Ged Carroll

Search results for: “"syd mead"”

  • AI and creativity

    Why AI and creativity?

    This post on AI and creativity was inspired by experiments being done at work by a member of our design department. They had been using Midjourney to create images within a minute of receiving an initial set of words as creative prompts.

    For example we created this surreal image which fits somewhere between Christian kitsch familiar to catholic households around the world and a touch of Syd Mead‘s visual futurism. This comes from the prompt. 

    Jesus fighting alongside the US Air Force
    https://flic.kr/p/2nSGwLB

    Other efforts weren’t successful, we had faces featuring eyes with two pupils and when it tried to render round shapes, it didn’t know when to stop. The hands would go on and on as a twisted mass of flesh. This could be resolved by creating a human character in a service like MetaHuman and uploading that to Midjourney as a base model instead.

    How neural networks drive AI and creativity?

    Midjourney works using two neural networks. The first works to render an image. The second compares the processing image to exemplars from a data bank of images. There is a back and forth exchange between the two networks until a number of variants are rendered. At this point the human operator is given a choice, or they can choose to have other variations created if the originals don’t meet their requirements.

    These images can be rendered in high resolution allowing for an amazing level of detail.

    Dystopian vibes

    The dystopian feel of the use of AI and creativity is down to a few different factors.

    The first reason is that dystopia is at the centre of our cultural zeitgiest in the west. Documentary maker Adam Curtis covers it really well in this discussion with with the Joe Politics channel on YouTube. This zeitgeist affects the type of imagery that the AI has available to draw upon and the kind of prompts that people use to create AI images.

    Secondly, the use of AI to ‘create’ something lacks the feeling and collective emotional experiences of a real person. Those elements can’t be captured in prompts which is why images land with the sensation of a dead fish.

    What does AI and creativity mean for agencies?

    Concepting

    The most immediate impact could be in rapid concepting, analogous to how rapid prototyping for manufacturing design. Creative teams would still need to conceive of ideas but concepts could then be brought to live in minutes.

    It’s as far away from the black marker and pad that creative directors traditionally used; as paste up graphic design techniques from the use of desktop publishing software that started to impact the design world in the mid to late 1980s.

    News illustrations and graphic novels show the way

    One of the first areas that is really shaken up by AI and creativity has been the world of the political cartoonist and news illustrator. At the moment newspapers and news magazines pay skilled artists to develop and conceptual designs that convey a political concept.

    A good example of this is the covers of The Economist magazine. However things are starting to change. US political publication The Bulwark has already started using AI generated illustrations processed by Midjourney. Midjourney has also been used to create graphic novels.

    One could easily see how this might be extended into business-to-business marketing for intangible products like software and services.

    Production

    The hyper-realistic effects that AI can produce is likely to inspire a desire in clients to use them more often for cost effective production costs. At the moment however, the results can be very hit and miss. There is a problem with hands, faces, interlocking round shapes and a ‘dead’ look to the work.

    Social implications

    At first we had a discussion about what happens to designers? Were they doomed? Should there be a universal income for them or should they march in the streets to ? How could the technology be stopped?

    I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine in this discussion. I pointed out that over the past few centuries, capital won out over labour every time. So people only kept their jobs if they cost less than the process to automate their tasks.

    Globalisation versus automation

    London like a few other cities have ad agency work done that is designed for global audiences. At the moment I work on campaigns designed for markets including: the UK and Ireland, Spain, Italy, the US, Vietnam and Japan. Globalisation seems to have benefited hub cities rather than moved the work to cheaper locales.

    This in sharp contrast to what happened to British manufacturing. Whole sectors largely disappeared:

    • Steel making
    • Textile mills
    • Shipbuilding
    • Car manufacturing
    • Chemical industry
    • Pharmaceutical manufacturing
    • Engineering and fabrication

    Where capacity was spared, it was largely down to the UK being a good point of entry into the European Union. As the number of countries expanded new manufacturing jobs moved east; and workers moved west to fill workforce needs in established UK factories depressing salaries.

    Research shows that globalization only accounts for 13 percent of job loss in US manufacturing while 88 percent of losses were from automation including robotic manufacturing. In fact, availability of ever-cheaper automation options combined with uncertainty in the global supply chain has led to a resurgence in “onshoring” manufacturing.

    Debunking the Myths: Job Loss, Globalization and Automation by Greg Council Parascript (April 14, 2017).

    Automation has been the quiet destructor of roles. During the 1960s businesses had typing pools and secretaries. Many of these roles disappeared due to desktop computers, office productivity software and the democratisation of touch typing as a skill.

    The Technium

    Even if labour won out over capital in the UK, there is no guarantee that they would be able to stop the march of technology. Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants shares the idea of ‘The Technium’. The idea behind The Technium is that technology has a momentum of its own building on previous progress. Kelly goes as far to describe it as a super organism of technology. He believes that it exerts a force that is partly cultural with technology influencing and being in turn being influenced by technology. All of which means adaption and accommodation are likely to be the way forward for now.

    Adaptation

    While people don’t realise it, you’ve been using what could be termed AI for decades:

    • Autofocus on a camera
    • Losing ‘shake’ in camcorder and smartphone video
    • Programmes in a microwave the attempt to cook a casserole or baked potato
    • Predictive text (although it seems to have become more stupid over time)
    • Siri, Alexa and Google’s various search functions

    In the case of a designer it would also include tools like the ‘lasso’ function in Photoshop that automatically cuts around objects including frizzy hair on a model. So it’s a bit late in the day for people to get squeamish about AI and creativity. Dominant creative software company Adobe sees the place of AI and creativity more as a technology to augment designers in their work rather than replace them. Much of the current Adobe focus seems to be on lowering the on-ramp for new users of their software packages.

    There will be more of a challenge for supporting professions like photographers. Fashion brand Hugo Boss is looking to 3D AI powered design to aid in product design and 3D rendering threatening product photography for websites, look books and catalogues.

    Limitations of AI and Creativity

    One of the things that my colleagues said which really struck with me was ‘if an AI told the world’s funniest joke’ would it know that it was funny? Software is being used to track emotional response, but it wouldn’t necessarily know why something was funny.

    The AI can’t be coded with a summation of life experiences, it can analyse emotions, but as far as we know doesn’t experience them yet. This probably explains why Studio Ghibli and Disney animation feels like it has much more life in it than the best AI renders.

    Is it art?

    Auction houses have sold works generated using AI, but is the art in the creation of the work, or in the decision to use an AI to do the work and thinking of the artist behind that idea? AI can produce works as they have existed before and mash-up genres and ideas, but it wouldn’t be able (at the moment) to create something completely novel through a leap of abstraction, such as a concept like Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture ‘Fountain‘.

    AI images can be nice, but do they involve an illusion of creativity? Everything that appears in an AI image is depended on the inputs that the AI receives and the content in image banks that it uses as a reference – which is the reason why AIs often sign works with an indecipherable script.

    Do artist styles have to be better protected as part of their IP as well as their works?

    IP issues goes beyond artists. We created an artistic rendering of Pokemon character ‘Pikachu’ on Midjourney using the prompt

    Definitely not a pikachu

    In conclusion

    If you’re a creative we eventually managed to get to four thoughts from the discussion:

    1. In the grand scheme of things, change is the only constant
    2. AI has been changing things and will continue to do so
    3. It is inevitable that there willl be some automation and augmentation happening in the creative professions such as design
    4. In the words of Douglas Adams book Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy ‘Don’t Panic’ – but be prepared to adapt and learn new skills and develop new areas of expertise

    Suggested reading

    AI-generated images open multiple cans of worms | Axios 

    AI-generated digital art spurs debate about news illustrations | Axios 

    AI Makes 1993 Video Game Look Photorealistic 

    The Push of a Button – by David OReilly – Reminders 

    DALL-E now allows anyone to cash in on AI art, but ownership gets complicated | Quartz

    GitHub – microsoft/AI-For-Beginners: 12 Weeks, 24 Lessons, AI for All! 

    Inceptionsim : Going Deeper into Neural Networks

    The Golden age of AI-generated art is here. It’s going to get weird – FT Online

    Novo Nordisk wins over doctors with AI email subject lines — and a human touch – Endpoints News 

    MAX Sneaks – by Kevin Hart & Bria Alexander, Adobe, Inc.

    Demo of AI ad copywriting and art direction for online ads 

    Books

    Harvard Business Review – Artificial Intelligence: The Insights that you need to know (HBR Insights Series)

    Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky

    Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy

    Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date – Robert X. Cringely

    Inevitable & What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements by Nils J Nilsson

    8vo: On The Outside by Mark Holt & Hamish Muir

    Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

  • The Line

    The Line or Neom

    The Line or Neom is a building project in Saudi Arabia. It is a 110 mile or 170 kilometre long building. It will be 200 metres wide and 500 metres or 1,600 feet tall. Inside the structure will be a city to house 9 million people, amenities like school and leisure, their work and public transportation.

    The Line - Saudi Arabia
    NEOM advert in the FT

    The Line will be run on renewable energy and involve some sort of smart grid to optimise the living experience. They’ve apparently already started the earth works on construction and expect to have it completed by 2030.

    Dystopian

    The Line has been criticised in western media as dystopian. The mind immediately turns to science fiction visions like Judge Dredd’s Mega City One or William Gibson‘s cityscapes in his sprawl trilogy books: Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They would likely consider ‘ideal’ to look more like the Bosco Verticale in Milan, or the STH BNK in Melbourne, Australia, both of which look very nice. However, isn’t necessarily a panacea as one forestry expert noted.

    ″I think it’s very important that trees are given space,” Cecil Konijnendijk, from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, told CNBC.

    “We know that soil — what we call soil volume — is really important, so the trees have to have space underground, maybe even more so than over ground,” he added.

    “And then of course trees will have to have time to develop, so you won’t have instant trees. You’ll have to take the time to make sure they grow up and then they provide the benefits that we want to get from them.”

    Cecil Konijnendijk, from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry on CNBC

    And it wasn’t just the media who were critical, there were people who spoke out on social media or wrote to the FT like Mark Hudson of Blandford Forum, Dorset.

    While the developers claim that it has green credentials and is a harbinger of a low carbon future, there are concerns about its effect on local fauna, flora and migrating birds.

    Retrofuturism

    Moonwalk 1
    Moonwalk 1 Artist: Andy Warhol, 1987 Media: Silkscreen on paper Description: The famous image of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon has become an icon of popular culture. It became material for Warhol’s silkscreen series of nationally known images printed on vibrant, retro, poster colors. Image Credit: Andy Warhol for the NASA Art Program

    When I saw the adverts for The Line, I was reminded of two things. NASA’s Art Program and the visual futurism of Syd Mead.

    Syd Mead Poster
    A poster apparently designed by Syd Mead for the 1983 World Sports Fair in Japan

    Syd Mead created designs and conceptual art for clients including Ford Motor Company and Philips Electronics.

    In the 1970s and 1980s, Mead and his company provided architectural renderings, both interior and exterior, for clients including Intercontinental Hotels, 3D International, Harwood Taylor & Associates, Don Ghia, Gresham & Smith and Philip Koether Architects.

    As the 1980s came around Mead developed working relationships a number of Japanese corporations including Sony, Minolta, Dentsu, Dyflex, Tiger Corporation, Seibu, Mitsukoshi, Bandai, NHK and Honda.

    Mead cemented his place on popular culture with his work on

    Mead’s world, was the world that my generation were promised but was never delivered. Instead we got social media. (If you want to see more of Mead’s work I suggest Sentury and Sentury II.)

    The Line
    NEOM advert in the FT

    NASA has an art program that is still running, all be it in a diminished form today. During the 1970s NASA Art Program artists and researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center explored what a future space colony might look like.

    Toroidal Colony
    Toroidal Colony – Cutaway view, exposing the interior. Art work: Rick Guidice. NASA Ames Research Center
    Torus Interior
    Torus Interior. Interior view. Art work: Don Davis. NASA Ames Research Center

    That feeling of retrofuturism might not be accidental. An architect writing in the FT commented on the similarity between The Line and a concept proposed (as more a provocation or thought experiment) by a group of Italian artists called Superstudio who proposed a white gridded wall across the Arizona desert in the late 1960s called Il Monumento Continuo or Continuous Monument in English.

    The case for a city like The Line

    Firstly, Saudi Arabia has to do something, doing nothing isn’t an option.

    At the moment, the population is growing at about 1.65% a year and the average age of the population is just below 30 years old. By comparison the population in the UK is 43. Energy consumption tripled from 1981 to 2010 and if things carry on like this the country will soon move from being the worlds largest energy exporter, to a net importer.

    The Saudis only have so much time to do something before the favourable petro-economy conditions turn against them.

    The demand for oil won’t dry up completely, but the economics change when oil becomes about supplying legacy transport in the developing world, which will likely go on for a long while, together with a small amount of vintage vehicles run by enthusiasts.

    To give you an idea of how long this can be. Leaded petrol started its phase out in cars back in 1975, in the US, and only stopped being sold in 2021. Leaded fuel is still used for some aviation power plants.

    Then there will also be a continued need for chemical feedstocks for the likes of the pharmaceuticals sector and manufacturing. At the moment Saudi Arabia’s GDP is just under 600 billion pounds a year, but that doesn’t mean that it will stay at this level for long, or by how much it will decline.

    Then there is the challenge of making Arabian peninsula liveable during climate change. They’ve seen the Arab spring in Egypt and Tunisia, or the Syrian civil war and they don’t want it to happen in Saudi Arabia.

    Concentrated populations in cities are better for the environment than having them spread out homesteading or living in suburbia. Less environmental impact delivering services. All of which Stewart Brand puts the case for; far more elegantly than I could in his Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

    Where does my own opinion lie on The Line?

    I can understand why the Saudis have gone there. They have sound pragmatic reasons for doing something.

    I also feel nostalgic about the childhood future I dreamed of seeing when I looked at Syd Mead and the NASA space colony art work in children’s science books and a sense of a bright future lost.

    But I don’t know how much of it will actually work.

    • Will the Saudis be able to find design fixes for migrating birds or animals in the same way that roads have developed overpasses or underpasses in the west?
    • Will the smart city systems work?
    • What about the renewable energy capacity?
    • Will there be an economy inside The Line? What will it look like?
    • What kind of society will be constructed inside The Line?
    • Will The Line be able to cope with an extreme weather event like a sandstorm, or the flash floods from rare rainstorms that occasionally happen even in the desert?
    • How will the infrastructure be repaired or upgraded once its all built?
    • Will the Saudis be able to afford completing The Line, or will they run out of money? The 2008 financial crisis crushed development in Dubai the following year and the aftershocks are still being felt through stretching out debt deadlines. Dubai property developers like Limitless went through successive rounds of financial restructuring. The Line is a project on a far grander scale.

  • Volkswagen Beatle fairwell & other things this week

    Volkswagen Beatle

    Volkswagen Beatle – after seven decades Volkswagen is finally saying goodbye to its most iconic vehicle. It seems the Beatle won’t make it into the electric future of Volkswagen.

    Visual Futurist – Syd Mead

    We lost visual futurist Syd Mead at the end of 2019. Mead was best known now as the stylist on Blade Runner, but had worked for a number of US corporates including Ford and US Steel. He’d also done work for NASA.

    Even if you don’t know Mead, you’ve likely seen his work. Or the stuff influenced by his work.

    My first reaction on hearing the news is that fate is cruel. Mead has left us, but in his place we have Elon Musk.

    Animal thoughts

    Ze Frank for Audible on animals thoughts for Christmas. Animal thoughts for Christmas reminds you of how alien our rituals must seem to our pets. The random associations that they will likely form with things like tinsel. The cat going on about tree torture is the best part of it. But the inner trips of cats on cat nip comes a close second.

    Connected restaurant

    Three Ireland have executed on an idea I investigated back in 2005 for Motorola. Back then it was a lot harder to get the bandwidth and screens to do it. We were also thinking on a bigger scale, connecting Trafalgar Square with public spaces around the world. Three Ireland made the venue more intimate. It was a lovely to see the creative wrapper that Three Ireland put around it that resonates with Irish households around the world.

    Sesame Street

    Sesame Street characters do impressions of each other. I know that some characters might be voiced by the same actors and wonder if that what was going on here. I am constantly amazed by the timelessness of the Sesame Street franchise.

  • Interface design

    Interface design

    This reflection on interface design has taken a while to write. When I started we were on the cusp of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. If you’re interested in technology, but aren’t an Apple fan it still matters as it sets the agenda. Apple’s moves affect wearables, smartphones, tablets and OTT (over the top) TV services.
    The New York Times published an interesting article Apple Piles On the Apps, and Users Say, ‘Enough!’.
    Ignore the title of the article itself, which is a function of clickbait rather than content. Instead, it provides an good critique of interface design across platforms. It highlights:
    • The difficulty in finding and installing other apps inside Messages. Many users aren’t aware of the functionality. This is different to the ‘interface as oldster barrier’ that SnapChat had. DoorDash – a Deliveroo analogue dropped a support after a few months due to a lack of users. Apple took a second run at this with iOS 11 trying to improve discoverability
    • Apple 3D touch isn’t used to drive contextual features by app developers
    • The Apple Watch’s mix of crown, button and small touch screen made ‘lean in’ interactive apps hard. The Apple Watch interface isn’t learned by ‘playing’ in the same way that you can with a Mac or an iPhone. Apple’s forthcoming watchOS update looks to have Siri ‘guess’ what you want. It wants to provide contextual information to users (and reduce interactions)
    If you ignore 3D touch for a moment, these problems are cross platform in nature. (Some vendors like Huawei have attempted a similar 3D touch feature in their own apps. They did not try to get developer adoption.)
    Thinking about Messenger app developers struggle to integrate disparate features into the interface. The exceptions are:
    • LINE
    • WeChat – the take up of mini-apps in WeChat have been disappointing performers. Is this indicating a possible ceiling for functionality?
    Wearables as a category looks thin, with Apple being one of the largest players. Pebble got acquired by Fitbit. Jawbone seems to be a dead company walking. Their blog was last updated in October 2016, Twitter in February. It’s ironic: their original BlueTooth headset business would now be a great opportunity.
    I’ve tried Casio’s BlueTooth enabled G-Shock, four Nike Fuelbands and a Polar wearable. I am on my second Apple Watch and I still don’t know what the real compelling use case is for these devices.
    So how does this stuff come about? I think its down to the process of creation, which affects analysis and critical analysis of the product. Creation in this case is essentially throwing stuff up against the wall until it sticks and then the process becomes reductive. As a case in point, look how smartphones have evolved to the slab form factor. 
    Throwing stuff against the wall
    I’ve worked enough times on digital products to understand the functionality is king. It’s the single most important thing. I’ve worked on products that wonderful functions but:
    • Consumers didn’t know they had a need, its hard to get consumers to build new habits. Forming habits can be hard
    • They were a bitch to sign up with. Yahoo!’s sign-up process killed products. It’s a fact. We’d get consumers hyped up, we’d deliver them to the relevant page and they wouldn’t convert. I didn’t blame them, if I wasn’t an employee or digital marketer I’d have done the same
    That’s how products are now built. The focus is on speed of execution of the idea. It isn’t about thinking through the complete experience. Agile methodologies with their short sprints puts emphasis on function. Away from data to feed into big picture optimisation. A function focus means that you end up with ‘lean in’ interaction designs as default.
    There aren’t many organisations that get it right. I’d argue that the early Flickr team and Slack ‘got it’. Though there are common factors:
    • Both Flickr and Slack had common key team members
    • Both products fell out of failure. Flickr came out of tools for Game Neverending. Slack began as a tool in the development of Glitch
    Where are the ergonomists and futurists?
    There are people who can provide the rigorous critique.
     
    Back in the day organisations with large R&D functions like NASA and BT employed writers to envisage the future. Staring into the future became a career. People like Syd Mead provided a visual map of the future. Mead and others did a lot of work thinking about the context of technology to users. At the present time lots of criticism levelled at VR glasses is it being anti-social. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Social interaction is more likely to come glasses wearer to glasses wearer. It will happen in a virtual third space. Neal Stephenson explored this third space in Snow Crash. The Black Sun was a virtual night club.

    Bill Moggridge, designer of the GRiD Compass computer – the world’s first laptop thought a lot about ergonomics. The laptop had a 11 degree slope from pop-out leg to the keypad. This is something that your MacBook Pro or Surface doesn’t have. There is a lack of depth in technology design compared to what Moggridge had. He brought in psychologists and studied human computer interaction. He eventually co-founded IDEO.

    Whilst the elements that Moggridge looked at were well known the thinking doesn’t seep into product categories. We are very good at asking can a product be made. We are poor at asking what does the product really mean. Apple’s viewpoint on the tablet segment is a case in point.

    The vast majority of tablets are used for lean back media consumption from watching films and reading books to reviewing emails. It can work as a productivity device in specific circumstances with custom built apps – say field sales or replacing a pilot’s flight paperwork. The keyboard and power of modern Macs (and PCs) provide a better tool for content creators; whether its analysing a spreadsheet or writing this blog post. 

    Yet, since its launch by Steve Jobs, Apple has viewed the iPad as a new PC. The iPad Pro has been designed to try and catch up in features with the Mac. It is ironic that Microsoft has moved a slim ‘MacBook clamshell design’ analogue into its latest Surface range.  

    Shanzhai

    It is very different to the pragmatic design ethos of China’s ‘shanzhai‘ gadget markers who came up with both laughable and exceptionally smart solutions. Everything from the dual SIM phone to the phone / electric razor hybrid. Successes bloomed, educated a collective knowledge of makers and a manufacturing ecosystem of facilitators, while the oddities slipped into the night.

    The manufacturing ecosystem played a crucial role in upping smartphone quality. Metal phone enclosures started to trickle down to other manufacturers once Apple had grown the capability of CNC manufacturers with orders for thousands of machines in Foxconn factories. This also fed expertise in how to use these machines in mass manufacturing. Which shows how physical interface design can be influenced almost as fast as software interface design in terms of commercial rivals.

  • ABZU & other things

    ABZU

    I like my computer entertainment trippy rather than action packed like this trailer for computer game ABZU

    Best battle of the bastards meme after the Game of Thrones episode caused an outburst of video creativity. Equating Jon Snow to Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins was genius. Whilst we talk about the fragmentary nature of online content, mainstream media is still providing the key cultural moments.

    Design

    The outlandish Rolls-Royce self-driving car of the future: Vision Next 100 | ExtremeTech – it has more of the design language of a Bristol than a Rolls Royce. Mercedes has an interesting take implying that UNHW individuals would still like the choice to drive rather than a self-driving car

    Amazing analysis of typography in Blade Runner. The level of detail is impressive. It also speaks volumes of the set designers and visualisers like Syd Mead

    FMCG

    Even the world’s biggest candy company doesn’t think you should be eating this much sugar | Quartz – there is another explanation to consider. Does having M&Ms in a McFlurry cheapen the brand or act as an economic substitute for a bag of M&Ms?

    Philadelphia Is the Nation’s First Major City to Pass a Soda Tax | Time – research on the effectiveness of this could be decisive in future legislation. It is interesting how it has also being rolled out in Mexico and discussed at a policy level across Europe

    Online

    Grandma with incredibly polite Google searches | BGR – it reminds me of my parents ‘Ask Google about…’

    US asks to join Irish data protection court case – Schrems argues that the use of these clauses does not change the fact that Facebook is still subject to the US mass surveillance program, and that the CJEU has already found them to be in conflict with EU law

    Software

    Samsung to Buy Joyent | WSJ – interesting move by Samsung. It makes sense for them to by as software and cloud has been a weaker capability than hardware design

    WeChat Moments – The Holy Grail of Social Media Marketing In China | Racepoint Global – my ex-B-M and Racepoint colleague James on WeChat

    Web of no web

    Biz Break: Apple Watch outlook may be dimming | SiliconBeat – the rationale is interesting and is category-wide rather than an Apple-specific platform. More on the Apple Watch here.

More posts