…you can have any design as long as it is digital

what is interesting about the role of digital technology today is how it allows access to design outside of the traditional routes. A case in point is youtube.com which has decided to monetize its site allowing those who put up work to earn revenue from their site - hits = $. This is already happening at itunes where an indie band can have equal presence to U2 etc. This will eventually change how we work as designers or practice!

/Nicky 28/01/2007

In England it was much discussed, last week, how the music charts were changing out of all recognition. With the new music download charts, Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’ had come back into the charts because a sudden re-surge in downloading - not (this time, or yet) ‘engineered’ by record companies etc. It means that the whole issue of timing the releasing of records will be collide with other less controllable forces.

This confirms the idea, which has already been evident for a long time, that designing in the digital age is increasingly about designing the systems through which content flows. So, Myspace is simply a structure and the content, as we all know, and the ‘interior design’ of the space is configured by the user. http://www.afterthesemessages.com is a site which bills itself as being about to revolutionalise the way we get the news. Here, there are picture editors who source images yet almost all of the other data is collected by RSS.

/Ray Marsh 29/01/2007

Ray, that’s an interesting point about the separation of content and structure in the music business. A few years ago I wrote a piece called ‘The myth of content’ which looked at the implications of the conceptual separation of form and content which seemed to be such an important part of the ‘digital philosophy’. My argument then was that whilst one can conceive of it in this way, it is in fact impossible to separate form and content - we cannot experience content without form. One might also add that we look for meaning in all form - there is no such thing as ‘contentless’ form.

Whilst we clearly cannot have one without the other, the consequences of this conceptual split have a significant impact on the kind of design that is being created. The ‘digitization’ of the design stage in many different disciplines has the result of distancing the activity of design from the nature of the product, and of making the various types of design (architecture, product design, graphics, fashion etc) more like each other. For instance, when I started as a graphic designer, one was constantly engaged with the nature of the medium - sketching out layouts, visualising in markers, cutting pieces of board, tracing type on the grant, drawing out layouts, pasting down galleys. It was a physical marking-and-sticking activity that bore some relation to the making of marks on paper that was the process we were designing for. Now graphic design is really just another species of ‘office work’ - she uses Word and Excel, I use Photoshop and Quark, but we are both staring all day into screens, jiggling our mice and tapping our keyboards. Design studios even begin to look more like conventional office environments.

In this respect, I find Colin + Monika’s comment about ‘breaking the rules’ interesting. My sense is that a lot of that came from early reactions to the blanding, homogenizing effect of computers on graphic design. Where achieving perfectly aligned type was previously an accomplishment, it became something anyone could do with a PC and some inexpensive software. ‘Breaking the rules’ was therefore no longer about defining a territory where others couldn’t go (the former ‘professional’ standards of graphic design) but instead defining a territory where others wouldn’t go (I’m a crazy designer and you don’t dare to follow me).

The problem is that the digital world is almost totally ‘democratic’ in the sense that no one configuration of pixels on my computer screen is really better or worse than any other. Moreover, all are equally disposable - can be flushed and refreshed at the click of a button or two. So, although design still cannot be anything other than ‘committing to form’, it now suffers from a hightly attenuated engagement with that form. There is very little joy in making or in materials, because the person responsible likely had very little involvement with that making or those materials.

The curves of the Guggenheim are an impressive testimony to… what? The ability of software to render complex mathematical formulae… And somehow - although I’m sure the architects here will defend them - suffer from the same ’so what?’ effect. This wasn’t a Gothic Cathedral, made by individuals lovingly carving each individual stone before balancing it hopefully and precariously on a pile of similar stones. It’s a computer model that just happened to be built, rather than filled digitally with avatars or bubblejetted on a sheet of 90gm white ‘unspecific’.

/james souttar 30/01/2007

Is it time to re-evaluate our taken for granted notions of technology in the reign of the digital? Do technological solutions quickly become veneers that incarcerate us in emancipatory illusions? What is design in the coding era? Has the eternal finally been located — isolating infinity within the realm of the finite? Is creative potential only that dictated by bureaucratic binary decisions? Are we governing technology or is it governing us? Have the programmes finally programmed the programmers?

Technology is viewed as *the* mechanistic route of freedom — particularly by those that use it (”technology…allows”, it is “essential to any understanding”). With digital technology the impossible is made possible-regardless of whether it is wanted, needed, or desired. We are led to believe that we can escape the trauma of the material real world. We can finally flee from the dominance of being, time, and the decisions they necessitate — into an individualised unreality. But what we enter is a space where a community’s commonality isolates it from the social, rather than integrate it within.

We need to become aware that all our actions create counteractions — some may be intended while others are not. When promoting the enabling abilities of technology, we also need to locate those aspects of it that constrain and limit us. For all to often the voices of ‘designers’ select the route of self-validation before creative exploration with the use of protectionist propaganda. By following this dogmatic procession potential new discoveries remain hidden from our perception. We as creatives are created to see and act in a particular way. But the solutions invariably spring from a *particular kind* of understanding. Indeed, the ‘creatives’ desire to resolve conflict obviates the agonistic reality of complex social structuring. But we should reflect on that — what if it is not only technology but the ‘problem solvers’ themselves that are the problem?

/Marcus Leis Allion 31/01/2007

Marcus

> what if it is not only technology but the ‘problem solvers’ themselves that are the problem?

You ask some really interesting questions, and I tend to agree with your views. The technology itself can’t be the problem, but the technology reflects a set of attitudes and, in turn, conditions the attitudes of its users. For me this problem manifests as a sense in which computer aided design is ‘unsatisfactory’ - a sense that it is hard to pin down, but which applies to both the activity and the results. Yes, what computers let us do is very clever - and in this respect, should be endlessly absorbing. But somehow it isn’t absorbing - merely distracting.

I used to wonder what it was about the computer games that my kids played that made me feel both claustrophobic and dislocated. The ‘environments’ were huge, varied and - increasingly - almost photorealistically rendered. But nonetheless they seemed somehow constraining. Then I began to be aware that more and more contemporary architecture was strangely similar - it felt like a digital environment ‘output’ in steel, glass and various kinds of minerals. There was no ‘there’ there, no sense or spirit of place.

Working in graphics, most of the designs I see - and help to create - also seem to have a similar feeling. The elements all seem to be there - the words, the images, type, colours, all the usual stuff - but there is an anodyne quality to it all, a blandness that is palpable despite the fact that the materials in question otherwise could hardly be more different in intention, style, format… it’s what I imagine food would be like if someone found a way of replicating every different kind of flavour by mixing up percentages of the five basic types.

Today, wandering through the Broadgate comples (a ‘Doom’ like environment, if ever there was one!), I found myself thinking that I would like to ‘reinvent’ design - if only for my own benefit - from a completely different set of premises. I had been looking, as a result of a bit of web serendipity, at a particular type of massage therapy called the Rosen method. What I find interesting about these things is the way that individuals seem to develop their own approaches almost organically, out of very basic, physical, unverbalised forms of experience. And I was wondering what design might be like if one went back to the fundamentals of human communication and let it unfold from the same kinds of simple bases: from the same kind of intention of release from patterns locked up in our musculature, from the kinds of primal experiences a good therapist touches upon, aspiring at a state of ‘flow’ where the physical and emotional and mental (and spiritual) aspects of human nature can become congruent. I don’t know where to take this experiment, but it feels like it is worth pursuing.

Sorry, a ramble…

/james souttar 31/01/2007

This is an enjoyable discussion but if I could make some pragmatic observations.

I think Digital technology is being conflated with change. 90% of digital technology just replicates analogue methods – the digital watch – or the abacus - being the most basic units in this chain. Even when digital technology (DT) is a catalyst for change, in architecture for example, the digital process is not bestowed the same reverence for its skill or aesthetic content, as its analogue predecessor might have been. What I mean by this is that because something is rendered digitally, it is perceived by many, to lack the more ‘organic’ or analogue skills of traditional craftsmanship. I do not think this is true [(technology has always changed perceptions and conventions)], otherwise we might as well strip the columns of say, the coliseum, back to the bare tree stumps which were the original influence - until replaced by the skills of the stone mason and mathematician.

DT lacks the kudos or respect of traditional eye/hand/pencil coordinates. I am not sure why this should be but it might reflect the insecure position of DT in the arts. Who can name a great digital artist?

This disenchantment of the digital is reflected in the comments by James, whom I feel is looking for a modern ‘arts and crafts’ movement to restore the integrity of contemporary design. I would argue the ‘there’ of any architecture - or indeed, place - is created through use and not a priori, a constituent of architecture. This is what separates architecture from the simulacrum of video games (or for that matter, CAD blueprints)

/Michael Newman 02/02/2007

Michael, the issue here is not so much with digital technolgy per se as with the creation of physical things (buildings, products, communications) in the first instance as virtual entities. There is something about the worlds we make ‘beyond’ the computer screen that have a sterile, alien, affectless quality. And this seems to carry over when we ‘output’ these virtual artefacts in the real world.

Am I looking for a modern ‘arts and crafts’ movement? I don’t think so. Really just something that is anchored in our physical, biological and embodied nature rather than in the abstraction of ‘virtual reality’. I have hands, eyes, ears - I want to feel the texture of something, enjoy its sensuality, see the light play off surfaces in different ways as the seasons change, take pleasure in its weathering and ageing, enjoy the noise and life around it. None of this exists in the digital realm, except in a kind of ersatz, ‘modelled’ way.

Many, many years ago when I (misguidedly ;) decided I wanted to be an architect, I had an interview at the AA. I was asked by the panel what kind of architecture I liked. “Vernacular architecture”, I replied. “But is that architecture at all?” came back the reply. The thing is, I still feel the same way. I like experiencing the mud buildings created by some developing world villagers - they seem to belong in the world they were created for, to be seamless part of the human experience. But I am left cold by buildings like Foster’s ‘Gherkin’, which I pass every day, which seem to be more concepts than buildings, (but perhaps suited to an environment where money is just a digital abstraction and people are just ‘human resources’).

But then again, maybe there is something strident and William Morris-ish about my distaste for contemporary capitalism - and the things that are designed for it.

/James Souttar 03/02/2007

James, I think you confirm my point. Architecture, any architecture, has a life on the blueprint or screen, which is in many ways separate from the physical artifact – Berlin is good example of this phenomena, it is a mixture of Schinkel, Speer, Foster, and Pei – all living in and out of their original context. The technology of representation will always influence the physical thing but equally, the structure of the mud hut was an influence on neo-classical architects, and nature influenced classical architecture…until we arrive at the cave. But all of this becomes real to us in the use and misuse of structures. In this sense, architecture is always in the vernacular.

On another point, rereading Ray Marsh, it seems to be mixing up poetic language with reality and, at the same time, misunderstanding the use of ‘flows’ as a term in critical thinking– which is not simply a spatial metaphor. ‘designing in the digital age is increasingly about designing the systems through which content flows’ Are we simply talking about train stations, bus terminals and airports here? Castells and others, have introduced far-reaching critiques on the mores of Capitalism, which are easily lost in poetic interpretation.

/Michael 05/02/2007

Michael, I understand what you are saying about the technology of representation but I think what we are seeing with digital technologies goes beyond this - and this is precisely where the ‘problem’ manifests. Computer aided design now gives us the possibility of ‘realising’ not just architectural projects but all kinds of designs in the virtual world beyond the screen. And, indeed, we know from studies of computer gaming just how absorbing these virtual worlds are - there is an addictive quality to them, drawing users away from ‘real life’ into this world where they have unprecedented degrees of control and influence.

As designers spend more and more of their time designing into the screen - realising their designs virtually - and are more and more removed from the physical processes by which those designs are ‘output’ (often now the preserve of others) it is not surprising that more and more of the designed artefacts we see (from buildings to documents) project the qualities of the virtual world. On the positive side, this is a world unconstrained by the limitations of previous technologies of representation (imagine drawing the sinuous lines of the Guggenheim with a french curve, or calculating the complex loads with a slide rule!). But on the negative side, virtual worlds have a sterility, a coldness, a lack of life, vitality and spirit that is reflected in digitally created products.

Having considered this for a few days, it now seems obvious to me why this should be the case. Digital worlds are not constructed of ’stuff’ - they are constructed of representations, simulacra of real materials. It is a purely abstract, intellectual environment trying to give the impression of a physical one. There is nothing inherent aboout pyhsicality in that dimension, as there is in this.

However, the abstracting intellectual faculty is only a part - a small part - of what it means to be human. We evolved to engage with a sensory world, and our most satisfying experiences are rooted in our sensuality (except perhaps for intellectuals!). Huge parts of our cognitive faculties are given over to our experience of sight, sound, smell, touch - and the diverse and sophisticated things we do with them. Unfortunately, when someone is in the trance of a computer monitor, most these faculties are switched off - it is, in the true sense, a ‘hypnotic’ experience. There is a narrowing of attention, a shutting out of external stimuli, a closing down of awareness apart from the thing that is being worked on.

Walking through the City of London yesterday, as I do everyday, I was struck by the fact that this place - which is really a kind of ‘theme park’ for modern architecture (with what must be close to a global record of fees per cubic metre) - remains so artificial, so soul-less. If you were right, that the ‘there’ - the ‘genius locii’ - could be created by ‘use’, surely it would be here already? Actually, I think the reason it isn’t is because these buildings, these environments, have been conceived with the same kind of digital split we see between ‘form’ and ‘content’ - ‘use’ is conceived like content, which will somehow magically materialise to fill the structures created. And there is of course ‘use’ here - these costly buildings are heavily utilised. But it is such narrow use - and to judge by the faces of the users - it is a dulling use.

Walk down Brick Lane - which I don’t suppose has felt the touch of an architect since Nicholas Hawksmoor died - and one is immediately immersed in a place that is teeming with ‘use’, with a variety and diversity of human activity that is quite astonishing, with the whole drama of human life from birth to death, with life and engagement of every sort. Why doesn’t one see any of this in Broadgate Circus, in Lower Thames Street or around the Gherkin? Because these are places that are unusuable except for the very narrowest spectrum of human activity. The technology of representation has unwittingly designed the possibility of this wider use - this inhabiting, adapting, owning and dwelling - out.

/james souttar 08/02/2007

Design in the material world differs hugely from that of the digital. The material world is inexact and therefore much more reliant on the skill and knowledge of each creative act. A series of circles drawn in the material world (even with the most precise of tools and by the same person) will vary greatly from one to another. By using digital technology this inaccuracy is eliminated, as each digital circle is a piece of information. It can, therefore, be infinitely replicated, and copied with exacting precision by anyone with access to that knowledge and technology. This moment of replication, then, opens many opportunities and closes many also. With regard to its relation to that of the ‘real’, it is not better or worse, just different. But it is important to locate those differences, for this only represents how digital technology has been created thus far, and where much confusion occurs.

We are constantly presented with two distinct camps; those who wish to locate themselves in the nuanced ‘real’ of our material world, and those that advocate the possibilities offered by these new techniques. Thus, the rhetorical arguments utilise assumptions of one position to defend their own — ’soul-less digital’ v ‘pragmatic efficiency’ — creating an either/or illusion in which a decision has to be made. Instead, what is required is an active engagement, one that takes into account the possibilities as well as the restrictions.

The limited understanding of programming some creatives have (and I include myself here), means our tools and methods are created by those entities that produce the technology that we engage with. Similarly, let us not forget that the material world is governed by restrictions also (e.g. the metrics of paper size and lead width). They in turn are governed by a series of socio-political decisions (economic, normative, ethical etc) that need our attention also.

If we briefly return to my earlier metaphor, the program that draws the circle could be encoded to draw it to varying degrees of exactness, or alternative methods for drawing can be calculated. This requires an engagement with the ‘program/mers’ – an inquisitive thinking and questioning, whether that is in a digital, material, or political framework. In that sense, creativity, means critically questioning the relations that shape or even allow creativity itself.

Therefore, to operate authentically in the digital realm we need to locate the shift in our practice that technology has created. As an example we can note the differences between a calligrapher and a sign writer. Both practices have a socio-historical narrative and a prescribed set of tools and methods, and although related via the visual representation of a language, can be understood as two distinct spheres. That does not mean it is impossible to engage with both, and possibly generate new disciplines, but to be a calligrapher means to know the tools and methods implicitly. For it is our actions that make us, which means it is important to be the master of our tools, or they in turn will dominate us. In that sense when we are operating with software on a computer we can no longer consider ourselves designers, but as programmers engaging with digital technology. What then can our experiences and insights of ‘design’ (in the broadest sense) bring to this field of programming - whilst recognising that it is those same experiences and insight that indoctrinate and limit our potential understanding?

/Marcus Leis Allion 13/02/2007

Marcus, your point about the circles echoes some of the typographic experiments of the early 1990s. I think particularly of Just Van Rossum and Erik Blokland’s ‘Anti Bezier League’, which resulted in intriguing digital artefacts such as the type family ‘Beowulf’ (with differing degrees of digital ‘randomness’ roughing up the outlines). And it is interesting that as early as this - before most graphic designers had made the shift to computers, there was already a reaction to the ‘inhuman perfection’ of computer set type. The problem with this ‘digital roughness’ (which led on to the vogue for ‘grunge’ type - distressed, mock-naturalistic fonts output on 2560 dpi imagesetters) is that it ends up feeling just as phoney as perfect type feels over-polished. There is no style of letterform - not even the bitmap - that could be said to be inherent to the computer (in the way that calligraphic styles can be said to be inherent to the constraints of the pen, or letterpress fonts to the casting of metal type). Computers can serve up anything you like, and it is all ‘ersatz’ because it is all replicating some other style of letterform.

And this spotlights the crucial difference between previous technologies and contemporary digital ones - all of the previous ways that were used to reproduce written language, from reed pens to dot matrix printers, gave rise to distinctive types of letterforms. There was a connection between the shape and style of the glyphs and the physical constraints of the technology. And in the older technologies - those that depended on the human hand, rather than on machines - there was a connection too between the shape and style of the glyphs and the physiology of the human body. The physicality of the letterforms was anchored in our physicality.

Even today, if you watch a Chinese or an Arabic calligrapher at work, you will see how perfectly complete the whole activity is. The movements of the calligrapher’s body is balletic - it is not just the end product that is beautiful, but also in the process of execution. And in both these traditions (not so much in the Western tradition, since the end of the monastic scriptoria) the activity is meditative, too. There is an integrity and coherence of body, mind, spirit; hand, eye, tool, rhythm and movement, attention, intention and form. And the end product resonates with these qualities, even hundreds of years later.

/james souttar 16/02/2007

James, you locate and defend your subjective position as if it were an objective reality. The opinion you have offered on digital technology revolves around the failings and constraints of current digital technology. How the operating system, software, applications, and typefaces are restricted to a particular approach. You recognise attempts have been made, but suggest that ultimately they have failed (and imply this will always be the case). You further limit creativity by incarcerating it within the bounds of “body, mind, spirit; hand, eye, tool, rhythm and movement, attention, intention and form”-as if these locations were the place of inherent truth (and one that has existed, and will exist for all time).

James, you locate and defend your subjective position as if it were an objective reality. The opinion you have offered on digital technology revolves around the failings and constraints of current digital technology. How the operating system, software, applications, and typefaces are restricted to a particular approach. You recognise attempts have been made, but suggest that ultimately they have failed (and imply this will always be the case). You further limit creativity by incarcerating it within the bounds of “body, mind, spirit; hand, eye, tool, rhythm and movement, attention, intention and form” — as if these locations were the place of inherent truth (and one that has existed, and will exist for all time).

But your thoughts only represent our present situation and thereby dismiss any notion of a potential future. Applying mendacious assumptions only diminishes our sphere of imagination, in turn condemning us to predetermined sites and situations. Therefore, we must engage with digital technology (merely a mode of creativity) on all fronts. Failing to do so only means that those forces that wish to contain and curtail inventiveness are given a free reign, resulting in the propertisation of the creative act. Instead, we should engage in a vigilant battle and seek to unshackle creativity and contest these myths of restriction and domination. Let us forge new forms of thinking, fight for actions that resist commonplace complacency. For, as I argued earlier, (digital) technology (in itself) does not present any problem, it is our relation with it (or lack of) that is in need of investigation.

/Marcus Leis Allion 24/02/2007

Marcus, the real ‘problem’ that I see with digital technology is with inherent qualities of that technology and not with any ‘failings and constraints of current digital technology”. These problems stem from the limitations of computing, per se, that were first expressed, mathematically, by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church as far back as the 1930.

All digital technologies have to represent qualities of our world in a purely abstract, mathematical form. Moreover this mathematical form is constrained by the requirements of being a ‘Turing Machine’ - of depending, ultimately, on parameters that are outside of itself, from its programmers. Consequently, what is possible within this environment can only, ever, be the replication of a human ‘world’, the world of the programmer - a replication can only have an abstract, mathematical connection with the qualities that are being replicated. This I would consider to be a sufficiently ‘objective’ basis on which to mount a critique.

Human beings, on the other hand, could be defined in almost opposite terms. We are sensory organisms, and all of our higher intellectual concepts are derived, originally from sensory experiences. So, for instance, if we look at the abstract vocabulary of any language, we see words that have come - metaphorically - from physical experiences. We ‘grasp'’concepts’ - this doesn’t mean we literally grab embryos, but it does mean that without reference to those experiences, we could not describe abstract ideas. The computer must represent the world as an abstraction: human beings have to represent abstractions in terms of our experience of the world.

You argue for freedom for imaginativeness - I don’t have any problem with that. Let a billion flowers bloom (to ‘up’ Mao’s sentiment by a few orders of magnitude). But I do have a problem with being told ‘we must engage with digital technology on all fronts’ - why must I do this, when I find the results of digital technology so frequently unsatisfying? (And suspect many others do too.) My suspicion is that what makes these digitally produced artefacts like this is the means of production, which distances them from what it means to be an embodied being. They are, instead, the products of ‘mechanized intellect’ - and seem to express the coldness and lack of specificity characteristic of pure mathematics.

Unlike you, I believe - and this is my opinion - that the future of design, of all kinds, will return to specificity. Partly because there is a growing hunger for ‘the quality of things’ (which we can see in all sorts of ways, from the demand for ‘organic’ produce to the thriving revival of live and ‘acoustic’ music). But also because the big issues facing humanity - climate change, population growth, pressure on natural resources - demand greater engagement with our physicality.

/james souttar 06/03/2007

James, when asked ‘What if it is…the ‘problem solvers’ themselves that are the problem?’, did you place yourself in the question? It does not appear so. You constantly fall back on assumptions that you have yet to justify or ground, which makes for a rather weak opinion.
Furthermore, your criticisms of technology make you the best person to ‘engage with technology on all fronts’ as you will demand the most radical of changes - e.g. a non-mathematical/digital computer. What would that look like, how would it operate? To do that it would be necessary to ‘contest these myths of restriction and domination’ that you consistantly rely on.

/DOMINIC JAMES 08/03/2007

…or as you have written elsewhere “Transforming Communication is an attempt to sketch out new ways of thinking about and practising communications. Ways that are simple, positive and realistic — promoting a richer, deeper understanding of the phenomenon of communication and recognising the profound changes that are happening in our societies.

/DOMINIC JAMES 08/03/2007

A slight return…

Here is a new way of thinking about and approaching the digital that begins to tackle some the limitations we have discussed. Rather than allow the digital doctrine to become a limitation, creative thought and pragmatic praxis proceed to provide an innovative new possibility.

http://www.fontself.com/index_B_en.html

/Marcus Leis Allion 09/08/2007

An interesting example - I hope the authors of this site develop this thread some more in the future.

/Joseph 21/08/2007

Intensification continues via FontStruct
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

/Marcus Leis Allion 02/04/2008

Intensification continues via FontStruct
http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

/Marcus Leis Allion 02/04/2008

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