complexity

Speaking about doing things should remain simple – but explaining design while relating it to aesthetical and technical choices can become really complex.
There was also some ambiguities regarding the fact i’m working mostly in collaboration with various people.

To reduce the apparent complexity, i used an introduction essentially relying on screenshots:
- first i decided to have a picture of the 2 other guys (pierre & fritz) from electronest, and a super simplified schema explaining the interaction in between the people i’m working with;
- then i introduced a short linear serie of works, alternating web and tangible projects, with some keywords and the main idea of the in & out underlying each small presentation.
The in & out topic/title/keyword of the talk was taken from discussions with Pierre Schmidt. This title was there like an anchor all along the presentation, i was reffering to it almost all the time to explain to students the process of the design+code or even design+code+electronic.
The in & out has to be understood as broad as possible: having something at the beginning, creating a process or action, and observing the result.

When you switch a light on, or turn a tap to get a glass of water, you create an action, a process and a result. This is exactly what happens when accessing a dynamic website with a database – you have some unsorted & undesigned content, a script that processes the content and finally a screen with the information organised and designed.
And that’s also what happens in the webjing projects we did in Bruxels (as one of the many examples): you have a set of data (news paper content parsed from websites + a sonor context made by the dj), a process (an application that listens to the sound’s frequencies) and a visual result: typography displayed and sized depending on some specific rules set up in the proccess.
Projects can handle various and complex processes, transforming many sets of data.

The process of design is all about choices and constraints; generating anything is always possible, but the designer’s role (or at least: my understanding of the designer’s role) is to produce meaning out of the raw content. To create an emotionnal interface to the data – this interface can be visual, but can also be an animation, a movement, a sound, …

Once the introduction was over we started to look at projects more deeply, and more hypertextually – linking elements of projects, explaining the links, the stories and the technicalities.

These technical complexities are what I was afraid of: loosing the students to the various complicated details that the scope of those projects generate. Apparently, the informal tone and the variation of various projects kept them on track with what i was talking about – nobody left the conference room before the end: good news.

NONE is an experimental trail

links for 2008-03-17

in & out – talk at Camberwell College of Arts