Ramesh Jain on Multimedia Search:

We do not have any similar structure defined to consider atoms, molecules, and grammars for pictures. Current image search engines that claim to use image attributes use things like histograms or textures which are neither atomic features nor molecular. They are usually aggregates of atomic features. Just imagine how useful it will be if a document was characterized by saying that it has 5396 a’s, 9456 b’s, 1294 c’s, 529 x’s, 1289 y’s, and 67 z’s. Similar techniques are currently tried by people to search images based on their content. What is needed is to define a “language” to describe pictures.

…This requires knowing those patterns and we don’t yet know those patterns. Research in many fields have been addressing these problems and once they have concrete answers, it may be possible to build on top of those. But our spoken languages were not defined like that. They evolved by standardizing certain patterns and then building using those patterns. Should we adopt a similar strategy?

I like the following passage from Design Noir, which I think serves as an ideal description of what academics focusing on HCI or user-centered design should be doing:

Rather than writing papers and seeking conventional academic approval, they could exploit their privileged position to explore a subversive role for design as social critique. Free from commercial restrictions and based in an educational environment, they could develop provocative design proposals to challenge the simplistic Hollywood vision of the consumer electronics industry. Design proposals could be used as a medium to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the public, designers, and industry.

Add “software industry” to “consumer electronics industry,” and there you have it. I would go farther, though: computer scientists, information scientists, and designers in academia shouldn’t just be proposing provocative designs, they should be building provocative systems. Too many academic projects look just like corporate projects, and are only being done in academia because they’re too far removed from actual human concerns to interest corporate research labs. Forget about founding your startup and shake things up a little bit…

Something I read this evening in Design Noir:

The subversion of function relates to a breakdown of order; something else becomes visible, unnameable, unable to find a correspondence in the material world. This subversion of function is related to not being able to find the right word, leading to the coining of neologisms that bend language to accomodate something new.

…echoed something I read just a few hours earlier in City of Glass:

What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella?

…which reminded me of something I just read in Beyond Backpacking:

Most commercial umbrellas are constructed with various pieces that are not necessary to the umbrella’s function. When I modify one of these umbrellas, these superfluous pieces are what I am after.

I just finished reading Paul Auster’s City of Glass and was interested to see that he foresaw GPS Drawing:

True, he had created the letters by the movement of his steps, but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no result, no trace to mark what you have done.

And yet, the pictures did exist…