Dear João,
You wrote,
<snip>' Terry insists that there are many automating design software already available or being developed. This may or may not be true in the engineering fields (I don’t have enough information to have a definite opinion) but it certainly isn’t accurate for product design, graphic design or architecture for example, and there is nothing indicating that this will change in the near future, no matter how smarter our gadgets become.'
I feel you may be mistaken or perhaps mean something different? The products from Adobe, Solidworks, AutoCAD, Microsoft, Corel and similar software suppliers for designers have been automating many design decisions for over 30 years now. In some areas of design such as Graphic Design the consequences are visible by the reductions in numbers of designers needed by companies (remember the shift from 200 person design teams to 20 persons to 5?) and improvements in quality of design detail. In other areas, e.g. oil and gas processing plant design, there is software that completely replaces design teams. Some of the newer areas (already usable) for graphic designers is image choice by semantic/sentiment analysis , e.g. Google's new Cloud Vision API (https://cloud.google.com/vision/).
Computer automation of novel writing is following on computerised authorship of non-fiction and the process is straightforward, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gini-graham-scott/automated-writing-technology_b_2974756.html
Cheers,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of João Ferreira
Sent: Friday, 5 February 2016 8:15 PM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Simon's glory
Dear all,
Just my belated two cents:
It seems to me that this discussion springs in part from Anglo-centric linguistic tyranny.
Eduardo’s research shows us that design (the verb) was already in use (in
English) centuries before design (the discipline) was established, and that word had nothing whatever to do with creating beautiful new things to be used by people.
I think this point has been made before, a non-English speaking architect would find it odd to see his work described as ‘design’(1) and an engineer would find it nonsensical.
This is not merely etymological pedantry. It has consequences and leads to misunderstandings.
For instance: Terry insists that there are many automating design software already available or being developed. This may or may not be true in the engineering fields (I don’t have enough information to have a definite
opinion) but it certainly isn’t accurate for product design, graphic design or architecture for example, and there is nothing indicating that this will change in the near future, no matter how smarter our gadgets become.
Computer assisted design is no closer to being able to design a chair as a word processing software is able to write a novel. In both cases, somewhere someone at some point will have to sit down and suffer horribly for an indeterminate amount of time with a pencil in hand, struggling to make sense of ‘current situations’ in order to change them to preferred ones.
In short, the etymological issue — as is often the case — is tightly connected with an ontological issue. I wouldn’t therefore dismiss it as disciplinary parochialism. There has to be something wrong — or at least inaccurate — with a definition of design (Simon’s) that renders architecture as a similar practice to medicine.
(1) I am aware that some architects fancy themselves able to design products (mostly hideous unsittable chairs and ineffective door-knobs) and even *gasp* websites and logos. This is one of the great tragedies of our age. (I am also aware of the historical exceptions to this rule, but a thorough discussion of this issue would be too long a digression for this thread).
João
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