Appropriate Response (part 02): An interview with Tim Rodenbröker

Tim is a designer, creative coder, and educator working within the field of generative design. He has taught at several institutions, including the Münster School of Design, HAWK Hildesheim, and the Rhine-Waal University. He is working to create an online collaborative and educational platform for designers to engage with coding and programming as part of their practice.

Can you talk briefly about your practice and what kind of work you are currently involved in?

I have created an online platform and community for people to learn creative coding and computational thinking, to empower them to navigate a digitised and technologised future. That's a bold statement but I think that's what I do - I’m thinking deeply about what kind of skills they need in the future within the design field - what kind of skills are beneficial for their personal development, and I’m trying to build an online platform around these questions. I’m also trying to find out what problems digital education and online education can solve and where the boundaries are.

It’s a process of teaching and learning how to teach, whilst also getting insights into the psychological mindset of my students - to understand what kind of questions they struggle with. It has a lot to do with psychology, philosophy, and what kind of world we want to live in. What kind of problems does digitisation create for us? How is the field of design changing? And what does it mean? What is important? All these questions just circle around in my head.

I know that you are currently working, teaching and studying. What is your position on generative design within the context of graphic design, both commercially and academically?

In 2009 a book called Generative Gestalt (Generative Design) appeared on the market - an amazing publication showcasing work which you could create with Processing. But there was a huge problem with it: the book had a very specific aesthetic that didn’t really match the aesthetic world graphic design was in at that point. It was kind of visually and aesthetically speaking to a specific audience that embraced complexity. But graphic designers mostly do not embrace complexity. They prefer to work with very clear forms, very clear communication, and very simple structures. That was a problem. From my point of view, it gave people the impression that generative design was a tool to create complex illustrations. In a way that is a catastrophe, because generative design is a form of thinking about how design can come to life. It’s a process where we put some data into an algorithm and convert it into something new - a new medium. In the sphere of graphic design it’s mostly a poster, a layout, a website, whatever. But you can also use that generative design algorithm to create sculptures, installations, I don’t know - books, furniture, whatever you can think of. That’s a huge misunderstanding. Many graphic communication designers don't connect with generative design because they don’t really resonate with the aesthetics. I’m trying to create a curriculum that doesn’t involve that level of complexity to show that graphic design can be controlled with algorithms and what kind of benefits it can produce.

There are many ongoing efforts to make computational thinking a foundational subject within schools alongside mathematics and languages. What do you believe computational thinking brings to design practice, both in terms of generative design and beyond it?

I see creative coding as a philosophical and psychological entry into the world of technology. It is a way to learn how computers work, and a wonderful way to try to understand what kind of world we are living in. Our world is driven by software - by algorithms and code. It's very important to understand that because if you don’t, then you are consuming products that you don't really ‘get’, which enables them to control and manipulate you. I try to get my students and the members of my community to think critically about technology. It’s a long term goal, but thinking critically about technology is something that motivates me very much, and this is of course not just important for graphic designers. We’re slowly starting to question the software that we use everyday.

In a recent interview with Martin Lorenz you mentioned that you will be interning at TwoPoints.Net, with whom you have collaborated in the past. Can you talk about your experience with the studio and designing flexible visual systems?

I became familiar with TwoPoints in 2007. I was interested in experimental graphic design and they had a really interesting approach. I was also a huge fan of Hort and Eike König. They were kind of my rock stars when I started to work in graphic design. By coincidence I just met Martin one day and we became very close friends. Since then we’ve worked together on several projects and we’ve discussed our approach to teaching. We’re trying to find ways to work together and plan some workshops in the future. My approach with creative coding matches Martin’s approach with flexible visual systems really well. Basically everything you do with creative coding is a flexible visual system, and that’s a very interesting link between those two worlds. It makes Martin’s approach very scalable. Working with creating systems instead of just media let’s you generate thousands of different variations of the same visual system, or out of the same visual system, which is extremely efficient.

Generative Design and flexible visual systems are complementary in their approach of developing a language. Do you believe it is important to cultivate this approach to design today?

Absolutely. If I didn’t believe that then I wouldn’t do it! In Germany we have this design culture - this very strong Bauhaus tradition - and sometimes this holds us a little bit back from moving forward I think. What Martin and I are doing is presenting a way to tackle a specific problem: how to shift students into a new way of thinking about design. I don’t know how it will be applied in educational institutions, but I know that many of the design schools do their best to try to implement all these practices into their curriculum. It’s a huge challenge because they have to change fundamental structures in the institutions, and that's quite difficult. 

You have made it your mission to build a community around creative coding that is built around the open software platforms of Processing and P5.js. How important is community within this field to you? Do you believe that open-source tools are also fundamental?

First of all, maybe we have to look at the differences between online and offline teaching. Offline teaching is very immersive. You have a physical contact or teacher
that guides you through the process of developing a project, writing a thesis, whatever. That’s something that online teaching cannot do, not in that immersive way. However, online teaching has some other very interesting benefits. It can scale up to reach many people. It is completely decentralised. It’s possible to create an experience of connection within an online community through cutting edge modern tools like Zoom, Discord, or Slack - to kind of emulate the process of being in touch with real people. That’s what I’m exploring and something I research a lot. I’m trying to build this experience of online learning.

I really love open source. I use an open source operating system on my e-learning computer where I create my courses using Linux. It’s an interesting experiment to see how far we can get with open source software. I think that creative coding can help you understand how far we can get building our own tools for specific problems. I mean, this is very rudimentary and nobody will be able to build a new version of  Photoshop in a short time period, but just starting to think about tools and platforms in this way is very valuable and can lead to some very interesting new insights.

You have mentioned that ‘depicting and questioning the digital is an especially important and exciting field in the arts’ and that you want to help people become ‘creative technologists’. You have also talked about how ‘digitisation causes expensive collateral damage’. Could you elaborate on this?

First of all, digitisation is a process that is somewhat controlled by the economy. The products that generate the most demand become the most successful. The internet is just thirty years old. Think about it. It’s been just thirty years and we haven’t had any time to reflect on how we use the internet, why we really need it, and what’s the best way to use it. Because innovation follows innovation (follows innovation), we are always lagging behind, reflecting on all of these developments after the fact. That’s a huge problem. When you start to think about the internet and the fact that AI is around the corner - it’s just too fast. We can’t change that, that’s how it is. But we don’t have the time that we need to reflect on these innovations, and that’s a huge problem. I think programming is one way to do that. Because through programming, especially through creative programming, we can depict the digital. We can start to create artifacts, artworks, products, services, whatever - that depict phenomena of the digital, which is very powerful.

“Computation is made by us and we are all collectively responsible for its outcomes” - John Maeda. In response to this statement you have said that ‘we have to think about how computation affects our world’. Western society is becoming more and more enmeshed in computing systems and algorithms just for basic infrastructure and daily life, yet often goes unnoticed and unperceived by most people. How important is it for artists and designers to understand and engage with the complicated digital ‘underworld’ that our societies are built upon? Do you believe that these digital infrastructures exert their own sense of agency?

Yes, absolutely. I think programming is a way of digital empowerment and to gain digital literacy. It’s a way of understanding what kind of atoms these very complex technologies are made of, and it helps you to understand the basic mechanisms of software. The short answer is: Yes, I believe that [big tech] companies do their best to keep us locked in their ecosystem as long as possible, and some of their motives or actions are ethically questionable.

In their book Code/Space, Kitchen and Dodge postulate that “One of the effects of abstracting the world into software algorithms and data models, and rendering aspects of the world as capta [data], which are then used as the basis for software to do work in the world, is that the world starts to structure itself in the image of the capta and code — a self-fulfilling, recursive relationship develops.” Do you have any thoughts on this concept?

It’s a difficult and complex problem. I try to maintain a low dependency philosophy in life. I try to keep my dependency graph - that’s what software developers call it - as low as possible. What I mean by this is that the more we depend on services, the more inflexible we become. This also applies to subscriptions - to services like Spotify, Netflix, and so on. If we get used to using these services all the time we become somewhat dependent on them. I mean, I use Spotify myself, but I think it’s important to question it. Because binding yourself to a company like that can open you up to different threats. It means the data that you submit, and all the effort that you put into building a portfolio or business website or whatever, goes into their database. And we’ve seen many of these companies fail, and if they do then they go down with your data. The market is very rough - it’s very fast moving - and I hate to rebuild things just because a company crashed. It’s one dependency that would make sense to question.

Where do you see generative design being used for critical practice? Are there any designers or studios that are leading this movement?

First of all, generative design is still in a very artistic niche where people use it to create visual worlds that often don’t aesthetically match with what individuals are used to seeing on a daily basis. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why it really doesn’t often land in the commercial world. It also leads to an amazing landscape of artists using generative technologies to create images and projects, installations, art and design, that depict specific digital and technological phenomena. Using technologies to depict technologies is very powerful and very important.

The studios I really like to follow are, for example, FIELD.IO from London. They do amazing work creating visuals to depict digital phenomena like artificial intelligence. That’s something I find very powerful - this idea of creating a visuality for AI which doesn’t really exist yet. There have been some amazing projects by the Écal in Lausanne, where they’re reflecting on our use of smartphones. There was a kind of exhibition where they took a critical approach to our use of smartphones. These are the projects that I really like - ones that question the status quo of digitisation and our relationship to digital technologies. There’s also a very interesting movement which was popular especially in the nineties which is called net.art. It’s an artistic practice that tries to question the way we use networks and the internet. There are some amazing examples of how the internet could be used within a critical context.

What areas are being explored currently? Are there potential areas that you are excited to see generative design applied to?

Maybe we should use it more within education to teach people how algorithms work. That would be amazing. In a way that’s what I’m doing - I’m trying to build a curriculum around that. Lowering the barriers to generative design and teaching people how it works. That’s very important I think.

Cover thumbnail has been taken from Tim’s website, available at timrodenbroeker.de