< Positions through Iterating >
Week 1:
100 Iterations publication
Week 2:
Feedback received from the tutorial:
*What’s working*
- Clear direction. Interesting to lead a project using only digital and computational tools and explore the unexpected.
- I like the iterations you have made.
- Manual work. AI/technology is taking something away from us
- They all look very beautiful
*What’s not working as well*
- Lines of enquiry could be more specific – for example, what kind of computation and what kind of creative outcomes?
- It is very easy to get a system to generate these visual outcomes so the time taken to do this isn’t very long. Not very clear what you have learnt about how to code works.
- The research and experimentation process can be pushed.
*Moving forward*
- Could use digital systems and constraints to create stills, typography… You want to create unexpected outcomes, but what are you using the tool to try and generate?
- Going away from your own intuition – find a time where you have used your own (random) intuition in your create processes and look at that through this system. As done through the first step of this project by manually combining the shapes.
- You are using this process as a correction / new way of viewing a previously intuitive process.
- You could try out many different ways to see how the code and the system works. You need to try out the code and look for patterns and see what it creates. Try another code, change the code… Go deeper into the process now that you know the tools and coding softwares. You have the base and now you can change the small details inside.
- Continue this enquiry into the next brief but really dig into how you can develop things using coding and you will also learn new skills to bring with you after this course.
*References:
- Zach Leiberman – from previous brief. He uses coding to create a daily visual.
Reflections:
- Began with hands-on, intuitive processes: cutting and recombining silkscreen fragments by instinct, which allowed playful exploration but lacked scalability and critical depth.
- Shifted towards rule-based systems using p5.js, marking a critical turning point where randomness became operationalised through logic and parameters.
- This move reframed my role from creator to system-designer—less focused on aesthetic control, more on shaping the conditions under which form emerges.
- I interrogated the boundaries between control and unpredictability, considering whether unpredictability can itself be authored.
- References like the Conditional Design Workbook and Reas’s Process Compendium encouraged me to see iteration not as repetition, but as a method of thinking through structure.
- Iterating through code helped reveal the visual logic of my own preferences and exposed patterns in what I once assumed was “random.”
- The outcome was a hybrid system combining code, visual rules, and physical process, opening space for pattern emergence without finality.
- Iteration became not just a tool but a methodology to investigate constraint, variation, and the politics of visual decision-making.
< Positions through Contextualising >
Week 1:
Week 2:
Reflections:
- Moved beyond generative systems to engage with cultural visual logic, specifically through the Korean architectural ornament Dancheong.
- Karl Nawrot’s use of architectural stencils to build typographic systems inspired my transition from random shape generation to structured form-making.
- Rather than appropriating Dancheong as decorative motif, I engaged with its underlying geometric logic and rhythmic layering—translating pattern into typographic structure.
- Contextualising my project challenged me to re-evaluate the ethical dimensions of modularity: how can a system acknowledge and carry forward cultural memory?
- Jose Quintanar’s stencil-based interpretations of landscape validated my approach to digital systems as a means of reconstructing spatial identity and visual tradition.
- Drucker’s Graphesis reframed my generative process as a form of knowledge production, not merely aesthetic experimentation.
- I began thinking of my type system not as a finished product but as a toolkit—an open structure through which cultural, generative, and visual systems could intersect.
- This phase affirmed that constraint is not the opposite of expression but can – enable new forms of cultural and visual authorship within design.