Title: Design machines: How to survive the digital apocalypse.
Context: The era of digital production has standardized creativity.
Synopsis: Man has always feared his own obsolescence. Since the dawn of the industrial age our bogeyman has invariably been the machine. Tireless. Relentless. Soulless. But our saving grace has always been our intellect. Humankind’s ability to abstract, reason, and create carved out a niche that machines would never be able to evict us from (AI fables notwithstanding). Yet here comes the information age which, it would seem, hits our cognitive sweet spot. Let machines run the wheels of production. Think of all the free time that’ll give us to think! And what have we done with that free time? All of that information? We have adopted the characteristics of the very machines we thought ourselves better than. Data powers our output. We templatize our creativity. Our ideas seem to roll off an assembly line. But it does not have to be this way. We can return to our roots and shake the bits and bytes out of our expressive selves. The medium need not be the only message we send out into the world.
Best Bit: “This pressure created by phoney metrics, fear of risk, and worthless content has squeezed expression and emotion right out of the design process.”
Leave a Reply