What are Dynamic Identities?

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

Definition

Dynamic identities refer to the concept of brands or identities that evolve and change over time, rather than remaining static. This approach leverages computational thinking by applying algorithms and data-driven processes to craft brand identities that can adapt to different contexts, audiences, or platforms, ensuring relevance and engagement. In the realm of generative branding, this concept takes a step further by using algorithms to create variations of brand and storytelling elements in real-time, reflecting and enabling the brand’s interaction with its environment or audience.[1] Incorporating co-creation into this framework, dynamic identities also empower users or stakeholders to actively participate in the branding process, allowing for a more collaborative and inclusive approach that harnesses collective creativity and insights to continuously evolve the brand’s identity in meaningful ways across a multitude of physical and digital touchpoints.

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Dynamic identities answer an important question: How do brands become visible in a world that has already seen everything? Designers and creatives today have more opportunities for expression than ever before. At the same time, as the world becomes more complex and nuanced, it becomes increasingly difficult to represent it. Dynamic identities, expressed with the help of programmatic generative design systems, offer multifacetted solutions for the modern challenges of how to craft stories and reactive visual expressions that create empathy, emotional attachement and curiosity.

Relevant quotes on the
topic of dynamic identities

“Opening up at least one of the elements of the identity gives the brand a living character. Letting the identity be influenced by external data – weather, stock market, news, tweets, number of visitors, statuf of a project, anything really – puts it in real time. The indetity can reflect the world it is living in, and adapt in response to its input.”[1]

“Visual identities are any graphic or communicative product that refers to and characterises a company or an institution. Dynamic identities are visual identities with some variable elements that help the identity to fit the company better. The static, standard, traditional or classic identities do not require any variable graphic component; while in dynamic identities the flexibility of certain visual elements is the core feature.”[2]

[1] Irene van Nes: Dynamic Identites. How to create a living brand, Amsterdam 2013, p. 155
[2] Sergio Corini, Dynamic Identities: An Analysis. A new classification system, Gavardo 2023, p. 12f
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