One aspect of the recent debate on 'Can a machine design?', has been the
question of whether computerised processes are becoming sufficiently
advanced to do so.
A parallel question is 'Which industry player(s) would be likely to offer
such computer-automated design services?' For a number of reasons, it seems
to me more likely that a large organisation will begin to offer automated
design services before it becomes available to smaller design shops. This
follows similar scale-based competitive manoeuvring at the expense of
smaller players found in many industries currently.
In graphic design, Adobe is the most obvious contender.
For those who have not come across it, underpinning Adobe's software has
been a very active design research program. Reviewing the design research
publications of Adobe researchers gives insight into how close or far is
their progress in automating design. More importantly, perhaps, it gives an
indication of Adobe's intentions for the future. A list of Adobe research
publications is available at
http://www.adobe.com/technology/publications.html They are an interesting
read.
For graphic designers, Adobe has played a significant role over the past
three decades. The consequences have not been particularly kind to graphic
designers with the effect being to significantly reduce the size of design
teams and, by reducing the time needed for each job, reduce the numbers of
graphic design practitioners that the available work can support . This
increases competition on pricing, further pressing on graphic designers'
incomes. It has also required graphic designers to make significant
investment in Adobe software to remain competitive.
Of more concern, however, is if Adobe decided to pivot to being a large
design company, i.e. being supplier of design *solutions* based on
computer-automated design methods, rather than being a supplier of software
to designers.
What would be needed and what would be the indicators of Adobe following
this path? I suggest the indicators would be:
1. Heavy investment by Adobe in machine learning research.
2. Adobe gaining access to a large body of design output from
professional designers as exemplars for conducting machine learning
programs, and from Adobe's work on crowd sourcing of design decisions
3. Signs of Adobe researchers developing software to automatically
create designs that would otherwise be created by human designers .
Reading the list of Adobe's design research publications at
http://www.adobe.com/technology/publications.html shows that machine
learning research is a significant theme.
Secondly, the transition to the Creative Cloud gives Adobe access to a large
body of design output from professional designers as exemplars, as does its
work on crowd sourcing design decisions.
Third, are papers by Adobe researchers on producing automated design
output, e.g.:
Learning Layouts for Single-Page Graphic Designs
<http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/%7Edonovan/layout/designLayout.pdf> O'Donovan,
P., Agarwala, A., Hertzmann, A. (Mar, 2014) IEEE Transactions on
Visualization and Computer Graphics, March 2014 (preprint)
ShipShape: A Drawing Beautification Assistant
<http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/home/sykorad/shipshape.html> Fi¹er, J., Asente,
P., Sıkora, D. (Jun 20, 2015) SBIM 2015 - International Symposium on
Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling
Preference Mapping for Automated Recommendation of Product Attributes for
Designing Marketing Content
<http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1245/cbrecsys2014-paper10.pdf> Sinha, M., Saha Roy,
R. (Oct 6, 2014) Workshop on New Trends in Content-based Recommender Systems
2014 (CBRecSys '14)
Whether Adobe might actually pivot into a design company is pure
speculation. If Adobe did so, however, it would be potentially highly
competitive in being able to offer automated designs at a fraction of the
cost of human designers' outputs.
On a different tack, a different, and potentially useful, PhD design
research project, would be to identify ways that human designers in the
graphic design industry could protect themsleves against loss of work in
such a scenario.
On a different tack again, after leaping in again with both feet to
phd-design, I've realised it is taking much time. - so back to silence.
Thank you to those who have responded on and offline to my posts.
Regards,
Terry
--
Dr Terence Love
PhD (UWA), B.A. (Hons) Engin, PGCE. FDRS, MISI
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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