Just some random thoughts of yet another someone who went to OCAD

How do you document something that does not yet exist? If the way to go about the project is “to make the best art piece you can and see what comes out of it,” how do we even draw up a plan when the art piece does not yet exist? Perhaps, the way to do this is to go back to our team’s “manifesto” (for lack of a better word)?

Just back from a talk on the history of stained glass that was held at AFT’s North York campus—I was surprised the walk back home took just about 20–25 minutes or so. Obviously, I wouldn’t have understood everything. (Actually I doubt I would have understood everything even if the talk were in English.) But then I went there really mainly as a useful kind of distraction, or inspiration… something like that. It’s ironic: Back when I was actually an AFT student I would never go to these talks because they would always clash with my classes. (And the one time my teacher actually decided to have the whole class go to a presentation on translation I missed class because I was too tired after returning from AIGA Pivot and fell asleep.) Now that I’m not an AFT student, I’m starting to go to these talks—at least to those that are art related. I probably only got 50% out of the talk, maybe less, which is, I guess, a good way to remind me that language is a real barrier. But I would really be skeptical if someone went to me and told me that a machine of some sort would solve this language problem. But the other thing, too, was about my being 10 minutes late. As it turned out, since my walk back home only took 20–25 minutes, my walk there should also have taken just 20–25 minutes, which means that had I not trusted in TTC’s NVAS system, I would probably have gotten there on time. The NVAS, essentially, is worse than useless. GPS can’t solve reliability issues. No one is working on those NVAS related quads, but this means that if anyone actually worked on those quads the final design artefact would be pretty much just as useless as NVAS itself…

Both the AIGA and the RGD were holding webinars today—at exactly the same time—, and since the RGD one seems to be directly related to my studies, I opted to go to the RGD one. What I got out of this: I have seriously underestimated the amount of work I need to do to finish this week’s assignment. Not that I wasn’t aware of that yesterday when I went to the library to do a good read of the course material, but if there is no established database and no established list of design journals in existence, then I’m pretty much screwed unless I started last Thursday, which I did not. Or unless the bibliography I should come up with would appear in a journal in a “related discipline,” which again is not going to be the case. I don’t know what I’ll be able to come up with, but whatever I manage to do will, as it stands, not be very good.

I went to the “Navigating the World of Design (w/ Zahra Ebrahim)” forum today, without really knowing what it was before I went. So it was a really good discussion (not really a “presentation” in the usual sense of the word), and Zahra turned out to be really friendly and approachable. Too bad I have never been good at coming up with good questions to ask. But in any case, the career related stuff aside, two things really struck me: how much her vocabulary overlaps our program’s (“disability” and “social impact” in particular, and probably a couple more, but I bet she’s unknown in our class), and her assessment on the state of graphic design. A few days ago—in fact last week after that class that “accidentally” happened—Brandon was talking about graphic design being “dead.” I was not convinced. But today Zahra also mentioned the fact that traditional design firms—even large firms—are failing, and this is something I was not aware of. Her conclusion—if I am not mistaken—the value of designers is in design thinking and our process. (Ok, am I allowed to say “our”?) Which is exactly what AIGA has been saying for the past two years. (And Ric Grefe calls it “craft.”) So, there, perhaps this is why we have such divergent views: Brandon views graphic design as print; print is “dead” (or so they claim) and so graphic design is “dead.” But I view graphic design as more than print: My idea of graphic design includes print, web design, environmental grapic design, and video, and I was never convinced that graphic design is “dead” because even though people might argue that print is dying, web design, EGD, and video are obviously not dead. But the essential question remains: Can I say I “get” the process? Can I say I “get” design thinking? I really don’t know but I suspect I might not like the answer.

Working through the source text of a translation contest, suddenly the inadequacy of ordinary dictionaries and thesauri was bugging me again. There are at least semi-usable thesauri for English, but for Chinese, there is virtually nothing usable. (True, the Revised Dictionary of the National Language is somewhat useful as a thesaurus too, but it is not even comprehensive enough as a dictionary…) So that quad that I drew in the summer semester (which I believe no one really noticed and so no one commented on) suddenly came back to me: We do need a better thesaurus, and in the fine tradition of Princeton’s WordNet, it should probably be an open platform where people can contribute. We really need “a better thesaurus,” for both English and Chinese, where people can look up not only synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and that vague notion they call “sister terms,” but antonyms, emphatics, and causatives (yes, those alledgely Semitic ideas). The lack of something that can jog our memory to come up with that elusive causative we invariably need is, in my humble opinion, a serious problem for translators. Maybe that can be a project, or a paper, or something. I don’t know. Does this really have anything to do with my program? I never got that feedback I needed.

I still have about 40 pages more before I can mark this book as “read,” but I am becoming less and less convinced of the validity of his ideas. One serious problem with his arguments is that he seems to have absolute no idea what axioms are, as he talks about “axiomatic certainty” on page 45 while and on page 149 he talks about “making unfalsifiable claims is not science.” The thing is that anyone with a mathematical background knows that axioms are by definition unfalsifiable claims (and must be unfalsifiable in order to do their job), and yet any logical argument must begin with these unfalsifiable claims, or else it’s just “vacuously true.” Naturally, then he continues to sing praises of evolution (page 150) as if there were no unfalsifiable claims, which is of course false, because if there were no unfalsifiable claims then there would be no axioms and therefore no logic to speak of. Evolution, if it really is science, must contain—and in fact must be based on—unfalsifiable claims. Both evolution and creationism are based on unfalsifiable claims, and must necessarily be so because the laws of logic demand it. And creationism is in fact very much valid science. If he is not even aware of this, how can he persuade us to believe his other ideas?

Where Design Is Going, And How To Be There, posted just two days ago on AIGA’s web site, sounds eerily relevant to our program. In fact it seems to fit right into the theme of our first assigned reading for the next semester. The fly in the ointment? It quoted a Chinese proverb which apparently is only a very loose translation.

There is neither a braille nor an audio version of this notice anywhere. So, in other words, “blind people and Muslim women are not welcome at our bank.” Is such the attitude of our society’s institutions? Or are they just so insensitive that they didn’t know blind people exist?

We really have been introduced only to CapScribe and Amara, the latter of which I was deeply familiar. But is this really the limit of what’s available?

Aegisub

When I was looking for alternatives for our captioning assignment, by chance I found Aegisub after a long unsuccessful search for open-source MacOSX-compatible editors. It is MacOSX compatible. And it is open-source. But for a simple school project the interface looked far too complicated; it’s, however, probably going to be really useful if I learnt how to use it and a real project comes my way.

SubtitleEdit, Jubler, MPC-HC

A few days ago I was checking my site statistics and noticed an interesting backlink, which linked to this post which recommended a few subtitle editors that I didn’t know about:

• SubtitleEdit—open-source, but Windows only
• SubtitleEdit Online—cloud-based version of the above (alternative to Amara)
• Jubler—open-source, multiplatform (Java-based)
• MPC-HC—open-source, but Windows only

Since I don’t have Windows, the only one I can check out is Jubler. I’ll do that some time.

InqScribe

The other day I landed on this post and a poster recommended InqScribe. It supports both Windows and MacOSX, but it’s a commercial piece of software. So there seems to be really quite a lot of options other than just CapScribe and Amara. Maybe some time I’ll try them all and report back what I find.

I logged in to my course account yesterday, left it open, and today I found the login screen sitting where my studio course’s syllabus should have been. Why is a timeout even necessary? To force students to take breaks? These annoying timeouts are there even if you saved the pages onto your hard disk. Why is this happening in this program in particular? Isn’t our program the unlikeliest place on earth that this happened? I am sure this is an act of exclusion at least for blind people, people with learning difficulties, or people with motor impairments. Did the programmer even try out that green dot computer interface thing? Are they telling us to block the timeout code as if it were a virus? Why are all web sites getting less and less usable? What is it, really, that we—the design, IT, and engineering professions on the whole—are striving towards? Isn’t our goal usability and not uselessness?