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Dear Sonia and all, I feel there is a significant difference between 'creating a machine to pretend to be a designer' and 'creating a machine to create designs'. 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 reality is our internal physical processes by which we create designs are very varied and none are as we perceive them subjectively. How we humans actually undertake the internal activities that result in designs is very different from what we subjectively perceive what we do. 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. I've suggested elsewhere many times on phd-design that attempting to build design theory and undertake design research based on such designers' or others' subjective perceptions is both unhelpful and false. The idea of instructing a machine to pretend to be a human designer goes down that path. 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. Meanwhile, the successful design research goes on elsewhere; automating designers tasks, reducing the number of designers needed, and making design education less and less relevant except as training in software use and looking backwards to design history. I feel that as design researchers we can and should do better. This will require dropping much of the existing and traditional perspectives and theories on design, especially dropping the use of designers' or others' subjective perceptions of what they do when creating designs. I suggest it is time and now urgent that we have a radical change, a new direction in design research and design theory. It will require making a break with the majority of the academic literature in this area over the last 50 years. For many of us established researchers, this will make substantial parts of our past work irrelevant. For new PhD researchers, this is now an opportunity to break with the past mess of design theory and create successful new forms of design theory. It will be a challenge to stand up to supervisors and examiners trying to reshape everything backwards to protect themselves. Good luck! Best wishes, 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 [log in to unmask] -- Snip> if we had to tell a machine to pretend to be a designer, what would we say? would we know what to tell to the machine? how much could we advance in design research by attempting to do so? ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------