Dear Readers,

Thank you for joining me in this new initiative which I hope will be the beginning of something that we can develop together. Indeed, a newsletter is perhaps all too often a means for communicating what is ‘new’ and invariably in the personal sphere, but I will have to confess, well that my intention is far from this. This is not a newsletter as such. Rather, it is quite simply to be a letter. And like all letters I address to thee, the reader, an experience that I sincerely hope will engage you and perhaps incite you in further exchange. An exchange that may take various forms, whether it be an email, a postcard, an invitation to chat, a time to meet. Who knows what may happen.

What will I write about? To be honest, I have yet to figure that out in detail. That is fine though. How could I have it all planned out beforehand? I’m not a computer program. Luckily, I do have some ideas. There will be some personal stories to share, thoughts both current and past, people to introduce, teaching and pedagogy - lots to be said on that - about learning, about keeping curious, on your toes and eventually why not, a little bit of code here and there. Nothing too technical though, as we have the web for that. There may well be writings on the culture of code, its implications as part of our practice and looking towards the future with regards to contemporary issues. Books and articles, projects and events, the possibilities are endless yet again I’d like to draw your attention to my first little paragraph and iterate my desire to get you involved. So, if you have ideas, a topic, something to share or would like me to write about, I’m all ears.

A Short Introductory Story

To get the ball rolling as it were, let me share with you some thoughts that have brought me to the present day and have shaped to an extent what I practice and teach. Recently, tidying up some old documents, I came across my initial notes for an interview I conducted back in 2005. At the time, I was working as a journalist for a graphic design magazine and one day was asked to meet with a certain John Maeda who was exhibiting work for the first (and last) time in Paris at La Fondation Cartier.

As always, I began to prepare my interview with a little research and to be honest, despite having some blurry recollections of an early TV documentary on John Maeda, I really wasn’t at all acquainted with his work. Luckily, there was a good amount of material on the web to get one’s teeth into and it quickly became apparent that I had a somewhat difficult task ahead. John Maeda after all was not head of a prestigious course at MIT for nothing. So I decided to pick up some quotations - some from Maeda himself and some that I felt were in line with his thinking. The idea being that instead of asking him questions I would read to him these quotations and let him respond. Here is one of those quotes.

“30 years ago it was very interesting to make electronic music. Now, it’s easy to buy some stuff and hit a button. New things are in a sense imposed on us. So the question is how to fight the imposed culture.” Taku Sugimoto.

The context in my eyes, with regards to that quote, was to incite Maeda to share his thoughts on the creative process. Yet the quote is also latent with a more philosophical dimension. How does the artist position him/herself in relation to tools and technology. Maeda’s response was fascinating for me.

At the time he was particularly critical of what he called the constantly updating culture. This need for everyone to be ‘up to date’ with their technology. Whether it was about having the latest video camera or the latest version of software, there was, and still is, an almost frenetic need to posses the latest of everything for we are sold a promise that this will in some way make our creations greater or make the process easier. We know that this is simply not true yet still we are many to adhere to such action. Today, we know that this situation has gotten worse in that the strategies used to incite us to update or pay up for our technology is driven by even more agressive strategies.

Personally, I recently found myself giving in to not having a mobile phone simply because my bank wouldn’t let me do any online purchasing without one and to be quite honest I was fed up of asking my daughter all the time for the code my bank would send. On a more important and general level though, we all know the story of cloud computing and the ’tools of the trade’ that dictate, in more ways than one, our creative process as designers or artists. There are few alternatives are there not, to this plight of imposed and standardised ways of creation?

From this point of view, Maeda introduced a fundamental concept of his thinking and one that has had profound implications for me too. That concept was open source which extends also to the more radical thinking of the free software movement. Maeda introduced those concepts with a particular project that he was leading at the time entitled the Open Studio. The initiative no longer exists and most probably because other platforms and frameworks have evolved yet it had an interesting element to it. It was a tentative experiment in shared creation but also in how we value such work with a pseudo-currency enabling participants to both sell and buy artwork. This was a revelation to me; to realise that there were other creatives out there thinking differently in line with their tools and in terms of how they go about distributing and sharing that work. Furthermore, I became conscious of the idea that the machine could be used as a means for tool creation. This idea provoked a fundamental shift in my thinking. One that focused on a liberating process of creation that promised a means of ‘fighting the imposed culture’.

This is but a slice of what John Maeda had shared with me on that day and yet it was enough to motivate me to learn more - much more. Since that moment I have initiated projects and events that promote code as an expressive medium and media but perhaps more importantly that help bring people together to share in their knowledge. The open source ethic was of self evidence to me - it underpinned a lot of how I organised events for distilling common knowledge in a horizontal manner.

As some of you may well know, I have also committed myself to teaching code and specifically to graphic design students. It is here that most of my experience has developed and where I concentrate most of my efforts today. There will no doubt be lots to be written about this in future letters. Teaching and pedagogy in this field is at its infancy, little steps have been made and yet I realise that much more is needed. There remains much deeper discussions to be had on the matter and particularly within the field of graphic design where the link between designer, tool and the rising technologies that impose themselves has always been at the heart of many a discourse.

Should graphic designers be learning to code? Personally I believe everyone should be learning to code. it should be a core subject from the earliest of ages. The real question is not ‘should’ but rather ‘how’. Code is fundamental to the understanding of the machine. And who does not use the machine today? Furthermore, it is a skill that empowers us because it puts us in a position in which we can take advantage of the machine as opposed to it taking advantage of us. Learning to speak the language, so to say, gives us access to the necessary culture we seek to engage with. Otherwise it means we are simply content to be observers or worse, passive consumers. This is something I have come to understand over the years and it is something I am trying to communicate and teach.

On that note, I’ll sign off for now. There are already ideas bubbling in my head for the next letter. Until then, I’m very grateful for your presence and I wish you all the very best,

Mark


Note This article was sent as my first post for my Designing Programs newsletter.

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