ALLIANZ GROUP: Founded in 1937, this group of Swiss artists and designers—including Max Bill, Max Huber, Leo Leuppi, and Richard Paul Lohse—championed principles of concrete art.
ATOMS TO BITS: This term, popularized by Chris Anderson, references new fabrication techniques and customized manufacturing that allow digital information to take physical form. The decreasing cost of technology, along with emerging production methods, now propels innovation in the physical as well as the digital world.
AVANT-GARDE: Driven by utopian visions, avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, particularly those discussed in the context of graphic design, sought visual forms capable of objective, universal communication. These artists attempted to radically alter their societies by merging art with everyday life, shifting the arts away from the individual, subjective, and, in their minds, corrupt visions of the past.
BAUHAUS: Under the leadership of Walter Gropius, this influential school opened in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Initially, its express purpose was to merge art and craft, thereby elevating German industrial design. Although the experimental work there varied greatly, graphic designers usually focused on efforts by prominent Bauhaus members, including László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, to uncover a universally comprehensible visual language. This quest greatly influenced New Typography and ultimately the development of the grid system. Also of note is the Bauhaus Vorkurs, or basic course, which became a curriculum model for art and design schools internationally and particularly in the United States. More generally, the Bauhaus has become synonymous with high modern design.
THE CATHEDRAL AND THE BAZAAR: In 1997 computer scientist Eric S. Raymond first published this influential text that examines the open-source, collaborative development methods used in the Linux project. His lessons for successful open-source software development (e.g., “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone”) increasingly permeate the creative process of graphic designers, interface designers, and industrial designers as widespread connectivity and rapid-prototyping tools incite makers to seek collaborative and open design models.
CONCEPTUAL ART: Sol LeWitt, one of the founders of the conceptual art movement, defined the movement as follows in a 1967 article for Art Forum: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” Conceptual art’s separation between the concept/planning and the execution of a project influenced a generation of new media artists and designers, including Ben Fry and Casey Reas.
CONCRETE ART: Theo van Doesburg founded the group Art Concret in Paris in 1929. This movement advocates art that does not reference the natural world. Instead the components look to mathematics and geometry for inspiration. After World War II, Max Bill became a principal theorist of concrete art, spearheading a retrospective of the movement in Zurich in 1960.
CONDITIONAL DESIGN: Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey, and Roel Wouters founded this collective in 2008. Their manifesto presents three key components—process, logic, and input—of their work’s emphasis on process over product.
COPYLEFT MOVEMENT: Advancing the free software movement, Richard Stallman led the way in developing new concepts of copyright that enable rather than limit the free distribution of information. Lawrence Lessig continued this tradition as a founding board member of Creative Commons, which advocates for flexible copyrights that allow content creators to reserve some rights but waive many restrictions on the reuse of information.
EMIGRE: Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans founded Emigre magazine and, shortly thereafter, Emigre Fonts in 1984. Published until 2005, Emigre became an emblem of postmodern defiance of the streamlined, functional tenets of modernist design. Emigre Fonts established the frontier of digital type design, which coincided with the introduction of the Macintosh computer and PostScript technology.
FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT: Activist Richard Stallman founded the free software movement in 1983 with the launch of the GNU Project. In combination with Linux, the GNU Project became the first completely free software operating system, inspiring an ongoing commitment to mass collaboration among programmers, amateur and professional alike.
GRID: Grids divide and order content. They are most notoriously associated with International Style or Swiss style design. For practitioners of this influential design approach, complex, modular grids play a crucial role in the establishment of a tightly controlled design methodology. The grid’s capacity to delineate specific design parameters for use by a wide range of designers forms a natural bridge between twentieth-century design theory and contemporary procedural thinking.
HACKER MANIFESTO: Loyd Blankenship (aka The Mentor) wrote “The Conscience of a Hacker” for the e-zine Phrack in 1986. The manifesto expresses the ideological underpinnings of hacker culture: individuals driven by curiosity who hack to expose weakness and corruption in an existing system and support free access to information. “This is our world now…the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore…and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge…and you call us criminals.”
INTERNATIONAL STYLE: This design ideology stems from a modernist, rational, systematic approach. Its practitioners often use a limited typographic and color palette, carefully constructed modular grids, and objective imagery. Such designers put aside personal vision and become, instead, translators who clearly, objectively communicate the client message. This “valueless” approach helped professionalize the design field in the 1950s and ’60s, moving it away from the arts and into the semi-scientific realm. Such systems were particularly useful for large-scale corporate identities that began to appear during that time.
INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT): Also referred to as ubiquitous computing, this term references a network of distributed objects embedded with sensors and other electronics. These objects transform from dumb objects to smart objects as they gather information and feed into a larger body of knowledge on the Internet. The objects begin to speak to one another, the manufacturer and/or user, creating highly efficient, data-driven automated systems. Technology pioneer Kevin Ashton, founder of the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, first used the term in 1999.
MACINTOSH: In 1984 Steve Jobs released the original Macintosh computer to the public. The Mac’s accessible graphical user interface inspired countless young designers to begin experimenting with computation. Designer Susan Kare created typefaces and icons for its original operating system, including the Chicago typeface and the now ubiquitous trash can and system-error bomb icons.
MASS PRODUCTION: This production model results in large quantities of standardized products. The system is based on the premise that the per-unit cost goes down as the overall quantity goes up. Designers invest a great deal of time perfecting products before they are mass-produced. The system requires large up-front investment, storage, and distribution facilities.
MODERNISM: The modernist movement falls roughly between the 1860s and the 1970s. It is typically defined as artists’ attempt to cope with a newly industrialized society. Modernism is progressive and often utopian, empowering humans to improve or remake their environments. Within modernism fall various other movements crucial to the development of graphic design. These include futurism, constructivism, and New Typography. The design community continues to debate the value of modernism, while basic modernist tenets still define conventional standards for effective design
NANOTECHNOLOGY: Rather than reshaping established materials from without, can we instead manipulate matter itself on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular level? Designers consider nanotechnology in relation to principles of self-assembly and self-organization. As Paola Antonelli notes in “Design and the Elastic Mind”: “The idea that you would only need to give the components of an object a little push for the object to come together and reorganize in different configurations could have profound implications for the environment.”
NEW TENDENCIES: This movement, falling between 1961 and 1978, encompassed artists, designers, engineers, and scientists who explored possible applications of the computer as an artistic tool that could bridge art and science and thereby improve our society. The focus of the movement shifted over time from computers and visual research to computer art. The organizers chose to center the movement in Zagreb, Croatia, as a protest against the co-option of computer-inspired art by the commercial art scene of the United States and Western Europe.
NEW WAVE: Often used interchangeably with postmodernism or late modernism, this movement is often associated with Wolfgang Weingart, a leader of the second wave of Swiss style typography. Weingart rebelled against the Swiss design luminaries of the 1950s and ’60s, pushing intuition and personal expression to the forefront of his work. Notable students are April Greiman and Dan Friedman. Greiman’s particular brand of postmodernism often involved forays into new technology.
OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT: Open source advocates are committed to free access to the source code of a computer program. Such access makes large-scale collaborative development models possible. Activist Richard Stallman’s free software movement, founded in 1983, the copyleft movement, which began around the same period, and activist Lawrence Lessig’s related Creative Commons licenses made the growth of the open source movement possible by resisting traditional twentieth-century copyrights, which prevent programmers from sharing resources.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN: Participatory design requires the user to contribute content to the design project either during the ideation stage or through involvement with the design deliverable itself. Users increasingly expect some level of participation when they engage with content.
PEER PRODUCTION: This practice is defined by a large-scale collaborative production process that utilizes communities of self-organizing individuals. Peer production relies upon the networked-information economy and to some extent the free circulation of information.
POSTHUMAN: The term refers to a historical period in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. It is the linchpin of the paradigm emerging in this century, wherein computers, not humans, dominate the power hierarchy.
POSTMODERNISM: Adherents to this ideological paradigm recognize that meaning is inherently unstable; there is no essence or center that one should strive to reach. Broadly speaking, the term is closely associated with poststructuralism. Within the design community it can be used to refer to a layered, complex style or a poststructuralist critical approach to design. The postmodern movement begins roughly in the 1960s. There is no definite end point, although most suggest we have already moved past the postmodern world. Critics describe postmodernism as either a reaction against or the ultimate continuation of modernism. Either way, postmodernism moves away from the quest for absolutes and universally applicable values that characterize modernism.
PROCEDURAL THINKING: The process of breaking down problems and solutions into a formula that can be carried out by an information-processing agent (a human, a machine, or a combination of both).
PROCESSING: A programming language, development environment, and online community that encourages artists to actively engage with code and technologists to explore visual literacy. Ben Fry and Casey Reas developed the initial infrastructure of Processing in 2001 while enrolled in the MIT Media Lab within John Maeda’s Aesthetics and Computation research group. Using an open-source model, they released their software to the community for further development. Processing remains freely accessible and open source.
TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY: Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized this term, which was originally used by mathematician John von Neumann in 1958. However, it is futurist Raymond Kurzweil who has in recent years spread awareness of the Singularity. Kurzweil predicts that by 2045, the acceleration of information-based technologies will have led to nonbiological intelligence that exceeds human intelligence.