In digital design, the word digital is vestigial. To be a “communications” designer these days implies working in digital space with digital formats. We've already examined the impact of digital tools on design practice, design thinking, and design production. Now we will survey the opportunities in the digital arena(s) and how others have mastered them. While a dwindling majority of graphic designers still describes their practice as “problem solving,” a growing number of new- comers have declared that instead of looking for solutions to problems, they are going to be designing programs for solutions.
Not a breakthrough idea, this concept was pioneered 50 years ago by Swiss typographer Karl Gerstner, who wrote Designing Programmes, a book about systems in graphic design. It features four illustrated essays on a systematic methodology that is particularly relevant today, in the context of the most recent developments in computational design.
So, why all the excitement?
The big difference between then and now is the technology. Whereas back in 1964, when Gerstner was articulating his principles, the most advanced piece of engineering was the ill-fated Picturephone, today people, but also products, events, and services are digitally intertwined into a vast substrate of pulsating data.
The designers interviewed in this chapter all enthusiastically embrace technologically driven interconnectivity as the source of endless creative opportunities and career building. Jeoren Barendse, a Dutch graphic designer who was one of the first in his field to see in this new paradigm a huge potential for reinvention, affirms that today designers “must become creators of the very design rules and processes that will allow them to come up with innovative solutions.”
In other words, today designers are on their own! No longer can they rely on tried-and-true formulas and techniques. To keep up with the proliferation of new devices, new software upgrades, and new usages, they hold on to the only thing they still can trust: the design process itself and the methodology behind it. “The most important part of designing is thinking,” remarks Frieder Nake, a professor of computer graphics in Bremen, Germany.
All over the globe, and in every corner of the digital realm, designers are developing a keen analytical mind. Whether they are designing apps or multimedia installations, venturing into e-commerce or investing in start-ups, joining user experience teams, or specializing in generative design, they are redefining their professional practice as they go. “The focus of design has expanded from the form of objects to the behavior of systems,” remarks Hugh Dubberly, a San Francisco software and service consultant.
This is good news for graphic designers who, until now, often played second fiddle to product designers whose creative output had easy consumer appeal. Industrial designers might not be able to make the most of the digital revolution, whereas graphic designers, who are no stranger to grids, templates, graphic standards, and visual identity guidelines, are better equipped to manage abstract complexity.
Lo and behold, as this next series of interviews demonstrates, graphic designers are emerging as the framers of a new way of thinking, one based on how we experience life rather than produce goods and sell services.