The Noun Project vs. Artificial Intelligence
Noun Project is building a global visual language that unites us.
The Noun Project
Visual language and communications are one of my areas of expertise. I have been creatively driven my whole life, drawing from an early age and integrating visual practice into my work in various ways. I tend to use arts-based practices in my approach to teaching, facilitating activities like gallery walks, which involve looking at and discussing visual designs as a group.
While not everyone is as comfortable drawing to communicate ideas as I am, everyone has a unique visual literacy they can use to tell all kinds of stories about the world.
I have been thinking about some of the learning activities related to icons, I have done in the past. One of my favourites was a self-portrait challenge using four icons from the infamous YouShow back in the day. In another post I can icon (towards a text/image remix assignment), I talk more about using icons as a learning activity and some fun ways images can be “re-interpreted”. And then of course there was the best group visual literacy learning I have ever done, The Icon Jam.
The Noun Project then
I used The Noun Project as a reference site in all these presentations. It has been a vital source of images for design projects, discussions of visual literacy in the classroom, presentations, and learning resources. I even used it to design a flag for my wedding.
The Noun Project now
In a recent visual design project (which I am very eager to be sharing soon), I came back to exploring the noun project for ideation and representation, I was delighted to learn (that it still exists for one thing) that it has a bunch of great new ways to use and share your icons. The subscription was quite reasonable so I decided to sign up for a while and get unlimited use of all the icons plus the benefits of other premium features.
Like kits!
I can now search the collection, say for icons representing “Artificial Intelligence”, spend some time reviewing them and put selections into my own Artificial Intelligence collection for later discussion and sharing. Nice!
Interestingly, my recent project used BOTH the noun project icons AND AI tools in the final presentation, leading me to the ideas I wanted to capture in this post. Which is essentially that AI sucks at creative thinking. At least it does not come close to humans’ capacity for visual thinking.
I will save a “gallery walk” discussion about the results of my search above for another time, but for now, I can say that the thinking and activities I use in the noun project for the AI tools are much less useful and kind of frustrating. I mean, I’m no expert at this stage, but I am exploring ways to use AI tools in my creative process, and I am finding they still have very specific and very limited uses.
Specifically coming up with metaphors, allegories, visual analogies, relating an icon to complex ideas or even being able to generate icons from a complex idea. I will have to get together a recent demonstration of this we presented in our course AI images in the classroom (which should be an open resource soon.) Any kind of deeper visual literacy representation is challenging with AI. I spend half my time getting the AI to write its own descriptive image generation prompts, and still, you have to be very literal about what you are asking it to represent.
I am still in the early days of this research, so there will be more to follow up on here. Suffice it to say that upon revisiting my visual literacy learning activities and digging into the noun project and AI tools for image generation, I am getting prepped to revise them and make them official offerings here on the same page. Let me know if there is anything in particular that may be valuable for you and your team, and check back soon for more project updates!
Readings
Open coursework from MIT, Visual Literacy: A Must for the 21st Century.
