{"id":4690,"date":"2022-02-09T13:40:15","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T18:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/?p=4690"},"modified":"2022-02-09T22:03:35","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T03:03:35","slug":"the-50-opacity-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/2022\/02\/09\/the-50-opacity-box\/","title":{"rendered":"The 50% Opacity Box"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Since coming to NC State 3 semesters ago, I\u2019ve been wondering why the professors here won\u2019t make it more obvious which design philosophies are the \u201cright\u201d ones to subscribe to. They even go so far as to assign readings from design academics whom they disagree with. Like the \u201cblack box\u201d of machine learning software, students emerge from graduate school with changed perceptions and new design philosophies, but it&#8217;s unclear to me what happens in the middle. At least that\u2019s the way it seemed. I was having trouble figuring out how the alumni got from point A to point B.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"><br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, I think the process is more like a \u201cslightly opaque box\u201d. Having had real conversations with professors about design, I know that you can just ask them what they think and they\u2019ll tell you. \u201cThis guy\u2019s ideas are outdated,\u201d \u201cI like her writing,\u201d etc. But they are very careful about steering you in any one direction. There is still something about the \u201cgrad school algorithm\u201d that is blurry to me, something that is shaping us (the students) that I can\u2019t get a good focus on.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Having recently attended a workshop on conversation and cybernetics with Paul Pangaro, I have been thinking a lot about the power that conversation has. AI is improving at exponential speeds but artificial conversational agents are still pretty dull. They don\u2019t understand irony or sarcasm and they are just products of the training data given to them. Myself, my grad school colleagues, and professors have also been shaped by our own design educations, careers, and the work that we consume. But we are also deeply affected by non-design interests, varied backgrounds, families, spirituality, art, and more.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Graduate school is a series of conversations, with ourselves, with our peers, and with our own work. These conversations have a cybernetic (steering) quality to them. But the conversations we have with each other shape our design perspectives in more complex ways than can be illustrated in an\u00a0 algorithm. There is a certain magic to it though, not unlike the black box of a machine learning algorithm.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m thinking about why I&#8217;m in grad school<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":4701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-incidentals","entry-card--landscape"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p86O3z-1dE","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/50-opac-box-bob.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4690"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4700,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4690\/revisions\/4700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/academics.design.ncsu.edu\/yesand\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}