Past Hue Angles columns have featured examples of career changes from color science to other areas. (See Issue #250 [2011] on Terry Benzschawel’s transition to Wall Street quant and Issue #475 [2016] on Mike Stokes’s transition to data privacy.)
In this article, I describe Suguru Ishizaki’s transition from color science to an English department. Such experiences can inspire hope for successful career transitions in the field of color science even in the current job crisis.
Ishizaki’s contribution to color science is heralded by his 1994 Color Imaging Conference paper [1], also extended in a successive paper [2]. He undertook the prodigious task of coloring sub-areas on a color-coded map or chart so that each sub-area, subject to spatial induction from its neighbors, would match an intended color in the key to the chart. The task is hard because every time you change a sub-area color, you must also change the neighboring areas to preserve all the color matches with the key. The process is iterative and multi-dimensional. To my knowledge, Ishizaki’s is the first and only attempt to capture and control such complicated and inter-dependent conditions for asymmetric matches. (Usually investigators look at only a center field as influenced by a single surround, and do not ask the matching question.)
Starting with this work (which led to his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab), Ishizaki built a career, alternately in academia and industry, based on a broader over-arching theme of human communication through design. He started at the Design School at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), then worked at Qualcomm on early mobile applications, and ended up at CMU’s English Department, where he is now an Associate Professor. Dr. Ishizaki’s current research area is Technology-Enhanced Learning for writing and Computer-Assisted Rhetorical Analysis [3].
Several people I know started as English majors and ended up in color science. Bob Karpowicz, who became a product manager at Datacolor, had an undergraduate English major. Mike Tinker (who became an expert in color digital cinema at Sarnoff) started from a B.A. in English literature; then, as a graduate student in English, he wrote a computer program that recognized writers by their word patterns. That wasn’t accepted as a thesis topic, so Tinker pursued another topic to a Ph.D. in English with a minor in computer science.
And I myself was an undergraduate English major, though this is unacknowledged on my diploma due to a binary choice being given to me on graduation day. (How English departments have changed since then!)
But whereas in all these cases the door of the English department was marked “Exit,” Dr. Ishizaki found a door marked “Enter.” I hope someday that he returns to color science to continue the career he started and that nobody else can match. Or perhaps someone else will continue his pivotal work.
[1] Ishizaki, S. Adjusting simultaneous contrast for dynamic information display. Proceedings of IS&T and SID's Color Imaging Conference, Scottsdale, 1994: pp 137- 140.
[2] Ishizaki, S. Color adaptive graphics: what you see in your color palette isn’t what you get! CHI ’95: Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems. May 1995, pp. 300-301.
[3] https://design.cmu.edu/people/courtesy-appointment/suguru-ishizaki
Michael H. Brill
Datacolor
