Dissertation Practical: OUGD601 - A Brief History of Computers & Design

A Brief History of Computers

http://printingcode.runemadsen.com/lecture-intro/

The first noteworthy computer design tool was built by Ivan Sutherland in 1963. It was called the Sketchpad, and it was a very early form of CAD drawing program.

The user could manipulate geometric shapes on the screen by using a light-pen. Important because it was one of the first examples of a computatinal design tool.

Xerox PARC was a research center established in 1971 as a research division of the Xerox Corporation. It’s widely famous for its contributions to computer science, which include the UI, the mouse, the laser printer, etc.

Here it’s Douglas Englebart from Standford University (later PARC) introducing the computer mouse for the first time.

I show you this video because it’s important to realize that a very small group of people ended up designing all the basic human-computer interactions that we all use today. Most of this hasn’t changed a bit since.

Look at the attention to detail here. By not placing icons on top of the dark pixels in the background, icons get a much cleaner edge.

That’s infograhics for you!

Here’s a comparison of interface design for Google Docs from the last 5 years, and the original UI for the Xerox Star from 1981. This should give you a sense of their accomplishments. It’s also a worthwhile reminder that great design is a product of constraints.

The Xerox Parc creations proved to be insanely important, also because a 24-old Steve Jobs visited the PARC facilities and was inspired to create some of the most important innovations for graphic designers.
I want to show you this video, not only because it’s super fun, but because you realize what Steve Jobs did for computation:. Suddenly the computer was a creative tool. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t back then.

The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists. - Steve Jobs

He invited designers to participate! Made these tools available.

The computer became a tool for creation.

The first computers in arts

Exactly like the Bauhaus, where machines became accessible to ordinary people, the computer slowly became accessible for artists. Some of the first ones where the artists known as The New Tendencies movement, based in Yugoslavia, but with artists all over the world.

The “New Tendencies” explored the use of the computer in the 1960’s and 1970’s in international exhibitions and the magazine “Bit International”.

Here’s a photo of a gathering in Paris in 1962.

Karl Reinhartz in 1962.

Jose Maria Yturralde in 1972.

Manuel Barbadilloin 1973.

Another important milestone in computational art was the exhibition “The Reponsive Eye” held at MoMa in 1965. It featured some of the newest developments in so-called “Optic Art”. Many of the artists used computers to create their artwork.

Josef Albers showed works in the exhibition.

Second Generation Computational Artists

A second generation of artists started in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Common for all of them were a strong knowledge about, and focus on, the art of programming.

John Maeda wrote the influential books “Design by Numbers”, “Creative Code” and “Maeda&Media”. He was head of the MIT Aesthetics and Computation group, and a teacher for Processing creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas, plus ITP’s own Jared Shiffman.

Mark Wilson is known for his experiments with plotter drawings. He received the Ars Electronica Grand Prize in 1992, and even though his earliest work was way before hom-computer-graphics, his style is very similar to the 1990’s aesthetics of e.g. Karl Sims.

Karl Sims is known for his evolutionary graphic art (e.g. the Galapagos installation). He often used particle systems and artificial life in his computer programs to generate a final output. There’s an interesting connection between Sol Lewitt’s instructions and Karl Sims’ software that chooses its on output.

The Internet and Design programs as Coding Environments

Nothing has contributed more to the acceleration of new programming artists as the internet. A series of coding environments started appealing to designers who would otherwise not have thought of programming as a creative expression.

Of course there’s the internet and HTML + CSS (not a programming language though). Nothing has done more to breed new programming artists than the internet.

Adobe Director and the programming language Lingo. Made it possible for the first time to draw things on the screen and control them in code. Very basic though.

Even though it has a bad rep, Flash was hugely successful in in graphic designers. The notion of drawing objects and manipulating them in code (the DisplayObject and scene graph) was extremely powerful, and it has inspired a number of modern frameworks.

Books about Flash and Director started being published, only targeted towards designers. What’s interesting, however, is that all of these books focused on generative art, not so much graphic design. Notice how it was still super hip to use your hacker name on your book cover.

… and of course Processing!

Today

Given this history of systems in graphic design, this class investigates what’s possible in the intersection between graphic design and computation. Here’s a few examples of designers working in this space.