Dear all,
*Beth Koch* raised some serious concerns. I have, for my sins, been
employed as a graphic designer in the past and anyone who worked in this
area is well aware of the ubiquitous nature of the Adobe software package.
The ramifications of this subject are too many and too complex to address
in a post. Nevertheless, the academic community should probably spend some
time reflecting on the fact that most universities will acquire the Adobe
packages (the educational version comes with a discount) and provide short
modules on how to operate the software. On the one hand this training is
fundamental to prepare students for professional work, and frequently the
students themselves will demand these tutorials; but on the other hand
aren’t we creating a dependency that results in the inevitability of the
newly graduated professionals acquiring the Adobe software packages?
What’s more, after graduating, many students create their own design
studios and these are frequently made up of very small teams — 2 or 3
persons — with limited financial resources. Adobe being the industry
standard (a status no doubt helped by their presence in university
computers - but this could be a chicken and egg conundrum) and having our
students a solid ethical foundation that impedes them from procuring
alternative (piracy) solutions, how are they supposed to finance acquiring
the software package and subsequent upgrades? (mind you, most of these
studios work from the basement while making extensive use of the nearby
Starbuck’s free Wi-Fi).
Back to the subject of automated design, thank you *Don Norman* for sharing
the links and information. It will be same time before I can give it a
proper reading, but I wanted to highlight a couple of issues:
*“our artificial intelligence software dramatically reduces the time and
energy people spend analyzing, interpreting and explaining data.”*
This quote reminded me of something the writer Geoff Dyer wrote concerning
the internet:
*“Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of
out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the
side incentives to travel was the hope that, in a bookstore in Oregon, I
might finally track down a book I'd been wanting for years. All of this
searching and tracking down was immensely time-consuming – but only in the
way that being alive is time-consuming.”*
And also
*“Quill and NS were both started by two friends of mine at Northwestern who
developed an Artificial Intelligence system that has replaced real live
journalists in doing routine stories about sporting events, financial
events, and so on.”*
I would argue that there is no such thing as a routine story (I’m being
facetious again.) Actually, considering the quality of most routine sports
journalism I, for one, welcome our new computer-journalist overlords.
I’m sure AI has evolved to the point of being able to dig through a cluster
of data (say the statistics of a rugby match) and generating an accurate,
albeit basic, narrative of what happened. I find this subject quite
fascinating actually because I wonder: will the same AI ever be able to
notice the absurd, the comical, the ironical of everyday events? Will it be
able to use irony, humour, wit, sarcasm in its narratives? And what about
the tragic? I take the risk of sounding unreasonably sceptical and say *no*.
And the same goes for design.
A final note before I leave this discussion for other voices:
I am convinced that irony, humour, sarcasm and all the related variants are
legitimate rhetorical devices in academic discussion; but not, however, at
the expense of clarity (after all, we’re not politicians). My little riff
about the particularities of the proper spelling of “João” was not funny
enough to make up for the confusion it created, I apologize for anyone that
wasted time penetrating it in search of any meaning besides a poor attempt
of being amusing.
However, funny or not, I stand by my previous remark concerning MS Word.
*Many a truth is spoken in jest.*
'best,
On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 9:51 PM, Beth Koch <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hello Listmates:
>
>
>
> In light of Terry’s comments on Subject: Adobe - automated design. A cause
> for concern?
> I offer, for your consideration my experience, which feels very similar.
>
>
>
> In a recent graphic design course, I guided students to develop projects
> for the various digital publishing platforms. They created basic e-books,
> studied interface design and produced fully interactive magazines for the
> iPad (which we also viewed on mobile). For the iPad project, we used
> Adobe’s DPS (digital publishing suite) software. The results were wonderful
> and students were able to view and keep their DPS magazines on their own
> iPads and computers.
>
>
>
> The following semester, Adobe promptly changed the landscape. They adopted
> a new pricing scheme, with a hefty licensing/distribution fee attached to
> each publication, wiping out any possibility for a small publisher/graphic
> designer to use the software to create interactive publications or even
> not-for-profit marketing materials. And with that, they cleared the playing
> field, leaving room for only big players with deep pockets (those that, I
> assume, had been actively working with Adobe to develop new Marketing
> software to managed their burgeoning lines of consumer publications rife
> with ad revenues.).
>
>
>
> The Adobe Marketing Suite is loaded with powerful data collection, data
> management, and revenue tracking (etc.). The tools are stunning, so I hear,
> and make full use of big data sets (enough to make this lowly consumer’s
> head spin with the possibilities for personalization). Graphic designers
> with coding experience are a perfect fit to enter this field. But again,
> the cost of the software is astronomical—in the tens-of-thousands of
> dollars this time. Only giant corporations need apply.
>
>
>
> I invite others to investigate the facts in my story, as it is probable
> that I’ve not gotten some of it straight, and certainly I err on the side
> of the independent creative community, so my apologies accompany this post.
>
>
>
> My point however is not entirely dependent on facts, and that is this: This
> actually happened—and even if and when Adobe figures out how to open the
> door to independent publishers and designers again, the fact is, they are
> able and willing to close the door whenever they please.
>
>
>
> The End
>
>
>
> --Beth
>
>
>
> Dr. Beth E. Koch, Assistant Professor of Art
>
> West Virginia Wesleyan College
> Buckhannon, WV 26201
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
> (651) 278-8181
>
>
>
>
>
> Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 01:05:54 +0800
> From: Terence Love <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Adobe - automated design. A cause for concern?
>
> 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
> <http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~donovan/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
> <file://localhost/tel/%252B61%20%25280%25294%203497%205848>
>
> Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
> <file://localhost/tel/%252B61%20%25280%25298%209305%207629>
>
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]
>
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--
*João Ferreira*
00351 967089437
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