Hi Ken,
Just to clarify- What I am really talking about is creativity (yes, that old chestnut). The many examples of tasks/ jobs lost to technology that you cite are those that may require skill but not creativity. The weavers were not creating the designs. They were executing them (albeit skilfully). Typesetting is not the same as designing. The same goes for printing, drafting, visualising etc etc. Of course technology has been hugely beneficial here with the consequent loss of jobs. This is inevitable. I take a pragmatic view - there is no point in fearing technology if it can do a better job. When it comes to creative design however, it can't. When it can, we will be living in a very different world.
Best wishes,
Martin
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration
Director, The Centre for Children's Book Studies
Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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http://www.cambridgemashow.com
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From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Ken Friedman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 10:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Steps to automated design of book covers and design research participation
Friends,
This recent thread has me thinking ¡ª and puzzled ¡ª not merely because there is something reasonable in all the positions stated by Terry, Martin, Ali, and Gunnar.
Yesterday, I read Terry¡¯s question: "A key question is how do/are designers and design researchers contributing to this research path of automating design?¡± My first thought was a joke from the 1960s:
Question: ¡°What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?¡±
Answer: ¡°I don¡¯t know and I don¡¯t care.¡±
Assume ¡ª correctly ¡ª that computing machines can take on increasingly greater numbers of tasks once performed by human beings. It is not clear to me that the human beings whose jobs will presumably be replaced can do much about it. This is very different to the question facing that much smaller number of people who make a living designing the software and machines that replace other human beings.
Now, where it comes to book covers, I tend to agree with Martin. So far, there is relatively little evidence that machines can take on highly judgmental tasks involving emotional response. Will this change? Perhaps. There seems to be some evidence, though limited, that computing machines may be able to learn to recognize and act on emotions in human beings. How well can they do this? Let¡¯s see.
It doesn¡¯t concern me for two reasons. First, I am involved in fuzzy tasks that require judgement. Second, at a point that occurs well before machines can replace me, I will step back from these tasks.
That said, I can already see that computers reduce the human work in the industries where I work. Typesetters have been completely replaced by computing machines. Already in the late 1970s, hot lead typesetting was an artifact of a prior age. In 1978, I illustrated a book for my Fluxus colleague Dick Higgins. I used a style of faux 19th-century woodcuts ¡ª Dick liked the illustrations so much that he moved the book from modern typesetting to hot lead type with the illustrations set in metal-die so that every page would carry the bite of type and illustrations. Dick took the book to Stinehour Press of Lunenberg, Vermont, at that time one of the few companies in North America still capable of producing books in the hot lead tradition dating back to Gutenberg and Manutius.
The family-owned press was sold to an Irish firm in 1998. When that firm determined that it could no longer afford to stay in the printing business, the company was sold yet again to its final group of owners. As dedicated as they were, they could not afford to stay in business. They closed in 2008. The last managing director told the story at the time:
¡ªsnip¡ª
Managing Director and CEO Warren Bingham announced today that The Stinehour Press, an award-winning book design and printing firm, will be ending operations and liquidating its assets after more than 50 years of operation in northern Vermont. The company, which had several million dollars in sales last year, employed a staff of 21 highly skilled workers. ¡°Although it¡¯s been lovingly cared for, our offset press equipment is more than 25 years old and lacks many of the digital time-saving devices and speed of newer presses; and we¡¯re behind the technology curve by not yet having adopted fully digital pre-press capability,¡± Bingham said. ¡°Our sales force estimates that the company had to forfeit several million dollars in business last year because of capacity constraints caused by our old equipment, and we would need to invest at least $3 million to be competitive. In today¡¯s economy, when added to what we¡¯ve already invested in the company, it¡¯s beyond what a small group of committed owners can do. We¡¯re heart-broken that what began with so much hope and represents the hard work and passionate commitment of so many is ending.¡±
¡°The lines separating author, publisher, printer and distributor are blurring, and digital technology can make China or Reykjavik seem as close as Lunenburg,¡± Bingham said. ¡°A new kind of book printing industry is evolving that is based on printing shorter runs of more titles including digital print-on-demand. This should bode well for Stinehour Press and our unique blend of art, craft and technology; but it arrives at the same time as we often see book projects from China for less than we can buy the paper. These are not good times for American manufacturers. I hope we know the full cost of what we¡¯re buying as a society. When lowest cost is always the determining factor, it might be higher than we think.¡±
¡ªsnip¡ª
At the same time that I feel deep sympathy for this, I understand that it is a situation that serves as many people as it hurts. I benefit from the advanced technology and high quality and low cost capacity of good Chinese print production firms.
Will this move from the print production side of the business to the design side? Perhaps.
In architecture and engineering, the entire group of people once employed as draftsmen has been swept away by computers. And computing now supports many of the thinking and planning functions that architects and engineers undertake without yet replacing human thinking and decision capacity.
We see these support functions in many highly judgmental services. For example, I now recommend that authors subscribe to the Grammarly service. Grammarly is an online editing and writing support system. Grammarly offers a free version and a reasonably priced premium version. You can see it for yourself at:
https://www.grammarly.com
While Grammarly does not write, and while it cannot offer the kinds of suggestions that editors often require, it is able to flag and identify problems swiftly and effectively. In addition, it offers excellent spelling and grammar suggestions. By offering flags and prompts that permit editors and writers to undertake swift revisions, Grammarly reduces the time and cost of writing and editing substantially, and it reduces the cost that writers might otherwise invest in early-draft editing work on manuscripts.
As with designers working on better equipment to replace their work, I can¡¯t see why anyone that makes a living in writing and editing would spend a lot of time improving Grammarly. What I do see is why editors who need to improve their output by reducing the cost of time would use Grammarly ¡ª including journal and book series editors, like me, who suggest that writers use Grammarly before submitting manuscripts. And I use Grammarly myself when I write, and when I serve as an editor or writing co-author for colleagues.
How close are we to decent book covers? I don¡¯t know. Terry is going to gnash his teeth and wail when I state yet again that his concept of book design is too primitive to bear comparison with the work of a Martin Salisbury or a Gunnar Swanson. I¡¯ve seen his books and I¡¯ve seen theirs. In my view, Terry is tone deaf when it comes to graphic design, and not much better when it comes to making visual products work. I have seen little to convince me that his understanding has improved on these issues.
At the same time, there is no question in my mind that things have changed even since we first debated these issues on the list. The challenge is not Terry¡¯s understanding of design for human beings. The challenge involves what machines can really do ¡ª or not do. In this, I would be more inclined to agree with Terry than in the past, not because he understands graphic design, but because machines do a better job today than five or ten years ago. Some of the things that machines can do have moved from pure mechanical engagement to different kinds of sophisticated support to tasks requiring judgement.
But Martin is right on a key point: computers lack judgement and empathy. As Martin writes, ¡°When computers have emotions they will be able to design book covers.¡±
Now Ali Ilhan enters the thread with a slight different question:
¡ªsnip¡ª
I think Terry is hinting at a possible future where some design tasks will be automated or will be done by the help of AI. Is this fantasy? I don¡¯t think so. Is it too far away? I don¡¯t know, depends on how AIs develop within the next decade. What if an editor likes a cover design done by an ¡°emotionless¡± automaton more than one designed by a human being? I Believe this is a highly possible outcome.
And the current pace of the work on AIs makes Terry¡¯s point even more relevant. Will design researchers sit idle, hoping AIs will never come to that level of sophistication, or are we going to do something for that possible future? Isn¡¯t design all about planning for possible futures?
¡ªsnip¡ª
Here, though, the answer may not be so comforting. Some forms of design involve planning for possible futures that serve one population at the cost of another. Designers and design researchers could not have planned a new future for the several million draftsmen that once worked in architecture and engineering firms. Some of those people have good, new jobs based on their experience, educations, and background. Others have moved into new industries. Some work in cleaning services, fast food restaurants, or retail sales jobs. Others are unemployed.
By the early 1990s, the large number of drafting jobs that once employed young architecture graduates had begun to vanish. The joke I heard from that generation of new architects was this.
Question: ¡°What is the first question a recently graduated architect will ask you?¡±
Answer: ¡°Do you want fries with your burger, sir?¡±
The question I¡¯d want to ask is how to make it possible for most members of a society to get a decent education and live well in a world that no longer provides enough high-pay jobs for most of its citizens. It is quite clear that the economic structures of contemporary capitalist and post-capitalist society do not do this. Asking how designers should address the question of automation will not answer this question. The question is political, and the solutions require expertise in political economics.
As societies, we have not done well in answering these questions. This failure lies behind some of the difficult social transitions of recent decades. It also explains some of the results of recent elections in the Western world. These results involve the increasing portion of the electorate willing to support nationalist and populist movements headed by charismatic or quasi-charismatic leaders who promise to restore industrial growth, good jobs, and high employment. The world to which they point resembles the 1950s and 1960s ¡ª the world we live in has changed radically, not simply over the past six or seven decades, but even over the past two decades.
As I see it, Ali¡¯s question only works on a big scale. Some of the problems that Jurgen Faust, Sabine Junginger, and others address in the recent Bloombsury book Designing Business and Management point in this direction. (Full disclosure: I wrote one of the chapters in the book, pointing to earlier authors over the centuries whose work addressed some of these issues.)
Gunnar¡¯s note offered a reasonable answer. Gunnar tends to agree with Martin, while acknowledging that Terry is ¡°incrementally rightish.¡± That sounds about right. Terry is more right than wrong on these issues in a technical sense ¡ª but more wrong than right in failing to understand some of the subtler issues of design.
Most of all, I think there is a fundamental error in asking what designers and design researchers are to do about machines that may replace them. That¡¯s like asking the hand-loom weavers of the 1600s and 1700s what they ought to do to improve the knitting machines that replaced them.
Some few became engineers and mill foremen. Fewer still became entrepreneurs. While entrepreneurs built and took the profit of the ¡°dark Satanic mills¡± that William Blake mentioned in his critique of the industrial revolution, not many among them started as displaced cottage workers. Merchant bankers and wealthy landowners were able to invest in mills.
A few talented shop mechanics became engineers. Some well educated, successful engineers made the leap from one class to another. These, however, did not need to leap quite as far as a displaced hand-loom weaver might have done.
The highly successful engineer class was more typically comprised of people such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. While Brunel went farther than most, he built on social capital and family connections as well as building on his own genius. Brunel was the son of engineer Marc Isambard Brunel. He was also an apprentice to the greatest horologist of his time -- Abraham Louis Breguet. Breguet founded the Breguet watch company that still makes luxury watches, albeit as a division of Swatch.
So how will designers and design research respond to the possibility of computers that can design book covers? I don¡¯t think they can, nor should they. If computers ever advance in the ability to emulate and use emotions, designers will need to do something different. And fewer of them will be employed.
As William Blake writes
¡°Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!¡±
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | Éè¼Æ She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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