Hofstadter’s Objection
After explaining the beautiful parquet deformations of William Huff, Douglas Hofstadter states his opinions about the algorithmic potentials of those patterns. Although it was 30 years ago, Hofstadter points out a fundamental discussion related to today’s parametric design tools;
…for a machine to make simple variants of a given design, it must possess an algorithm for making that design which has explicit parameters; those parameters are then modifiable, as with the pseudo-Mondrian paintings. But the way people make variations is quite different. They look at some creation by an artist (or computer), and then they abstract from it some quality that they observe in the creation itself (not in some algorithm behind it). This newly abstracted quality may never have been thought of explicitly by the artist (or programmer or computer), yet it is there for the seeing by an acute observer. This perceptual act gets you more than half the way to genuine creativity; the remainder involves treating this new quality as if it were an explicit knob: “twiddling” it as if it were a parameter that had all along been in the program that made the creation. That way, the perceptual process is intimately linked up with the generative process: a loop is closed in which perceptions spark new potentials and experimentation with new potentials opens up the way for new perceptions. The element lacking in current computer art is the interaction of perception with generation. Computers do not watch what they do; they simply do it…
Hofstadter, D.R. (1983). Metamagical themas questing for the essence of mind and pattern. New York: Basic Books. pp 191-199
I think we should listen to Hofstadter’s objection and remember to put creativity at the center of an algorithm design. This is why we are called “design”ers, not “programm”ers. And this is why there is a whole theory and pedagogy related to the term “design computing”, experimenting with the ways of designerly coding. This can not be successful if we only “engineer” an algorithm as Hofstadter suggests; but we should be in a design cycle, a “reflection-in-action” with all the parameters of a design situation including, materials, construction, perception, performance, and context.
Here is the link if you want to read the rest of the book.
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