When looking at the historical evolution of the creative process – the reciprocal relationship between creativity and technology – there has always been a drive to automate and modernize the very same process. Times, when creativity and technology collaborate without boundaries, are followed by times one of the two rejects the other without mercy.
Brynjolfsson and McAffee point out in Race Against the Machine that machines are getting more human. Pattern recognition and complex communication are now manageable by computers. Will people still have any comparative advantage as we head deeper into the second half of the chessboard? Will computers be able to take over those very specifically ‘human’ skills a designer manages?
To automate or not to automate
When innovation disrupts an established industry, the capacity of jobs, or crafts, within that industry changes. Traditional, often century-old tasks or skills disappear or shift into other…
Autonomy on the edge of realism
David Hockney assumes (although it’s never proven because the actual tools are lost) in his book “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters” that in the 15th…
The Heckel diagram
In 1991 Paul Heckel, a software developer at Apple Inc, devised a set of 30 rules to guide software designers in their creativity. In short, the software designer had to learn to think like a…
Why designers hate Powerpoint
When graphic designers started to work with creative software, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they experienced the intervention of a new kind of automation for the very first time. A simple…
Japan, nation in the shell
Japan has been used to the existence of robots and artificial intelligence in society for years. There is a long cultural legacy of humans dealing with robots, and vice versa, not only in the…
The automation of representation
The birth of photography has a great story of successive inventions and is evolving even now with the popularization of digital cameras and the availability of digital snapshots. It’s a long thread…
Margaret A. Boden – The ‘Lovelace’ questions
What is creativity? A professor of cognitive science, Margaret A. Boden, has written extensively about creativity. She is also one of the foremost thinkers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.…
Introduction to TAD, the automated designer
Researching how technological automation affects creative work is similar to exploring the reciprocal dynamics in the relationship between technology and creativity. Every manmade thing,…
The automation of creative labour
Designers need their tools, techniques, processes, devices, and applications to act on their creativity. Without these tools, they would not be able to be creative. They could have ideas and think…
“Die stärkste Erkenntnis (die von der völligen Unfreiheit des menschlichen Willens) ist doch die ärmste an Erfolgen: denn sie hat immer den stärksten Gegner, die menschliche Eitelkeit.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches“