On Robots and Designers – Experimental Practical Study of
Production and Skills
For my Master's Thesis, I chose to explore the concept of
artistic education combined with the questions the ready-to-use
advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) leave us with.
"Speculating on the possibility of complete or partial
replacement of humans to robots, many would wonder why, as a
designer, i would risk the possibility of replacing my own
skilled work with self-learning software that can physically
produce my desired aesthetics efficiently and in less time: a
designer being replaced by a robot.
Of course, replacing a designer (myself or anyone else) with a
robot will effectively aid in production processes of any given
design; the designer will customise the robot to produce with
his/her specific skill set – the creator's solution to complete
a given task. However, to understand my endeavour to replace a
designer (myself or anyone else) with a robot, it is of utmost
importance to understand the difference between creativity and
skill. Creativity is natural and inborn. It is often measured in
extent and cannot be honed.
Work on these topics is made possible in recent years due to
current technological developments - amidst those two stand out
to be prominent. Firstly, industrial robots have made it outside
of industrial settings. Advancements in industrial production
methods sanction decommissioning out-dated machines due to
availability of high-end new technologies; but mechanically a
twenty-year-old robot is mostly similar to its modern
counterparts.The main change happened in software. This allows
resellers to restore these robots and bring them back to the
market for a fraction of the original price, making it
affordable for small-scale companies. Still, current users are
able to form the instructions on high-powered systems and then
transfer these files into their functional older robotic
systems.
Secondly, as far as technological development is concerned,
lately there has been an upsurge in machine learning, a subset
of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Instructions on how to build
deep learning neural networks are readily available online.
Google released their TensorFlow software, built by its 'Google
Brain' division (initially intended for internal use), as an
open-source software library. Safe to say, looking at the
functionalities of these various open-source software and
available machines to support them, machine learning has become
a tool to create new creative work in the hands of artists and
designers.
A foray on sketching
It is very important to understand that while learning to
sketch, we learn to control the movement of our arm and hand, as
well as the position of our joints. It is seen in competitive
Asiatic cultures such as in India and Japan – where various
forms of arts constitute an important part of culture and
expression, – students as young as four years of age learn to
control their hand movements by practicing straight line
drawings. For implementing Dhyãna (India) or Zen (Japan),
children are often disciplined based on their ability of line
drawings. Keeping that in mind, mimicking this human arm
resemblance while sketching a line is the most basic and
important first step to train or make my robot function is a
desired direction of output. In this case the output being my
own line drawing skills. In relevance to line drawing it is
worth mentioning that between the 1960’s and 1970’s, American
visual arts saw a new trend: “less is more” or Minimalism.
I use the word "create" for a trained neural network because it
is guessing the most probable continuation from an externally
fed starting point: by its own calculations - this is very much
similar to a newly trained human illustrator. Therefore my
software is allowing my robot to “create” and not simply
“produce” what I ask it to. Which technically proves my stand in
my hypothesis “(a) robot is not a machine that can create” is
partially wrong. If human learning is a process of acquiring
knowledge, where our behaviours along with skills, values and
ethics are acquired when we process information through our
minds to learn – then robots can learn too and posess a
different set of behaviours along with skills, values and ethics
that they acquire through set software, and process information
through neural networks to learn. Just like human learning is
taking place through education, personal development or
informal/formal training, a robotic learning is taking place
through same set of protocols that go with the aspect of
learning.
For any given artist, the set question for a gallerist is this:
“where did you train?” It is a known fact that this training is
all about learning skillset of another artist or art movements
and then either replicating the style or reconstructing the
style in ones own taste. Everyone has their own interpretation
and ways of accepting this sort of training and reconstructing
learnt styles in an unexpected way. Thus, through my experiments
I have managed to prove that my robot is capable of doing the
same, provided I introduce it to a system where the robot can
learn.
Therefore, my hypothesis stands corrected as:
A robot is a machine that can create when taught, and also is a
machine that can imitate skilled labour. Thus, robots are not
just tools to help generate that what the designer or artist
would demand of it. But, has the capability to create new by
taking old and existing. ".
Today even robots become unemployed. The industrial optimization
pressure accelerates the generation change of these machines,
which are spun on ebay long before the expiration of their
intended service life.
In architecture, robots have been a popular field of research
for a number of years, but the design industry in Switzerland is
only occasionally getting involved with them. As designers we
should deal with such discarded robots, because in the
post-industrial context we can also use them alternatively - we
are less concerned with process optimization than with
fascination, staging and uniqueness.
My diploma dealt in three aspects with the question of how I can
work as a designer with robots. With the conference "Applied
Robotics in Art and Design Education" Mischa Schaub and I have
jointly invited to a workshop that was well received across
national borders. The establishment of the association postup in
Mulhouse opens my future for me through the industrial robot
installed there. At the heart of my work is the experimental
approach to the machine itself. At the conclusion of the
diploma, I now want to give the acquired knowledge an expression
that encourages the viewers to see robots with different eyes.