[D/DISCO]™
Creative Coding, UX/UI, Branding & Strategy.
These tools were retrofitted by designers for creative research, without the understanding that they encode assumptions about cognition. When designers use identical applications and see identical algorithmically promoted results, visual languages converge. The ubiquitous rounded illustration style on startup websites, identical muted color palettes across unrelated brands, and the broader blandification of identities and visual language 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. This is 'Visual Literalism'. The most useful images for a creative project rarely resemble the search term literally. A practitioner exploring the concept of 'Freedom' does not need literal photographs of open birdcages; they require the capacity to drift from 'Freedom' to 'Improvisation' to 'Jazz' to 'Sadness' to 'Blue.' These deeply felt, emotional associations remain entirely invisible in the pixels of a literal photograph.
This thesis presents D.I.S.C.O. (Dynamic Imaging Systems Cartography & Ontology), a functioning software tool that helps students, designers, researchers, and anyone utilizing digital visual platforms to discover ideas by navigating conceptual relationships between ideas. It represents a structural shift from platforms that organize what a practitioner has already found, to an instrument that produces what they could not have predicted.
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. The system utilizes language processing software to surface conceptually related words to find images that carry contextual richness; unlike the ones absent from algorithmically ranked results.
Try it out! - d-disco.com