Branding with data. Generative design for progressive thinkers in the creative industries.
I had the pleasure of giving this talk at ITERATIONS 2021 Amsterdam.
A Creative Coding symposium organized by Creative Coding Utrecht and Dutch designer Vera van de Seyp.
Learn how to unlock the potential of Generative Design for brands, agencies and cultural institutions. Embrace a new approach to creativity and experience how it changes the very core of how you create, work and monetize your ideas. This talk is focused on Generative Design for progressive thinkers in the creative industries. It highlights 7 very practical approaches and concepts to apply Creative Coding and Creative Algorithms to the field of branding and communications design.
I have a few questions for you. Just to talk about your work, but also to learn a bit about the way that you see the creative programming landscape. How creative coding is influencing your work?
Creative Coding has enabled me to communicate stories and ideas in a completely new fashion. Ever since I discovered it, I’ve been incredibly excited to explore the field and its creative potential. From the very beginning, it felt like a wonderful space where you can really make an impact and discover new opportunities. Wherever I look, I feel like there is a great story to discover, just waiting to be told. Looking at Creative Coding from the background of a graphics designer, the aspect of storytelling is what intrigues me most as I see Creative Coding as a powerful new tool in my arsenal of communicating ideas and reaching out to an audience. When you combine aspects of human interaction, data and programming with storytelling and design, a vast landscape of new opportunities emerges. Nowadays, I primarily specialize in collaborating with agencies and brands to combine my explorative approach to storytelling with communications and experience design.
You already touched upon it a little bit, but what is your definition of creative coding?
That‘s a tough one because there are probably as many different perspectives out there as there are great people exploring the field. So, I can naturally only talk about my personal perspective. For me, Creative Coding is about broadening the capabilities of designers by fusing the capabilities of programming, the knowledge encoded into data and the emotional impact of graphics design. At the very core, it is about asking how you can transform any given dataset into a new form, shape or story. It allows you to take anything and transform it into something new: You could turn music into paintings, you could turn the weather into sculptures… Creative Coding can transcend all forms. It can even transcend the borders or the physical and the digital, which I think is incredibly cool.
Looking at Creative Coding from the background of a graphics designer, the aspect of storytelling is what intrigues me most. I see Creative Coding as a powerful new tool in my arsenal of communicating ideas and reaching out to an audience.
The second aspect is, that I believe with Creative Coding we can build our own tools and free us from the limitations of more traditional tools like Photoshop or Illustrator. With those tools, you’re always confined to how someone else envisioned you work. But Creative Coding allows you to be free of all limitations: If you’re smart enough or know how to Google the right thing, there is hardly any limit to what you can build. That still feels incredibly amazing and empowering to me.
I always mention in this context that I consider myself to be a designer that codes and not a coder that designs. While both fields are incredibly creative –and generalizations are obviously bad– I mention this because I observe that people from a design background tend to have a different take on Creative Coding: It is not the technology that takes center stage but the stories you can tell with that technology.
Interesting. You already said you’re a designer who uses coding instead of the other way around. So, for you, how do Creative Coding and Generative Design relate to each other? Because they’re both in your field of expertise.
I asked myself the same question a couple of months back and used that as a motivation to write a paper on the history of ‘coded art’ to try and learn more. Both the term Creative Coding and Generative Design seem to be occupied and still up for definition at the same time. So, I started to look back at history, going back all the way to the 1950s. It was an exciting journey to (re-)discover all these people who, even before computers, were doing parametric experiences and thinking about how to incorporate systems, chance and other variables into their work. I feel like John Cage and other pioneers of the time thought about experiences in a similar way that we now do in Creative Coding. Think about works like “Imaginary Landscapes No.4” where twelve radios and 24 participants create a musical composition by following rules of performance and incorporating the factor of chance.
It was amazing to discover how many core ideas were already present in the 50s and going forward. Look at the movement of ‘Fluxus’ and all the rule-based, crazy experiences they thought up at the time. That created new experiences and also incorporated the audience in a meaningful way for the first time. That seems to be quite similar to what is happening in the field of Creative Coding, Generative Design currently.
Creative Coding involves unbounded exploration and serves as a commentary on technology itself. It’s a synergy between coding and artistic design, encouraging their fusion.
To be more precise: Creative Coding involves unbounded exploration and serves as a commentary on technology itself. It’s a synergy between coding and artistic design, encouraging their fusion. Unlike traditional programming, where errors are frowned upon, Creative Coding embraces them. Mistakes often yield surprising outcomes and guide me incrementally toward an unforeseen endpoint, making the journey inherently inventive.
On the other hand, Generative Design is more goal-oriented for me. I specifically employ this approach to address distinct challenges, such as those in a design project.
And so because you wrote this paper, I was wondering what place creative coding takes in the creative landscape? So if you would call it pre-computer disciplines? I’m wondering if it’s a different discipline to you, or if it feels like already existing disciplines that were there before computers, and before creative coding with actual codes became a thing.
I think it’s one of those fields where multiple disciplines and schools of thought fuse together to create something new. The way I look at it, all of the individual disciplines where already present: There was communications design, there were data analysis and mathematics and obviously the field of programming. Creative Coding and Generative Design, I think those are new landscapes where all of the above fields are combined at a point in time where this is really possible for the first time. Only today do we have the capabilities to access large amounts of data from the web at any given time, have an infrastructure for delivering those experiences to everyone on the globe, have unprecedented access to knowledge on how to code and design, and what is basically a supercomputer in the pocket of almost everyone on the planet. Looking back at the example of John Cage or the many great creatives of our current time, I feel the discipline is shaped by people who combine multiple facets of looking at this world. Take Christian Mio Loclair for example, who I really respect for pushing the field forward. As far as I know, he has a background in choreography and dance and then went into the fields of computer science and visual arts. Such people naturally ask new questions and can really thrive by combining data, rule-based and flexible visual systems with experiences and storytelling. Definitely look up both Christian Mio Loclair and Studio Waltz Binaire for inspiration in that regard.
