. Whatever implication it has for research are for specialists in the fields of such applications. Gunnar Swanson is also right. This has little to do with narrative pacing. The program does not read, analyse, or simulate understanding based on content. Rather, it uses visual structures to organise images.
This offers no challenge to the design profession. I can’t recall the last time anyone told me about hiring a designer to sort through the images in a photo album.
Four quick comments:
1) This is not “automated image rhetoric.” This is a sorting tool. While any series of images may tell a story, this is an outcome of the way that human beings receive the images. Keith Russell’s comments on the intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1054) point in the right direction.
2) The program does not select among the potential narrative sequences within the images. This is another reason that it is not an automated rhetorical program. But the article in Phys Org (2015b) makes no such claims. The story describes an "automated method to assemble story-driven photo albums.”
3) The Facebook story (Phys Org 2015a) gives far too few details for anyone to worry about, designers or anyone else. A basic awareness of personality testing and the limits on even the most sophisticated tests will explain why this is both interesting and irrelevant. I couldn’t explain all that is wrong with this approach in the space of a discussion-list post, not even a long one. For my master’s, I studied with an expert in personality testing, and I studied with several distinguished psychologists and psychiatrists for my doctorate. That’s five decades ago now, but I can tell you that serious personality testing involves far more than selecting for a reductive cross-section of traits that can be measured using Facebook “likes.” Despite the massive number of Facebook users, there is no way to measure for any of several dozen crucial factors. Such an analysis is necessarily shallow — and that’s before asking what we actually measure in any kind of personality test. Essentially, Facebook “likes” allow a computer to identify a number of relatively superficial personality traits as well as a human being might notice the same traits. But the fact that this requires one to use Facebook a certain way means that this only works for people in groups that make extensive use of Facebook. For those who are interested, Annie Murphy Paul (2015) gives a nicely balanced overview of personality testing in general.
4) However reasonable the article in PNAS may be, it is irrelevant to design practice, and meaningless for design education. Wu, Kosinski, and Stillwell (2015) have written an interesting and serious piece, but many questions remain to be answered before anyone needs to worry about what this means to designers. Few designers learn to administer, interpret or use the IPIP or the MMPI in the course of design practice. Until this becomes part of the design profession, the possibility that computers can judge a personality profile won’t make any difference to us. There is a minor possibility to this may be relevant to those few people in design research who are cross-trained in psychology and personality assessment, but this group is very small indeed.
Design education and design practice face many challenges today. These challenges do not include losing design jobs to machines that sort photo collections or administer personality tests. Since designers don’t do these two things now, they won't be overtaken or left behind by machines. But these machines are not involve in image rhetoric or personality testing. That involves different skills, and neither article suggests that machines have learned to emulate these skills.
Yours,
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
--
References
Paul, Annie Murphy. 2005. The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. New York: Free Press. For more information, go to URL: http://anniemurphypaul.com
Phys Org. 2015a. "Computers using digital footprints are better judge of personality than friends and family.” January 13, 2015. URL:
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-digital-footprints-personality-friends-family.html#nRlv
Phys Org. 2015b. "Team creates automated method to assemble story-driven photo albums.” January 7, 2015. URL:
http://phys.org/news/2015-01-team-automated-method-story-driven-photo.html
Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. 1954. “The Intentional Fallacy.” (In) William K. Wimsatt. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954, pp. 3-20. Copy available at URL:
http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/Fallacy.htm
Wu, Youyou,Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell. 2015. "Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans.” PNAS. URL:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112.full.pdf+html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
