Dear Terry,
Thanks for your messages and suggestions. Much appreciated.
I can’t wait to have decent software that really helps me to design. It’s not a threat, it’s a shift in activities. (That is a fairly continuous characteristic of graphic design practice. Wax-coaters, letraset, scalpels, reprographic camera’s, and photographic typesetting equipment have all moved to museums. Most of the ‘manual work’ has disappeared in the last 25 years. Most of the early design software and web-coding stuff is now obsolete too. Great. Designing for screens is the current starting point, in combination with printed materials. That’s still a challenge.)
A few of my requests:
- why doesn’t the software ask if I know anything about the characteristics of the readers/beholders/users? (Age, motivation, background, literacy-levels, female-male ratio, ….) [There is plenty of research about perception, reading, interpretation, visual patterns, etcetera that could be incorporated already.]
- why does the software assume that ‘all design projects’ want to achieve the same goals? Can’t it help me to design materials that specifically focus to ‘attract attention’, ‘make information memorable’, ‘clarify a structure’, ‘explain a process’, ‘visualize a space’, ‘makes searching easier’, etc.? [There are plenty of research results in these areas, none of it is integrated into the software yet.]
- if there are any rules/regulations/guidelines/standards for a particular genre, why doesn’t the software point me to the the most up-to-date versions? [Pictograms, user instructions, legal/medical/financial documents, signage, packaging, website standards, etc.]
- if I get stuck, why doesn’t the software provide me with 5-50-500-5000 examples of award winning designs of similar projects?
- why doesn’t the software help me to test and evaluate designs? [Yes, all designs are stored and analysed centrally. Why not use this as a resource to test locally across the globe? I would love to know the reactions of people in other countries, languages, cultures, … Finally some local differences might become clearer and develop from anecdote to evidence.]
I’m not only looking for helpful *graphic design* software. Some useful ‘conference presentation software’ and ‘writing software’ would come in handy too. [I make the assumption that ‘writing a text’ and ‘preparing a presentation’ are forms of design too.] Such software could suggest appropriate patterns to structure arguments in particular genres. Of course based on ‘best practice’ through a combination of relevant ‘author characteristics’, ‘contents characteristics’, and ‘audience/beholder characteristics’. [We’ve studied rhetoric for 2500 years, and we now have Microsoft Powerpoint and Apple Keynote?]
Until these kinds of software are available, I’ll have to do most of the above mentioned activities ‘manually’. Some of it urgently needs to be automated: it would save enormous amounts of time, reduce errors, and reduce costs for people who now don’t have an option but are forced to interpret and use non-optimal graphic design artefacts.
Kind regards,
Karel.
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>>>
> On 24 Sep 2015, at 19:05, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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> Fišer, J., Asente,
> P., Sýkora, 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
>
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
>
> --
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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