Design & Machine learning: automation takes command?

1–
About

Ongoing research

• Formats and shapes of research
• Open access for project-basesd research
• Blockchain & NFTs
• Design & AI

2–
Mimesis machines?

2.1 —
Deep learning functioning

Deep learning & creation

How are deep learning technologies invested in the fields of art and design?

2.2
AIcademism

Mimesis machines

How can art history help to understand the dominant ways of doing simulated intelligences?

Academism → AIs

Hierarchy of genres → Ideal of technical progress

Superiority of drawing over color → Vectorization of the world

Indoor and workshop work → Cloud computing

Imitation of masters → Datasets remixes

Texture removal → High resolution

AIcademism

We can observe a temporal gap between photography as a technical invention, and photography as art, which is born of a divergence with the pictorial model.

2.3 —
Towards an automated creation?

Techniques without forms?

The acceptance of a world shaped by AIs is less in terms of replacement (replacement of humans by machines) than in terms of overlap: an environment in which one could not distinguish what is produced, or not, with AIs.

3 –
Mechanization or automation?

Mechanization or automation?

Mechanization (or industrialization) usually refers to efficiency and performance free of human contingencies.

Siegfried Giedion's book Mechanization Takes Command (1948), in which he analyzes several ways to optimize human labor, is part of this perspective.

Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command

• Division of labor = loss of global view
• Better living conditions = new addictions
• Inability to organize and "new barbarism"
• "Fear of progress, which has gone from being a hope to a threat"
• Need to find a new balance

Mechanization or automation?

• Are mechanization and industry homogeneous?
• How to work not for, but "with" machines?

« Pour [Walter] Benjamin, il ne s’agit pas de se résoudre mélancoliquement au sacrifice, mais de trouver ce que peut être le progrès de l’art, ou sa marche, sa méthode, avec l’industrie. Art et industrie devront aller ensemble, sans se sacrifier ni l’un ni l’autre et sans se sacrifier l’un à l’autre. C’est donc le rapport de service de l’industrie (ou de la photographie) à l’art qui fait l’objet de la critique de [Walter] Benjamin. »

— Pierre-Damien Huyghe, « Art et mécanique », Le Portique, nº 3, 1999

« In the world of mechanization, whether to work or just to consume, the standardization of time is a matter. This world is in the constancy of cadences, of the equal, of the repetitive. What it produces in an unprecedented way is uniformity. Thus the abundance of the industrialized society is in depth, and even if it defends it, haunted by the risk of monotony. »

— Pierre-Damien Huyghe, « De la mécanisation au design », Azimuts, 2013

Pierre-Damien Huyghe, « De la mécanisation au design »

• "The design was born to come out, not without difficulty, of this nostalgia. Its own historical principle was linked to a particular but determined acceptance of machines."
• "Design distinguished itself by fundamentally admitting that the technicality of the time […] did not necessarily merge with this [ruthless] mechanization."
• "[The historical characterization of design is] an attestation of a methodical order whose milieu and stake are indeed the way of making economy, that is to say [a] disposition of techniques in a machinic milieu."

"Our industry must train designers instead of craftsmen because our craftsmen are the machines, ready-made, efficient, docile craftsmen. On this point the mechanical power has made a clean sweep. How to get from these impressive “machines / craftsmen” what they can do best? Then, beyond the mechanical know-how, how to find the rhythms of the form?"

— Frank Lloyd Wright, « L’Architecture moderne » [1930], in : L’avenir de l’architecture, Paris, Linteau, 2003, p. 107-108. Quoted in : Pierre-Damien Huyghe, « De la mécanisation au design », Azimuts, 2013

Mecanization or automation?

• To be able to work with mechanics (with machines) without industrial mechanization
• Giedion's mechanization is now called automation
• Difficulty in thinking about the machine without automation

• How to work "with" deep learning machines in other directions than those of automation?
• How to escape the uniformity that characterizes the world of mechanization / automation?

4 –
Design in the age
of AIs

Design in the age of simulated intelligences

• 4.1 Highlighting the aesthetic standardization of the world
• 4.2 Generating hybrid or even chimerical forms
• 4.3 Exploring the flaws and inconsistencies of technologies
• 4.4 Going beyond the human/machine opposition
• 4.5 Combining translation and transcoding

4.1
Highlighting the aesthetic standardization of the world

4.2
Generating hybrid or even chimerical forms

4.3 —
Exploring the flaws and inconsistencies of technologies

« This invisible classification process is usually intended to produce automated decisions, which can have profound consequences for individual and collective freedom. The possible benefits of machine learning are many, but we run the risk of developing technologies of such complexity that our abilities to shape them to serve the common good are severely limited. »

—Alistair McClymont, John Fass, Of Machines Learning to See Lemon, 2018

4.4 —
Going beyond the human/machine opposition

4.5
Combining translation and transcoding

« Si je ne peux pas traduire, je ne peux pas comparer. […] Il est très facile de traduire un traité de chimie, de l’anglais en français, mais traduire un poème de Li Tai Po en français est presque impossible, traduire Mozart en architecture est un grand problème. […] Peut-être lorsque la science des codes aura fait des progrès plus grands, on pourra faire des familles de codes. Peut-être trouvera-t-on des codes qui peuvent être traduits et d’autres qui ne le peuvent pas. Si on fait un tel catalogue, on comprendra beaucoup de choses sur la situation humaine. […] C’est une théorie pour les temps nouveaux. C’est un champ d’engagement très grand, parce qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement de traduire de l’anglais en français, il s’agit, par exemple, de traduire Marx en Freud, ou Freud en catholicisme, ou le catholicisme en néopositivisme. C’est là le vrai jeu. Vous voyez où nous allons si nous commençons à penser en termes de codes. Nous allons vraiment vers une autre culture […]. »

— Vilém Flusser, Le monde codifié, Paris, Institut de l’Environnement, 1973

Conclusion –
Which pedagogy of simulated intelligences?

Which pedagogy of simulated intelligences?

• Potential for change comparable or even greater than PAO & CAO
• Automate tasks currently performed by designers
• However, most design training courses do not integrate these transformations, or even deny them (this is our hypothesis based on initial observations)

• In an age where simulated inteligences are part of our daily lives, how could (or should) design curricula be reconfigured?
• What skills are no longer relevant to teach?
• Which ones should evolve or be added?

“It is a question of thinking of technology as a system in front of which one must never lower the flag and know how to remain critical, but also as a gigantic mine of resources and potentialities. It is there that we must draw to imagine new qualities.”

— Ezio Manzini, Artefacts. Vers une nouvelle écologie de l’environnement artificiel [1990], Paris, CCI, 1991

@AnthonyMasure

www.anthonymasure.com

Powered by Reveal.js, MIT License
Licence (textes) : CC BY-SA
—
Typefaces
Forward (Frank Adebiaye & Studio Triple × Future Fonts, 2021)
IBM Plex Mono (Mike Abbink × Bold Monday, 2018)
—
Motifs des fonds : D3-Delaunay