Assignment 5 – Sophia

 To do this, I suggest a system that works with the user during the process of developing a composition, aiding them in making all those small decisions as opposed to only receiving critique once a piece is finished.  I imagine that the user would place a shape on the canvas or screen, and the system would propose a series of possible next steps that the user could make on screen or projected directly onto the work.  Even just being able to see how a one choice might affect the rest of the composition without committing to it would very helpful because this is something that can be hard to do when using physical materials (cutting out shapes of paper, etc.). The possibilities would be varied in shape, value, texture, color, and line, which are the ways that an artist or design can influence the feeling of the final composition.  The user could cycle through the possibilities and choose what feels best.  The user could repeat this process for as long as it is helpful.  The way the system would make suggestions would be derived from an algorithmic analysis of a bank of images of the work of other artists and designers.

I see a few different use cases for such a system.  I imagine that this could be very useful for teachers of art and design.  Teachers commonly tell students to study the work of artists before or after giving an assignment, but this sort of system would help the student during the process of making a work.  A teacher could assign a set of images to feed to her students’ systems to hone certain skills.  In addition, a teacher could tailor the input to each student, diagnosing weaknesses in the student’s design sense and prescribe artists that would help to counteract those weaknesses.  I also see such a system helping artists and designers working alone.  The user could teach themselves by inputting the works of artists they admire, and using the system would help them understand what it is about those works that is so appealing and successful.  Furthermore, the images fed to the system need not even be works of art but any source of inspiration, any image, and the system could become a new way of making work in general.

A system like this could also be easily adapted to record how an artist arrives at a composition and then play back those steps to someone else.  This would be almost like a paint by number but with an emphasis on the process of arriving at a composition and not just reproducing the final result (in which it can be very difficult to understand how the artist/designer got there), and it could also be a very useful learning tool.

When working digitally, something like this could be built directly into the graphics software. For sketching and painting, a camera could record the work in progress and the suggestions could be projected onto the work itself or shown on a screen on top of an image of the work.  Ideally, the user would be able to see the suggestions directly on their work and not on a separate screen.  Using projection would be problematic because projected colors do not have the same quality as those made with real materials, which will affect the user’s ability to weigh out their options effectively.  Also, artists need to work in bright light, and projections would not work as well in those conditions.  Projecting onto already colored surfaces also would also be a problem because the colors would mix and shapes would overlay and not occlude each other.  Many of these problems might be avoided by using AR glasses.

Such a system would also be useful for learning to arrange 3d spaces, making sculptures, etc. but this use case would likely have a confusing UI and be hard to implement.  Starting out, the algorithm for making suggestions would likely be very primitive and might not always analyze the input images correctly.  Understanding that one shape occludes another and that they are not just two shapes side by side also seems like something that would be hard to implement in the algorithm.  In addition, often good compositions are nuanced ones, and it would be hard for a computer to understand these nuances.  However, despite these limitations, such a system could still be very useful.

That this system might train artists and designers to all work in a similar way is a valid concern, but I would argue that this is no different than using any tool or technology (paint, a pencil, Photoshop, etc.), which also imposes constraints on how to think and work. By being able to iterate through the design choices more easily and reversibly, users could develop a “good eye” more quickly.  This system would also help the user learn from someone else’s working process, which is hard to do now.  I imagine this could be used in class, but that it would be particularly useful as a way for people to teach themselves when they do not have access to expensive art and design schools.  Furthermore, I believe that such a tool will help its user find her unique voice as an artist much more quickly.  As the user trains the system, she will discover what she likes and define her own style. Finally, such a system might even grow to be more than a learning tool and become a new method for creating works in ways I cannot even predict.