Considering that it was an invention poised between art and industry at the end of the 19th century, it is logical that design once again confront the new techniques of digital technology. These techniques are characterized by a mathesis universalis, whose objective is to reduce any element into discrete binary entities so that it can be computed mathematically. In the course of this process of the delegation of tasks that predated this technology to a machine, has some part of a designer’s “craft” perished, notably in the restructuring of their activities into “professions”? It is these many methods of working against or “with” digital media, that we have chosen to examine in this, our first issue. We will examine and question the notions of tool, implement and “apparatus” within the context of graphic design.
A “revolution” for some, a field of “innovations” for others, the series of technical inventions that make up digital technology means that it would be simplistic to merely perceive it in terms of its power to compute, store and handle information, its association with media (multimedia) or even merely as a new “cyberculture” detached from the past. It is certainly all of the above but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even as it embeds and incorporates social and political conceptions that predate its existence (the division of labor, gender issues, etc.), digital technology in turn creates its own new cultural paradigms (bugs, interfaces, networks, etc.). That is why, as philosopher Pierre-Damien Huyghe argues in this issue, it would be erroneous to see digital technology as a technical means created from nothing, “like after a flood, […] that modifies the general conditions under which one can question oneself regarding technology.” For example, pondering the nature of digital technology in terms of painting, photography or cinema enables us to gain perspective on contemporary questions regarding technology, such as virtuosity (how do you create something new from pre-existing tech?), or economy (how do we escape the cultural and material limitations of our work environments?). It’s not a matter of saying that there’s nothing new under the sun, but rather one of taking stock and examining the divergences between different periods and different cultures.
Since the appearance of the Macintosh in 1984, designers have seized upon the digital objects made available to them. Graphic designer Etienne Robial reminds us of the issues related to the progressive transformation of physical practices (mounting, collage, cutting, tracing, taping, sketching, etc.) into digital ones. According to Lev Manovich, author of the article “Cultural Software,” which we have here translated into French (“Logiciel Culturel”), this transformation is linked to the conversion of the creation of forms into a chain of functions predetermined by software designers. Statistician Edward Tufte takes things a step further by evoking a “cognitive style” when referring to the uses of the PowerPoint software. From now on, how do we preserve and develop a clear vision of visual forms if digital technology automatically takes charge of these tasks and works against us rather than with us?
At the heart of this “software culture” that designers contribute to creating (in the best of cases), and whose effects they feel when this culture instrumentalizes them or competes with them, the question remains: how do you work “with” the intrinsic possibilities of digital technology? What methods should be imposed upon technical systems to guarantee a context of “free” creation? What can one do to ensure that a technological medium continues to remain open to infinite possibilities? How can a study of unrealized, even forgotten, projects be instructive regarding this question?
The diversity of the articles in this issue attempts to address these questions and shows that the notion of “tool,” when applied to digital technology, is complex and polymorphous. As they transition from a relationship with an instrument to one with digital tech, specifically to a way of efficiently accomplishing tasks, the designers who interest us “make do” with the digital, in other words, they work in directions that transcend technological determinism. Preserving what remains specific to the hand and the eye, constructing one’s own systems and technical architectures, opening the “black boxes” of programs in order to work with the machine, revisiting projects forgotten by history to venture into other directions, are all just so many ways of “making with” the digital that we will explore in this first issue.