Week 1
For this brief, I chose creative coding as my material to iterate with. To learn the in’s and out’s of the tool, for the initial exploration I decided to imitate a chair with as many coding solutions as possible. Though the iterations started out simple, but each iteration got a bit more complicated and ended up creating something that I had not planned for. The complexity and the learning curve of the tool, helps the user, unintentionally, to find more such accidental discoveries.
Week 2
Reference
Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation, [1972]
Week 3
The methods of iterations started with a quick dive into what iteration can be seen in different ways. The goal being to create iterations by selecting a specific material or tool (something that you haven’t experimented with before) and reaching a new level of skill, knowledge, or mastery with every passing iteration. For this particular brief, I decided to go with creative coding, specifically the processing.js library, as my tool/material.
The initial exploration revolved around getting to know the software and play around with the basic knowledge that I could gather in the first week. I tried to figure out a way of drawing a chair in 7 seven different styles, each style getting a bit complicated as the knowledge started to pile up. Each of the initial iterations took inspiration from already existing codes, available either in print or on the web. The last iteration of the first week left me with a question, how can we use code to imitate nature? The following week, I tried creating an iteration that not only tried to imitate nature but also took in inputs through various sources to react accordingly and something natural would. Using naturally occurring numbers to create a few instances. The thing that I realised is nature seems mysterious to us because we don’t know all the variables that are at play and how those variables or things form a cause and effect relationship. Nature is random for us, just because it’s too complex.
Drawing from the previous realisation, I decided to create two separate iterations that would try and recreate some of natures behaviour, using a lot of variables making the audience or the viewer think of it as random, but under the wraps it would contain the necessary code to decipher it. First was a simulation of two of life’s main processes, food, and reproduction. In this iteration, the bot went around the canvas hunting for food and mates to reproduce with, trying to survive as a species. The second, however, acts more of a record keeping tree, growing only when provided with passive inputs and taking inputs from various sources to create an event map, to depict the condition that was there when the dot was made.
For writing the code for the simulation, a passive decision was made to colour code blocks into pink and blue to signify their gender. Why Pink and blue, though? Because of someone in the past decided to make that decision and people followed. Where mass subjectivity became objective after a point, something that people now think is sacrosanct. Because of the same reason I implicitly decided to colour code my bots in the colour scheme. All that is solid, an article my Michael Rock (2016) touches on the same point, of how “Once established its almost impossible to think outside the systems and structures they represent”.
This is not only true regarding gender, but also when it comes to design tools and materials. Several tools have a style associated with it, a look or pattern of output, which in some cases maybe because of technical limitations or other uncontrollable factors but a lot of it can be associated with the pattern that was established by early designers using that tool. And because of that it becomes a lot more difficult for a designer or a user to look outside it, to break it.
References
Michael Rock, All That is Solid…, [2016]
Feedback: Written by Amandine Forest
- like that you’re taking natural processes and put it in the opposite scenario (digital)
- The way tree are growing ++
- Good base to push further/ can do a lot with it
- If you follow the process of translation it can be v open, go further
- Transforming something organic in coding +
- Tree iteration ++++ because its uses the idea of a tree
- Focus and open enquiry +++ > open to let the process create your result
- To what extend coding can engage with organic processes?
- Very rigorous / you’ve put in a lot of work
- Whats the role and function of the game? How would you keep the user engage?
- 2nd iteration ++++ really exciting = really a graphic communication design outcome // we’re seeing a poster being designed // how to develop? Give the audience More interactivity + date stamps ? // how to develop the text aspect? Change the way the text is presented in relation to the variables? How are the directions chosen? Could be more related to the variables // it is almost data visualisation of an environment at a particular moment in time and space > to what extend is it bout data visualisation?
- What could it be sue for? // what do we learn? // select an environment?