Styling the Future. A philosophical account of scenarios & design

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style (Mort, 1996) – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times (Whicher et al., 2015) see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed (Brown, 2008; Martin, 2009; Neumeier, 2009) as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes (1995, p.31), ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact (Flynn & Chatman, 2004; Cox, 2005). A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking (especially scenario planning (e.g. Schwartz, 1991; Li, 2014; Ramírez & Selin, 2014), but also some work from organisation and management studies (e.g. Tsoukas, 2005a, 2005b)), and an encounter with philosophy (particularly the work of Deleuze & Guattari (1984, 1987, 1994). We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living (both individuals and organisations)

Bringing Impressionism to Life with Neural Style Transfer in Come Swim

Neural Style Transfer is a striking, recently-developed technique that uses neural networks to artistically redraw an image in the style of a source style image. This paper explores the use of this technique in a production setting, applying Neural Style Transfer to redraw key scenes in 'Come Swim' in the style of the impressionistic painting that inspired the film. We document how the technique can be driven within the framework of an iterative creative process to achieve a desired look, and propose a mapping of the broad parameter space to a key set of creative controls. We hope that this mapping can provide insights into priorities for future research.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures, paper is a case study of how Neural Style Transfer can be used in a movie production contex

Demystifying Neural Style Transfer

Neural Style Transfer has recently demonstrated very exciting results which catches eyes in both academia and industry. Despite the amazing results, the principle of neural style transfer, especially why the Gram matrices could represent style remains unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel interpretation of neural style transfer by treating it as a domain adaptation problem. Specifically, we theoretically show that matching the Gram matrices of feature maps is equivalent to minimize the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) with the second order polynomial kernel. Thus, we argue that the essence of neural style transfer is to match the feature distributions between the style images and the generated images. To further support our standpoint, we experiment with several other distribution alignment methods, and achieve appealing results. We believe this novel interpretation connects these two important research fields, and could enlighten future researches.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 201

Cognitive style and computer‐assisted learning: Problems and a possible solution1

Although the notion of cognitive style has been around for some time, only in relatively recent times has there been a research interest in examining its effect on the performance of Computer‐Assisted Learning (CAL) users. There are a number of practical difficulties associated with catering for different cognitive styles of CAL users. This paper identifies not only a style which influences CAL‐user performance and overcomes many of the difficulties, but also a possible suitable measure of that style. Data on the reliability of this measure is reported, along with preliminary work on its use to cater for CAL users with different cognitive styles. Future work will focus on the development of the package and the predictive validity of the style measure

In search of an evolutionary coding style

In the near future, all the human genes will be identified. But understanding the functions coded in the genes is a much harder problem. For example, by using block entropy, one has that the DNA code is closer to a random code then written text, which in turn is less ordered then an ordinary computer code; see \cite{schmitt}. Instead of saying that the DNA is badly written, using our programming standards, we might say that it is written in a different style -- an evolutionary style. We will suggest a way to search for such a style in a quantified manner by using an artificial life program, and by giving a definition of general codes and a definition of style for such codes.Comment: 14 pages, 7 postscript figure

Trust your instincts:The relationship between intuitive decision making and happiness

Epstein (1994; 2003) proposed that there are two cognitive information processing systems that operate in parallel: the intuitive thinking style and the rational thinking style. Decisional fit occurs when the preferred thinking style is applied to making a decision and research has shown that this fit increases the value of the outcome of a decision. Additionally, decisional fit leads to less regret, even when post hoc evaluations show the decision to be incorrect. It has not yet been determined whether decisional fit correlates with greater happiness and hence, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the difference between styles of thinking, styles of decision making and the impact of decisional fit on happiness scores. Individual differences in thinking and decision style were measured using an online interactive questionnaire (N = 100), and an ANOVA, hierarchical multiple regression, and a series of t-tests, were used to investigate the relationship between thinking style, decision style, decisional fit, and happiness, thereby addressing a gap in the existing literature. The major findings from the current study show that intuitive thinking has a strong positive correlation with happiness; that intuitive thinkers are more likely to utilize intuitive decisional style, than rational thinkers; and that when both rational and intuitive thinkers experienced decisional fit, higher ratings of happiness were reported. Explanations and recommendations for future studies are outlined in the discussion