edesign Magazine, June 2002
THE CODE CREATORS
While many designers avoid getting involved with programming, it's often at this most basic level where true innovation occurs.
YOU BEGIN with a bird's-eye view of a cellblock. Inside, there are individual cells that house tiny square-shaped inmates. When you pass your cursor over the shapes, they come alive. Each has its own distinct personality: One flutters, another prowls the perimeter of its cell, another skates figure eights, another levitates, rippling in the air.
Their movements are tireless, growing more graceful and dramatic the longer you watch them, but no matter how hard they twirl and somersault, the poor prisoners cannot escape their cells.
"Cellblock" is Peter Cho's contribution to Singlecell.org, a Web site founded by computational artists and designers— many of whom are graduates of the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG) at the MIT Media Lab. The site exhibits monthly installations that offer different interpretations of the "single cell" theme.
Many of the installations are a kind of homage to John Maeda, the spiritual leader of ACG who roots his students deeply in the gospel of Bauhaus: They explore the ideal of a unity between art and technology. In today's terms, that means the steady convergence of interactive design and programming.
"I despise most of the common tools," says Golan Levin, a recent graduate of ACG and one of the founders of Singlecell.org. "In order to design anything interesting on a computer, you have to write your own software." Levin admits only begrudgingly that good design can be created with prepackaged software. "Sometimes all you need is an animated GIF," he says. Nevertheless, almost all of the work at Singlecell.org is designed and programmed from the bottom up, either in Java or C++.
Levin's purist attitude can be difficult for many designers to take because it implies that the act of creation must be, at its core, logical and quantitative. Levin's perspective dismisses the advantages of a more intuitive, macrolevel approach to digital design. Even so, many designers prefer to steer clear of programming, arguing that a fluency in code encourages a hypermodern look that favors repetition, pattern, and texture as opposed to a more imagistic, curvaceous aesthetic.
And while it may be true that programs by Macromedia and Adobe offer limited use of the computer's full potential, many designers employ less than half of those programs' feature sets anyway. More often than not, this lapse isn't due to the software, but rather to the individual designer who may be intimidated by or just plain too busy to learn all the software's features.
There is no question, however, that the ability to write even low-level code enables designers to think outside the cell, so to speak, creating a more complex and dynamic universe that moves beyond the prefab conventions and filters of popular applications such as Flash or Photoshop. It also gives professional designers added currency.
"What you don't want," Levin warns, "is to be tied to a piece of software. If software becomes obsolete, your skills become obsolete."
The Singlecell collective hints at a central predicament that is being hashed out by pedagogues and design firms alike: How much of our imaginative power are we giving away when we rely on off-the-shelf programs to design? Are these applications freeing designers from the burden of coding and recoding a set of common tools?
Taken to its logical extreme, the question then becomes: Should designers be programmers? Should programmers be designers?
"I think the blurring of boundaries between design and programming is one of the most interesting phenomena in the design world," says Peter Girardi, co-founder of Funny Garbage. "One of the most frustrating things to me as a designer is being manipulated by the tools and software available to me.
Coding your own design executions is a way to break those chains."
Girardi argues that understanding the technical foundations of the medium should be considered a practical necessity for designers. He recalls that when he was doing print design, his knowledge of how the presses worked-how to sheet, print, and ship a job-not only strengthened the design process, but also made him a better businessman:
"I learned not to let the pressmen take advantage of me and tell me what could and couldn't be done."
Girardi readily admits he isn't a programmer himself-but he's also a businessman and can compensate for deficiencies in his technical knowledge by employing respected programmers such as Colin Holgate. "It's fine if designers have an appreciation of what programmers do, but I think it's useful if the two tasks are handled by separate people," says Holgate. But, he insists, the designer and programmer need to work together early in the design process.
Girardi agrees that collaboration is key.
"A project can't be successful unless the graphic design, information design, and technology design are all working together to form a whole. In a lot of companies, either the designer leads or the engineer leads. Either way is a mistake," Girardi maintains.
Girardi's and Holgate's views are grounded in the pragmatics of business rather than the idealism of academia:
The reality is that a division of labor is necessary for the execution of large projects. Furthermore, in the corporate world, where time is money, off-the-shelf applications are, more often than not, practical necessities.
When Funny Garbage was commissioned to create a model of the formation of the universe for the American Museum of Natural History's Rose
Center for Earth and Space, Holgate did not write his own software. But his deep knowledge of programming did come in handy. It enabled him to stretch Director to its limits, animating 50,000 sprites in a simulation of i3 billion years of cosmic history. On the Willing-To-Try Web site he co-created for Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising agency, Holgate used a series of simple, poetic gestures that had begun as his own programming experiments. "Willing-To-Try is a good example of how the programming can actually be a design element in a project," says Girardi. "The programming came first. We attached a narrative and a face onto it later."
Whereas the Singlecell.org approach positions the hybrid designer-program-mer as an independent, autonomous agent, a larger corporate structure like Funny Garbage positions designers and programmers in an environment that recognizes specialization and encourages collaboration. Either way, both models prove essentially the same point: Design and programming are at their best when they're doing a symbiotic dance.
The real advances in digital design will occur when, in time, the single cells break out of the clink: They will move beyond autonomy and combine to form larger, more complex, multicellular organisms.
AMANDA GRISCOM & IRWIN CHEN