What is Creative Coding?

Data-Design Dictionary.
A dictionary to illuminate data-driven generative design and creative coding.

Definition

Creative Coding is a place where experience in the field of design, love of explorative creativity and skills as a programmer come together. Unbound by commercial purpose and driven by free flow, it is a design approach that inspires and motivates to constantly challenge existing limits and unfold new creative possibilities. Discovery-based, iterative Creative Coding projects and artifacts often lay the groundwork for future commercial generative design systems.

“[..] Creative Coding, defined by Mitchell & Bown (2013, 143) as ‘a discovery-based process consisting of exploration, iteration, and reflection, using code as a primary medium, towards a media artefact designed for an artistic context.'”[1]

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Creative Coding is a practice that uses programming as a medium for artistic expression. It encompasses a broad range of topics and interactions:

  1. The realm of Creative Coding can be understood as the ideation process of generative design, a form of design produced with the use of an autonomous system.
  2. Creative Coding integrates aspects of interaction design, which is the design of interactions between users and products.
  3. Such interactions often manifest in a digital medium, an electronic environment where one can broadcast, display, or interact with content.
  4. Creative Coding employs visualization techniques to represent data or concepts visually. These visualizations often appear in the digital medium.
  5. Creative Coding oftentimes leverages simulations, an imitation of a situation or process.
  6. The field also often explores hardware- and sensor-Integration, combining coding with electronic and data-measuring components, which in turn connects with the digital medium.
  7. Performances are also possible by engaging in live coding, which is an act of writing code in real-time to i.e. produce music, visual art, or graphical performances in real-time.
  8. Creative Coding oftentimes makes use of various frameworks & libraries, which assist with specific functionalities.

Additional quotes about
Creative Coding

“‘Creative Coders’ are artists, designers, architects, musicians, and poets who use computer programming and custom software as their chosen media. These practitioners blur the distinction between art and design and science and engineering, and in their slippery interdisciplinarity, may best be described with the German word Gestaltern, or ‘creators of form’.”[2]

“[..] many of these creative coding toolkits [..] have radically democratized software development, positioning programming as a potent mode of cultural inquiry.”[3]

“Creative Coding is… iterative, experimental, playful, serendipitous, pushing boundaries, critical.”[4]

“[..] many of these creative coding toolkits [..] have radically democratized software development, positioning programming as a potent mode of cultural inquiry.”[5]

“Creative coding is an interdisciplinary field composed of diverse practitioners that have fostered their own shared practices, and whose works treat digital technologies as material for creative practice. The community of creative coders that has established itself in the Netherlands is composed of a range of creatives coming from different fields: they are artists, designers, programmers, performers, musicians, scientists, and craftsmen. [..]”[6]

“In my Creative Coding courses, it has never been my mission to make graphic designers fully-fledged programmers. That, I know, is never going to happen—nor should it. By teaching graphic designers how to create visual output through the medium of code, I hope to instill in them an understanding of how programming can be a highly versatile and useful addendum to their skill set, not only as a practical tool, but also, in a meta-cognitive way, informing how they think, plan, and execute visual communication. In my view, educating code-literate graphic designers is essential for the continued development of graphic design as a discipline.”[7]

[1] Møller Hansen, Stig: public class Graphic_Design implements Code { // Yes, but how? }. an investigation towards bespoke Creative Coding programming courses in graphic design education, Aarhus Universitet 2019, p.13
[2] Golan Levin, Tega Brain: Code as Creative Medium. A Handbook for Computational Art and Design, Cambridge/London 2021, p. 3
[3] Golan Levin, Tega Brain: Code as Creative Medium. A Handbook for Computational Art and Design, Cambridge/London 2021, p. 3
[4] Van Sluijs, Fabian & van Wynsberghe Axelle, Editorial in: Hello World! Exhibition Catalogue, published by Creative Coding Utrecht, 2018, p. 5
[4] Golan Levin, Tega Brain: Code as Creative Medium. A Handbook for Computational Art and Design, Cambridge/London 2021, p. 3
[6] Van Sluijs, Fabian & van Wynsberghe Axelle, Editorial in: Hello World! Exhibition Catalogue, published by Creative Coding Utrecht, 2018, p. 4
[7] Møller Hansen, Stig: public class Graphic_Design implements Code { // Yes, but how? }. an investigation towards bespoke Creative Coding programming courses in graphic design education, Aarhus Universitet 2019, p.14
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