D.I.S.C.O.
Searching for project inspiration on platforms like Pinterest or Google Images yields hundreds of results. This apparent abundance hides a pattern. The first images shown have already been widely viewed, clicked, and saved. The platform prioritizes popular images to maximize user engagement and advertising revenue. The tool serves the platform's economic interests over user discovery.
When designers use identical applications and see identical algorithmically promoted results, visual languages converge. The ubiquitous rounded illustration style on startup websites and identical muted color palettes across unrelated brands demonstrate this effect. This convergence represents the structural consequence of tools designed for retention rather than divergent thinking.
These tools find and rank images based on visual resemblance. A search processes pixel patterns and matches them to similar patterns. This approach is termed 'Visual Literalism'. The most useful images for a creative project rarely resemble the search term literally. Designing packaging for a coffee brand requires images associated with morning slowness, bitterness, and community rather than photographs of espresso cups. These conceptual associations remain invisible in the pixels of a coffee cup photograph.
This thesis proposes DISCO (Dynamic Imaging Systems Cartography and Ontology). The software helps practitioners research ideas by navigating conceptual relationships between words. The system uses language processing software to find conceptually related words. Entering a term produces a constellation of semantic associations and corresponding images on an infinite canvas. Panning the canvas generates further conceptual associations from the new position. Images in DISCO are drawn from Are.na. The platform hosts manual collections organized around specific concepts. Every image represents a deliberate human curatorial choice. These images carry contextual richness absent from algorithmically ranked results.
Images appear in a Phyllotaxis spiral derived from natural growth patterns. The arrangement expands outward organically without crowding. A grid communicates finality and bounded sets. The spiral communicates continuous growth and possibility. Proximity to the center indicates the strength of conceptual relation.
Software tools for creative research encode assumptions about cognition. Dominant tools optimize for platform economics. DISCO builds upon arguments from computer scientists and philosophers advocating for technology that augments human curiosity and original thought.
The project makes this argument through functioning code.