This text was initially published in Dapper Dan AW2011 and is the collaborative fruit of Thomas Eberwein and Jérôme Rigaud.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke

The digital technological revolution is the biggest revolution to mankind as far as we know. It is bigger than the industrial revolution, has already transformed, and keeps transforming our lives forever.

Artists don’t seem to be interested.

Technologies are advancing faster than humans are able to evaluate the changes they will bring and the impact they will have. To reflect and measure this impact is traditionally the domain of the arts and design. Strangely this vast new playing field, this immense creative potential remains very much unused. Who is using Google’s street view for a road movie. Who is using Google maps for a painting. The invention of these technologies is as significant as the invention of the steam engine. Modern animation software allows to create Hollywood effects in your bedroom (or artist studio). These softwares make Photoshop or Illustrator look like something from the dark ages. You can create fog, smoke, rain, fire, explosions landscapes, skies, sunsets, oil, liquids. Using them is easy.

The following is a digest of a discussion between Thomas Eberwein and Jérôme Rigaud at the Tin Café—off Kingsland Road.

These are things we think are relevant and should be used / evaluated / understood in art design or fashion. They are new to us as well and writing about them is as much for us an exercise to understand them. The discussion kept on blurring the limits of art, design, technology, marketing—in the sense of bringing something to the market—and distribution. It is presented here under the form of succinct summary on topics.

YouTube as a source

Websites like YouTube are huge cultural archives which can enable the creation of new artworks. YouTube is a huge library of worldwide culture, its pace of growth is so fast at this point that it kind of exceeds numbers humans can understand, just like it’s hard for us to understand what a light year really means. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube—it enables the existence of new (video) derivative work in a manner that no human experienced before our times.

This enlarged facility is easing the on-going modifications the traditional understanding of rights to copy that ruled our western civilisation since the pre-era of the industrial revolution. It constantly reframes the question of the common goods.

Non permanence of style

In fields where design is dependent on or based on technology, as in the web, interactive installations or computer animation, technical possibilities are changing all the time and very fast. Every half a year the playing field changes, the goalpost move.

One interesting side effect is that design style is very much linked to technology. Bigger screens allow bigger font sizes, faster connections allow more video and a ‘richer’ experience. This also means whatever you were doing 2 years ago looks and feels dated in most cases. This has the effect that style is less important in a very positive way. While in traditional design the technology is pretty much unchanged since the early 90’s style can become very important. It is one of the only areas a print designer can innovate. It seems in print, styles change and get copied or adopted very fast, because this is one of the only ways to say for a print designer “I am new, look at this new look. This is new and different”. While most designers look at digital design and its link to technology as a curse, to us its a great possibility and can disconnect it from any kind of design for design’s sake. By the time you refined a ‘style’ there are new technologies into play which changes the rules completely and makes your style obsolete.

The birth of new style and trends, and its counter-part the obsolescence, is fast developing online. An emerging style, in printed typography, that would take months to reach its audience, develop, and multiply can easily disseminate online in just a few weeks; while the printed medium and its production techniques as well as its distribution is requiring an extended time for a large significant diffusion to spread, the same content’s style online might have died and reborn a couple of time.

A low barrier of entry — technical complexity

While developing for the web remains something relatively technical, day after day, frameworks are bringing the realms of advanced programming to a growing larger crowd of beginners. It’s getting easier to learn how to program an animation on a web page; the information is more and more accessible and so is the technology: at the same time as more sophisticated technologies are supported by most browsers it also becomes easier to create and produce for these technologies. So we have the field expanding on both sides, it’s easier and easier to switch from consumer to producer.

Beta Applications

For a few years now, beta applications have been released in advance of their public release date so people could use them earlier if they wished so. Immediately convincing early adopters, a large audience is now used to the term and its signification: early launch, continuous refinement of new features and debugging. The process that is familiar to the structure of a bazaar—read Eric S Raymond’s book about the Cathedral and the Bazaar—allows companies to launch new projects with fewer costs.

Extremely fast distribution and adoption. Flipboard is an application which allows you to read your favorite news in the design of a magazine or newspaper on the iPad. It recently saw an amount of growth never before seen in any kind of product, the estimates are around 100,000 users trying their products on their first day. This is an amount of growth never seen before in any industry. It is a chain of distribution so highly optimised that these amounts of growth become possible.

Near real time diffusion and the real time Web

Twitter — the short messaging service — uses the expression “fire-hose” to describe the stream of information. The web is about to enter a new phase where services and users will all talk in real time to each other, with no delay. For example Twitter opened a new interface, perfectly named ‘fire-hose’, to connect to which distributes messages by Twitter users in real time. This is the same as listening to 200 million people in the same room or as the name suggests being on the receiving end of a fire-hose of a fire brigade.

New platforms

The landscape of cultural production and distribution changes all the time. It seems every half a year there is a new platform to publish to and from. Digital becomes a lot easier to define by what it is not rather than what it is. The web itself is now a huge combination of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and we have completely new ways of using computers like iPhone and iPad. Each introduction of these new platforms comes with their own rules of use and consumption all there for artists to explore. Users use them on their couch, in the train, on the plane, in bed and so on, making them ideal to be explored and exploited for artistic use. The list of new experiments is constantly growing, redefining our relationship to ourselves, the others and to the devices in charge of this connected-ness.

How programming and project management can/should influence design process

By defining clear and simple objectives early on in the process, it is possible to define a workflow relying on adaptability and continuous refinement—based on versioning, granular improvements and continuous development. Processes and models used in day to day development work by startups are a daily response of programmers for this constantly-changing work context—it is far more advanced than anything we have seen.

Programmers love to optimise their tools and processes for productivity. Nowhere else is the saying “You are only as good as your tools” more true than in software developing. Often programmers build tools to become better at building the tool they are building. For example Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel was not happy with the version control system he used to maintain the Linux kernel so he wrote his own, GIT, which is now one of the most popular version control systems.[^1]

[^1]: Version control is something really amazing, and simply put, like magic. While designers still save their files as “final-21-new-A-0662”, programmers optimised this process to a point where you can go back to any saved state in the history of a file at any point, without ever having to duplicate it.

The fields of design

Strangely enough the traditional fields of design didn’t seem to acknowledge the change; a project still has a start, a middle point and an end. It has schedules, date of delivery and deadlines. It doesn’t consider the flow and the adaptability of the project. We are not saying that these practices are totally irrelevant, but they do need to be understood and practiced within new contexts.

Agile Development is another answer from programmers to this constantly changing context—it comes from the Agile Manifesto written in 2001 by 17 programmers, most competitors to each other, assembled in a ski resort to discuss further organisational process—essentially all what designers need to manage projects, collaboration and work-flow is in there.

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.