Machine Indoctrination

March 2013 

From my post on Enabling Prejudices

One of the key insights of the early work on Design Thinking (Bryan Lawson, Peter Rowe) was the importance of heuristics, or what Rowe (following Gadamer) calls enabling prejudices, which will hopefully get us to a good-enough solution more quickly. 

As Christopher Alexander notes:

At the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch. The Timeless Way of Building p 204

We always approach a problem with a set of prejudices or prejudgements. Depending on the situation, these may either help us to solve the problem more quickly (enabling), or may lead us astray (disabling). The acid test of a set of heuristics or design principles is that they are mostly enabling most of the time.

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March 2025

Design schools indoctrinate their students in ways of solving design problems efficiently. If you are trained to follow a particular design approach - for example Bauhaus - this greatly reduces the complexity of the task, because it rules out a vast number of solutions that would be anathema to a Bauhausian.

Algorithms may be able to calculate vastly larger sets of options than a human designer, but as Adam Nocek explained yesterday in a talk at Goldsmiths, machine intelligence is subject to mathematical limitations on computability. I touched on this topic in my guest editorial for a journal special issue on Algorithms in 2023, but his argument was much more comprehensive and wide-ranging, linking to important questions of agency and subjectivity.

Many researchers have noted the prevalence of algorithmic bias, but if we accept the importance of heuristics and intuition in the design process, there are much more fundamental problems here. 

 

to be continued ...

 

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Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)

Dan Klyn, Skirmishing With Ill-Defined and Wicked Problems (TUG, 5 July 2013) - review of Rowe

Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think (1980, 4th edition 2005)

Adam Nocek, Designing in the age of artificial machines and Whitehead (Talk at Goldsmiths University, 19 March 2025)

Peter Rowe, Design Thinking (MIT Press 1987)

Richard Veryard, As we may think now (Subjectivity 2023) 

Related posts: From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices (March 2013), From Enabling Prejudices to Sedimented Principles (March 2013), Limitations of Machine Learning (July 2020)