Outdesigned By Your Computer
Martin Burns
Member info
User since: 26 Apr 1999
Articles written: 143
A study published in Science magazine claims that trained computers make better designers than untrained humans in producing creative adverts.
The study found that computers programmed with procedural rules of cognative psychology produced adverts which were consistently rated by a team of experts as being better than those produced by non-professional designers.
Before you get worried and change career to merkin combing, the authors also note that ads produced by professional designers were better than computers, and that the very best creativity involves a spark of randomness which cannot be built into procedures.
There's more at the BBC.
Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.
Amongst his favourite things is Zope
He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.
Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?
Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?
