Who's to Blame? Human or Machine?

In an article featured in The Guardian a few years ago, author Tom Chatfield states "Meaningful collaboration between people and machines must not subvert human creativity, feeling, and questioning over speed, profit, and efficiency. This sentiment has been echoed over the past several years and is getting even louder.Google has made blunders before, for instance when they released a new photo app in 2015 which resulted in automatic tagging of black people as gorillas. Google was quick to blame the problem on computer algorithms and quickly removed the "gorilla" category.The most recent controversy has been about an app that was released in 2016 and matches selfies to works or art. Once again Google's app is having a hard time with how it interacts with images of people of color. Much of the conversation has focused on choice of museums and organizations that Google has chosen to partner with and the collections that they have, or rather what's lacking in their collection.Others, like Joy Buolamwini, a Researcher at MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, feel that the heart of the problem lies in the teams of mostly white engineers who create facial recognition algorithms based on their own experiences.Neither of these arguments speaks to what some feel is the heart of the problem, the intertwining of human and machine relationships, and how we as humans view our roles with these machines. In an article for The Guardian, author Tom Chapman writes, "We think of ourselves as individual, rational minds, and describe our relationships with technology on this basis." But we do not have as much individual freedom and autonomy as we think we have, we are interdependent, relying on our devices much more than we would like to admit.The same logic that Google's algorithms use are at work in all aspects of our lives, cars that drive themselves—medical procedures that don't require a physician. The problem is that technology is Darwinian and data and performance drive where our culture is headed.Argodesign's Mark Rolston recently wrote an article for Co.Design that points designers to doctors for a model on adopting an ethical code. While I agree that ethics are called for, I don't know if a model has been created yet for any profession that deals with the issues ahead of us.ProPublica is one organization that is actively working to change things as Katharine Schwab reports for Co.Design. Led by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Julia Angwin. Dedicated to investigating algorithms that impact people's lives, they've ended up building their own algorithms in order to hold big tech companies accountable.Google's Art and Culture App may not seem very serious today, especially to those who don't bother with such silly things on social media sites. However, it may very well be foreshadowing a future where algorithms and data control our world more than we do.Sources:http://digg.com/2018/google-arts-culture-racist-facehttps://www.fastcodesign.com/90159804/what-designers-could-learn-from-lawyers-doctors-and-priestshttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/humans-machines-technology-digital-agehttp://bgr.com/2018/01/17/google-art-selfie-viral-app-privacy-racism/https://www.bustle.com/p/googles-arts-culture-app-is-being-called-racist-but-the-problem-goes-beyond-the-actual-app-7929384https://www.fastcodesign.com/90160486/how-propublica-became-big-techs-scariest-watchdog?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Co.Design%20Daily&position=1&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=02162018

Racism, then, and now

Almost twenty years ago, Benetton Clothing’s “Hearts” Print Ad won the Cannes Lions 1996 Press Gold award when it featured these 3 hearts in an effort to open people’s eyes and speak to the “heart” of the matter.Steven Heller’s recent post for the Daily Heller, Institutional Racism, featured ads from the past century, including a beautifully rendered wood-cut illustration of a slave worker in front of a steamship for “Old Plantation” coffee. Heller talked about how commonplace these stereotypical images were in consumer advertising and packaging and how they undoubtedly influenced the perceptions of many white adults and children.Heller’s post shows ads from the first half of the twentieth century, all prior to the 1970s. An article published just a few years ago on Business Insider, “The 10 Most Racist Ads of the Modern Era,” lists the most offensive ads in contemporary times. Among the winners are Ashton Kutcher’s “Brownface” debacle for PopChips, Sony’s “White is Coming” PSP billboard, and Mary J. Blige’s offensive Burger King commercial for fried chicken.Last week’s Daily Heller post, “Jews Need Not Apply,” is about an ad placed this past week by a Paris-based SNL studio looking for a graphic designer which said, “if possible not be a Jew.”Unfortunately, sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.Sources:http://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/institutional-racism/http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-racist-ads-of-the-modern-era-2012-6?op=1http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/the-14-strongest-anti-racism-ads-of-the-last-20-years#.xeoGoDWdKhttp://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/jews-need-not-apply/http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/prints/benetton-clothing-hearts-429905/

A “not so subtle” controversy

If you got a chance to see the recent Kara Walker exhibit in an abandoned Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, you may have found yourself on one side or the other of a heated debate about art and racism.Walker’s installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a 75.5 feet long, 35.5 feet tall and 26 feet wide sculpture of a mammy/sphinx made out of white sugar and molasses was anything but subtle. Walker says the work was “an homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World.” (1)Purposefully sweet and charming, the exhibit was designed to draw you in and then make you think about the horror of the Carribbean slave trade that fueled the Western market for sugar. Walker says it was blood sugar and the process was very dangerous with many slaves losing arms, legs, and their lives.After the exhibit opened in May critics claimed is was a racist piece of art. Some black visitors were appalled to observe some white visitors laughing and joking as they posed in front of the sculpture. SUNY Westbury Professor Nicholas Powers wrote an essay entitled, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” where he speaks about his outburst at the exhibit and anger at Walker. Powers questions her responsibility as an artist.Powers visited the exhibit three times and by the third visit he was happy to see a team present handing out stickers reading “We Are Here.” Their presence was to remind white visitors about the seriousness of the exhibit and that descendants of slaves were in the room they should curb their disrespectful acts. Charing Bell offers an opposing point of view in her article entitled, “Why the Behavior of White People Shouldn’t be Policed at the Kara Walker ‘Sugar Baby’ Exhibit.” Bell asserts that art—no matter how painful—should not be directed.In an interview with Complex Art & Design, Walker talks in depth about the research that she did and the many complexities involved in the work. Intertwined in this “not so subtle” exhibit, are many subtleties that deal with themes of race, power, and sexuality.For me, Walker’s work calls to mind graphic designer James Victore’s quote, “Graphic design is a big *&#! club with spikes in it and I want to wield it.” Substitute “art” for “graphic design” and A Subtlety packs the same kind of punch, only it’s sugar-coated.What do you think, was the exhibit subtle, racist, or brilliant?Notes:(1) http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/Sources:http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/http://www.npr.org/2014/05/16/313017716/artist-kara-walker-draws-us-into-bitter-history-with-something-sweethttp://www.indypendent.org/2014/06/30/why-i-yelled-kara-walker-exhibithttp://charlesrubinoff.com/2008/06/favorite-quote-about-graphic-design/http://madamenoire.com/444739/white-people-policed-kara-walker-exhibit/http://www.complex.com/art-design/2014/05/kara-walker-interviewhttp://colorlines.com/archives/2014/06/kara_walkers_sugar_sphinx_evokes_call_from_black_women_we_are_here.html

What should you do if your client is a racist?

Last month former NPR correspondent Juan Williams made headlines with his remarks and subsequent termination.  NY Times Opinionator blogger Tobin Harshaw wrote that if you start a sentence with "I'm not a bigot, but..." it's not going to end well. Kind of like "if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck."I recently ran smack into this issue when a client of mine made a racist remark during a conversation we were having. It did not pertain to the project I was working on for her; it was a personal story. My first reaction was something along the lines of, "oh no, really? not you..." Disappointment, disgust, and then confusion about how to handle it set in. Should I fire this client? Does she have a right to her opinions as long as I'm not forced to produce work that represents them? Graphic designers are often conflicted about having to work on projects for services, causes, or products they don't believe in. But what about working for clients whose behavior is objectionable?In this case I haven't decided yet. It's not a big job, but she is in a jam. I will either bow out now, or get her out of the jam and then end the relationship. This decision isn't that difficult. Luckily my livelihood doesn't depend on this client. I've seen other situations where the client is not mine alone, but the client of a larger organization that I'm working for. Often the client is a member of a team and it's a matter of "one bad apple." In cases where it might not be easy to fire the client perhaps the prudent path is to tell them you're not comfortable with their remarks. I know someone who tells the offender to please keep such remarks to themselves because his "sister-in-law," "nephew" or some other fabricated relative is of that ethnicity. He assures me this usually shuts people up quickly and also elicits an apology. At first I thought perhaps the lie was unethical, but if you take the world view that we are all brothers and sisters on the planet earth, it makes perfect sense.Most of us have had to deal with instances of racism as well as sexism, agism, and other forms of discrimination at one time or another--whether it's aimed directly at us, or we are passive listeners. It may come from a client, a boss, a co-worker, relative, or even a friend. At the very least it's uncomfortable when it happens and often it leaves us outraged.What do you when racism rears its ugly head?