Magic Box
The craft of programming is helping to further traditional craft aesthetics and production in present-day culture. Experiment and play are vital in craft practice. Play lets you learn, which is why it still lies at the heart of art and design education. And the computer can very effectively introduce play; digital media, with their instant reversibility and ability to simulate, can withstand sustained experimentation where other formats would disintegrate.
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/magic-box-craft-and-the-computer
Craft has been rooted in particular tools and associated techniques, each defining its respective practice, as have the design disciplines, historically, and much of art: painting, printmaking, photography, typography and so on. But today anyone calling themselves a graphic designer or an artist will likely employ a wide range of tools and media, and quite possibly engage with the ideas surrounding each practice and its inherent ‘craft’. Yet despite the cross-influence of areas of cultural production on one another – or because of it – the habit of defining practice in terms of the use of tools is not helpful in the information age. This is mired in a discourse that has been static since the sidelining of the Arts and Crafts movement a hundred years ago. Nor does it recognise the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary practice.
Curiously, the craft of programming is helping to further traditional craft aesthetics and production in present-day culture.
Experiment and play are vital in craft practice. Play lets you learn, which is why it still lies at the heart of art and design education. And the computer can very effectively introduce play; digital media, with their instant reversibility and ability to simulate, can withstand sustained experimentation where other formats would disintegrate. Moreover, the digital context can be its own world, beyond the need to mimic physical reality or structure. […] Freely experimenting with process, this new generation of designers is fashioning a future for graphic design where craft practice – and the ‘what if?’ question central to it – is integrated into the coding itself. And they are reassuringly ready to share their ideas over the Web, so that others can use these small elements of coding to collage them together in their own way, to create new ways of manipulating digital material.
Team-based production may be a solution, with designers and programmers working together. In contrast to the older master-and-apprentice set-up, the computer encourages a more democratic structure. Mateas suggests designers and programmers be placed in teams only when each has an understanding of the other’s area of expertise – what Malcolm Garrett described (at Eye’s Forum no.3) as being a ‘jack of all trades and a master of one’.
[… ] programming – despite its abstract nature – has the properties of a concrete craft practice. I suspect that when the curriculum is designed by educators who have grown up with coding, the computer will become more transparent in our art and design schools. What makes for good virtual craft is not the quality of the technology but the application of our perceptive ability to generate surprises – combining motivation, visual thinking, knowledge of tools and our experience of media.