Dear Terry,
I, for one, welcome our new cyborg-designer overlords.
I’m sorry I couldn’t resist it… anyway, I appreciate your boldness it makes
for interesting debates. Your post read like a manifesto, with bold claims
and paradigm shifting proposals. Bellow you will find some comments.
*"I feel there is a significant difference between 'creating a machine to
pretend to be a designer' and 'creating a machine to create designs'."*
I completely agree with you on this point.
*"Underpinning the first idea, that a machine could pretend to be a
designer, is the assumption that there is a single human way to design.I
suggest there is not, or rather, that there are many ways that humans
undertake activities of creating designs and NONE of them are the ways that
humans perceive themselves to be undertaking the creating of designs."*
The second paragraph is somewhat unclear, but I think I managed to grasp
its overall meaning. If I understand you correctly, you seem to suggest
that humans are able to design (albeit rather poorly) but are unable to
accurately describe designing — i.e. the activity of designing — at all. I
would argue that the fact that human designers are able to teach how to
design to human-designers-to-be is testament that some basic understanding
has been achieved.
Unless you consider that what is being taught is not design at all, or is
not as much design as it could be. In that case the burden of proof is with
you to demonstrate better ways to design and teach design.
*"The reality is our internal physical processes by which we create designs
are very varied and none are as we perceive them subjectively."*
I don’t think design is exclusively an internal physical process or it
would be akin to meditation. Discussing and drawing, for example, are a
couple of activities that often occur during a design process which are
not exclusively ‘internal’. Of course, you might argue that discussing and
drawing are ineffective and time-wasting activities and should be replaced
by… here again you would have to propose and demonstrate the effectiveness
of a couple of alternatives.
*"In fact, the 'stories about how we create designs' that we subjectively
deduce are more like a 'tales for children' picture of the world. They are
not true."*
A couple of examples would add weight to your claim that so far design
theory has been no more relevant than The Hobbit.
*"We have to stop using human-centred and designer-centred perspectives as
the basis for undertaking design research and creating design theory.It
should have been obvious by now that it doesn't work but there seems to be
a blindness about it."*
Again, we know enough to be able to teach design; some of those students
than go on to design cutlery, clothes, and chairs that function fairly
satisfactorily. And I’m only giving examples of the first things I see
around me in my study (which was designed by an architect) so I wonder what
you mean when you say “it doesn’t work”?
'best,
--
*João Ferreira*
00351 967089437
0031 0619808750
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