A few thoughts about the future of the expression of thought, ideas, and knowledge AND about the future of graphic design in the context of digital technology.

"It took 65 years after the invention of the printing press for someone to decide that putting page numbers on books was a good idea! The essay took a century to be invented: thus it is quite likely that the enduring and serious forms of the new media have not been invented-- we are still mired in the imitation of the old: paper, film, and tape. ...

Literacy is more than being able to read a street sign or write a party invitation-- it is about being fluent in the ideas and issues of humankind and being able to use and create symbolic representations to understand and explore them further. ..." --Alan Kay

"In spite of incessant talk concerning interdisciplinarity, something is wildly out of kilter when, at the end of the twentieth century, no alternative metaphor of intelligence counters the nineteenth-century standard of the book." --Barbara Maria Stafford

"As anyone in computer science knows, the boundary between data and program-- that is, what is data and what is procedure-- is very fluid. In fact... there is no principled distinction in terms of form or representation of which is which." --Alan Newell

"[In terms networked computers] knowledge is no longer conceived and construed in the language of forms at all ('bodies of knowledge,' or a 'corpus.' bounded and stored), but rather as modes of thought , apprehension, and expression as techniques and practices." -- Geoffrey Nunberg, research scientist with Xerox Palo Alto and professor of Linguistics at Stanford.

These particular quotes represent a kind of story for me. This is a tale about communication and information and the technologies that allow for these to take place. It goes like this: Once upon time there were spoken words, then pictures, then writing, then paper, the printing press, photography, the telephone, motion pictures, recorded sound, then the radio, then TV. You get the picture. Today there is the computer. With each new medium it took a while to figure out how that technology might be exploited to produce new ways in which thought (information, knowledge, and ideas) might be communicated. In other words it took a while to find good kinds of representations that allow for greater ways for us to "see through data so we can come to understandings" as Dan Russell puts it.

This means that what gets said is what is sayable-- that knowledge is only as good as the means by which it is transmitted. Like when you want to share an insight or an experience exactly as you've come to know them. Finding the right words, the perfect image becomes the challenge. The more mastery your have over means and forms of communication-- both in terms of what the technology is capable of doing and ideas for the use of that technology-- the more you're able to communicate. Technology and conceptual advances work hand in hand.

A good example is the book. First of all, books weren't born from a single new technology but allowed for greater possibilities from further exploiting older technologies: writing exploited words; mass-reproduction exploited writing; scientific knowledge exploited mass-reproduction while at the same time mass reproduction was in turn exploited by new ideas about it.-- the essay is the example Alan Kay points out. And referring to Barbara Stafford's statement, in its essence the book is a stand in for a kind of brain-world. This brain world (the book) is a source of knowledge that has been acquired and then organized and configured in a such a way that it can then be applied.

What Alan Newall points out that with computers what the data is and how it is delivered is like trying to distinguish the dancer from the dance. Writing is simultaneously and symbiotically programming and formgiving. The expression of thought through form concerns how the technology results in new and unprecedented ways in which ideas manifest.

And since graphic design by definition gives form to thought so that ideas can be communicated, I believe it is significant that graphic design should consider is what might graphic designers offer in terms of furthering the means through which ideas, and the experience of ideas-- the links between thought and the perception of thought so that understanding-- takes place? But for graphic design to do this what might this require of the profession that challenges how we are defined?

The first thing to keep in mind however is that the development and evolution of graphic design-- as a profession and as an activity-- has always corresponded to the development and evolution of communications technologies at the same time to notions of how knowledge, ideas and information are expressed. Simply put graphic design as a profession was born of permutations in divisions of labor of print technology and is a child of that technology. As the technology change so will the need for different activities and divisions of labor surrounding it.

An example of the triadic relationship between technology, graphic application, and the furthering of the knowable is demonstrated in a recent exhibition entitled "The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy." It covered the history of medical illustration that followed the advent and proliferation of that former new "new media"-- the printing press. Surgeons wanted to preserve and to communicate their discoveries pertaining to the internal functions of the human body. But in order to do this, these early medical professionals had to either join forces with artists (visual communications specialists) or become adept at making images themselves. These graphic expressions were the result of the technological means-- printing-- coupled with how the body was conceptually regarded and at the same time how the illustrations needed to function in order to be useful to the intended audience. As the images progress through the centuries you see a concurrent and intergrated evolution taking place between scientific knowledge, concepts of representation, and technology.

Following this continuuum forward to today's "Digital Age," how does this translate? Today it is the technology itself that is now confronting us with the generation of highly complex and abstract data (for instance the data of the internet). A graphic and conceptual transformation (for instance the search engine) is necessary so that data can be understood as well as can be manipulated so that further meanings can be drawn and applied.

So what is it specifically about computer technology apart from print technology that leads to other considerations about the function and role of graphic design as applied to the frontiers of experiential structures of thought? The computer can essentially assume any shape or form within the scope of materials and programming; it can become all and any media; it has the ability to compute and therefore can be reflective, analyze, reconfigure and provide simulations according to given parameters. This allows for information to be presented in multiple forms and from multiple perspectives. And there is the added quality of telecommunications which allow for vast networks of data to integrate. The question then becomes for me how might graphic designers serve as partners and ideal contributors to the potentials for conveying thought offered by the juncture of expression and engineering? What I wonder is if given a different horse (both graphic design and the computer) how might the cart (expression of thought) be different.

However, now that I've unabashedly campaigned for graphic design I don't believe it's quite so simple-- graphic design would likely have to branch out in order to accommodate what this kind of expression might involves and in doing so might it permutate beyond recognition? Or might it get absorbed into some other profession? So to distinguish this design activity from the one wedded to print I've come to refer to this type of design activity as "mutant design."

Mutant design refers to a few things: First, the computer itself. As Alan Turing put it-- it is a machine that is all machines. Second, this title refers to the mutating boundaries of graphic design as it accommodates or gives way to other potentials and possibilities of seeing and giving shape to ideas: semantics and user experience from industrial designers; ways of thinking about space, structures, navigation from architects; ways in which the sayable gets said from writers; and mood structure, rhythm, emotion and spacial feedback from sound designers; and certainly there's plenty more. Mutant design also denotes the potential nature of products that are produced-- of which many, as part of their function, may exist in a state of perpetual alteration.

How the spacialization of information and knowledge takes place becomes a key strategy. A single text can be reconfigured according to different points of view instead of being confined to a single identification. Knowledge as a reflection of use value can be defracted through filtering systems which change the meaning and intention. Because the computer is not necessarily a friendly environment for reading, new rhetorical strategies may also evolve.

All that said, there are huge issues with information in the digital age that should at least be mentioan-- one is copyright and the other is indexing of knowledge. The copyright issues live in the tension between democracy and commerce. Commerce encourages the production of ideas and democrary assures those ideas circulate. How the problem can be addressed is a matter of public policy. New constructs for categorization are being invited and encouraged and what might prove most revolutionary are new ways of viewing and classifying knowledge. And finally evolution, revolution and all these hopes and deareams must bargain with the devil of pre-existing paradigms.

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© 1997 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com