Death of Ideation Sketching

 

Most of my ideation "sketches" just flow through my mind--little maquettes dancing with flashes of imagery. Requiring a specific number of ideation sketches, never lifting your pen, working with two colors—these are all fine to the extent they are useful.* However, design educators should not be pedantic about these things.

In a few minutes I littered the blog above and below with ideation sketches using DALL-E 2. This will only get easier and “better” with time. These sketches of toasters, helmets, blenders, coffee makers, and door handles may not be to your liking, but I generated all of them in less than ten minutes of typing. They are done in marker, colored pencil, and graphite. Easy stuff.

Interesting issues arise for the designer/educator/student to consider in the AI universe. One of them is personal style. While our personal style seems independent of AI’s ability to identify patterns that nurture rule creation, it is influenced by the world we encounter, much of which will be increasingly generated by AI or flattened by the globalization of cultural standards.

Unlike AI, people have the ability to 1) change their style and 2) incorporate influences serendipitously. The randomness and mistakes people make do not rest in the datasets that machine learning requires. Moreover, people respond and appreciate the sacrificial time expended by other people. People hold hands and converse. AI can converse, but it doesn’t sacrifice its time in the process.

What is personal style and how much of it is simply a product of cultural imputation and the copying of influencers? Do we own our own sense of style? These are unanswerable questions; however, people can take surprising actions that upset rule-based approaches. People have the ability to shed rules and explore new ways of thinking and acting. Additionally, people can be exposed to events that modifies their personal style. This serendipitous stumbling can lead to a surprising randomness in style.

I do take joy knowing that imagination is greater than knowledge, imagination is an untethered rocket and a sweeping cool wind that carries thoughts wherever it will!  Maybe my technology-enabled works are only decorative, but I own them. They are my voice. Being able to present my voice is all I can ask. I can’t ask for fame or money, no one owes me that.

In this next chapter of design, the dogma should continue to crumble and distinctive human abilities should shine brighter while we swim in what AI is flooding at our feet.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the Cradle of all true art and science. Key to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer Wonder at stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. Albert Einstein 1930

* I like tradition. My students and I have crawled into a dark room under one of our campus buildings to do blind contour drawings. Weird and intriguing, but I really don't know how useful it is for the aspiring designer.

More ideation sketches! How many do you want? I have a few more minutes.

All images are from Dall-E 2 (and I)

 

Instructor Bias in Higher Education

This has been in my syllabus for a number of years and I try hard to follow it. The lectern should not be used for unfair advantages. Faculty have opinions, but opinions on many topics can be unfairly imputed onto students. 

Instructor Bias

My goal is that you learn how to think and not what to think.  By its nature, design requires creative (and very human) approaches.  These approaches can be influenced by tradition and an experientially rooted bias.  Your educational experience should not include receiving any sort of instructor indoctrination.

Where controversial issues arise, I may present information from sources representing differing views from which you can develop your own opinion.  These writings will be appropriate and professional presentations of the topics.  However, unlike me, you have the right to present your opinions in class, which other students can debate.  As an instructor with an unfair access to the podium, I do not share in that privilege.  Think for yourself!  However, design critiques are an important part of design education and these critiques should not be taken personally, they are intended for your benefit.

STEAM Education Hurts Art

Leave art alone. Why has art gotten drawn into STEM education, producing the cute acronym STEAM? Is art the decorative box that you put technology into? Have artists devolved to stylists?

The problem with STEAM is that art is pulled in as an afterthought, it is anchored to something not of its own making.

Art is often connected to technology, whether paint pigments or casting processes. However, art should not be constrained by these technical matters. Art merely uses the tools of technology. Technology shouldn’t use art.

Every year, my students and I make and launch rockets. The science is pretty simple: make everything aerodynamic and keep the center of pressure behind the center of gravity. There is no math. It is a lot of fun and it is always magical to touch the sky with rockets. However, it is not really STEM education. It is building stuff and having fun.

Launching a rocket or flying a drone is not STEM education, it is using technology. The acronym STEM is problematic in that it gives equal value to all subjects and suggests a sequential movement that is wrong. One must first understand math and science before moving to engineering and finally technology. Using technology has nothing to do with understanding the science and math that undergird it. It is unwise to equally couple the easier insights of using technology with the more difficult challenges of understanding science and math.

Technology is more important than science and math for most of us. We want X-ray technicians to be expert practitioners on safely operating X-ray machines. We don’t care if they know calculus or physics. But our educational system is locked into developing structured, theoretical foundations for professions.

Interdisciplinary study is good but we should study MSET and A instead of STEAM. Maybe MSET&A education is too hard to pronounce, let’s call it design education and move on.

And one more thing…

While it is easier to define what art is not, the Oxford English Dictionary commonly uses terms such as creative expression, beauty and emotional power. However, non artistic expressions can be creative, non artistic expressions can be beautiful.

One of the OED’s actual definitions is:

The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/art

 

Rocket party: STEM-like activity but actually model building and fun.
Painting party: Art with nothing to do with STEM.

Birds nest: I took this photo in my yard today. Is the bird an artist?

Honesty in Academia and Art

  

A well dressed, well-spoken admissions officer told us with a straight face that they read all the student essays at an Ivy League university we were checking out. 35,000 admission essays.

This was ridiculous and deceptive proclamation. The sad part is many applicants spend weeks getting their essay to look perfect. Clearly the facts are different, but we lie to our young people to present some sort of ideal impression. Us older, alas, more cynical people know when the numbers don’t line up.

How many people do you need to read, assess, and quantify 35,000 essays every year? They had an 8% acceptance rate. Why would they bother to read essays from students that didn’t meet other criteria? What are those secret criteria that they mask with their “essay” criterion?

I don’t know what they do with these essays. Logically, they use them for borderline cases and other program goals. Maybe they use keyword searches, discourse analysis, or AI driven evaluations. Maybe they don’t read most of them. The sad part of this deception is the false promise it makes and the wastage of applicants’ time.

And then we have the world of art in which branded artists seem to be more important than the art itself. We have art trying to squeeze into STEM education and thereby belittling art and selling it as design and styling. All with the catching acronym STEAM.

Recently a museum displaying the works of French Fauvist-style painter Etienne Terrus discovered that more than half of their collection was counterfeit. Counterfeits are humbling. The fact that counterfeiters spend time doing this work has a flattering component. However, it highlights the contrived values that can put fine art into the same category of DeBeers controlled diamonds. Perhaps this is why people love Bansky.

We all struggle with honesty. Read John Murray’s “Sanctity of Truth” if you really want to be humbled. I had my own business for a while and if you don’t present your best face to the market you won’t last long. Listing your string of failures isn’t normally a good marketing plan. 

It is humbling that both academia and art, which one would think are purveyors of a type of truth, struggle with what honesty means.

A preachy reflection on faculty commentary

     

        “I always remember my professor telling me…”

      "My professor used to say …."

These are the words that educators wish to hear. But is that what we want?  No!  Better memories for students are:

      “In that class I learned that I’m really good at …."

      “In that class I realized that …."

Because faculty usually don’t have tangible, market rooted abilities, they often try to "produce" students who share their views.  The goal can be to have students think like us.  This may seem reasonable if we ‘profess’ expertise in a discipline.  However, our expertise is a datum and the world is much more complex than we can capture.  

Why should a student care about our opinion on anything?  We should care about students’ opinions or opinions of those that don’t hold a power position in the classroom. 

Subjective assessment of student work is required for many of us. We like to call it "trained subjectivity" as we work through rubrics and past experience to critique work.  However, in trained subjectivity we must present our positionality with respect to our data.  For me as a Christian, the only sayings worth quoting are from the Bible, which presents what I believe to be the only eternal truths.  To quote the aphorisms of others is pointless.  

Of course, we can learn from great minds and those who have dedicated themselves tirelessly to our disciplines.  However, throwing out quotes from "experts" is weak exposition.  Where expert commentary is offered from the lectern, it should be two opposing opinions thereby allowing students to struggle with what they believe.  Our individual commentary is always connected with some intellectual ecology and worldview.  When we contend with various viewpoints, our inclination is to side with the greater expert, which is lazy epistemology. 

Don’t have your students quote you, don’t have them remember your opinions.  Let your role be such that they only remember their own intellectual walk.  Your vanity shouldn’t be satiated by young minds but rather confidence in the excellence of your teaching. Now, I just have to get over my own vanity and condescension…