On "quality" vs relevance
Nadia is an aesthetics inference camera developed by Andrew Kupresanin and has the ability to infer the quality of the photo before shooting it and send it to the photographer as a feedback. The camera doesn’t have a display, but constantly sends updated messages about the aesthetic quality of the image as the photographer moves the camera around the object to be captured, helping judge when to snap the photo.
Last June, Chris Anderson of the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price spoke at the RSA (video here) with notions that on a surface level seemed like an exploration of "free" but were in fact an exploration of value. An exploration of 'quality' is captured in paraphrase below, taken from Chris' response to a comment on how the impossible triumvirate of "free, perfect, and now" (the old maxim being that you can have only two) reflect the desire for cost, quality and time:
"Perfect is one of those words that I'm not so sure what it means anymore. I struggle with semantics - the word 'free' has changed, semantically. The same with words like 'news.' It used to that news meant content created by professional journalists. Now it's something that is relevant and worth repeating. And now you have this word 'quality.' I tell this story in the book: my children are allowed two hours of screen time per weekend. One weekend we said to them that for this weekend's two hours you can have two hours of Star Wars. You can either have two hours of Star Wars DVDs - upscale, high production, surround sound, big screen, and popcorn. Or, you can go on YouTube, and watch Star Wars videos created by 7-year-olds of stop motion animation with Lego figures. And instantly they're like: YOUTUBE. They didn't hesitate for a moment. If you look at these videos created by 7-year-olds you would say that the quality, by standards of Hollywood definition, is not good. They put their fingers in the screen. The lighting is not great. The voiceovers are exactly what you would expect from 7-year-olds. So it fails every traditional definition of quality - except for one, which is relevance. That it is exactly what those kids wanted. And in fact it's not even the quality of the story that George Lucas created that's a factor here - they would actually much rather watch toy soldier animations made by 7-year-olds instead of Star Wars animations. I say all this because I don't know what quality means anymore."It's something that I find important to consider whenever thinking about the value of 'quality.' In the inference camera example above, the term quality is misleading - quality in this case is a measure of relevance, as defined entirely by the developer Andrew's sense of relevance. This definition may in fact be useful - you may be a photographer who needs to shoot photos of the nature that Andrew has defined as quality, and get value out of sharing these photos with people who find Andrew's sense of relevance closely in line with their own. But when thinking about value, its worth considering whether any particularly defined relevance does in fact capture the relevance that is valuable to you (or anyone you hope to share a photo/anything else with).
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