“Virtual reality of impossible designs”, The Australian, 15-16 Jan, 1994.

Designing the Future

Ross Harley

Reality’s not what it used to be. If we are to believe Robin Baker’s survey of the latest digital technologies (“Designing the Future: The Computer Transformation of Reality”, Thames and Hudson, 1993; 208pp, $79.95) it’s no accident either. It’s the result of an electronic uprising.

Cars, houses, magazines, aeroplanes — you name it — even computers are designed with digital aids. Small wonder reality has been prefixed by a smorgasbord of ‘hyper’, ‘virtual’, and ‘artificial’ tags. Baker’s well illustrated publication does a fine job contextualising some of the most profound and sometimes intangible changes arising from the so-called computer revolution.

Although computers are still considered by some to be useful only for itemising telephone bills, calculating missile trajectories, or giving stockbrokers something to do all day, the computer has changed fundamentally the nature of our increasingly global existence. We might not agree this is ‘a good thing’, but it is an undeniable part of contemporary life.

One could mention the advent of desktop publishing (yet another ‘revolution’). People quickly realised that good design sense did not come bundled automatically with the software. Nor did the new machines make design skills obsolete either, as many feared they might. In fact, professionals quickly realised how crucial designers could be to the end product.

The development of the personal computer’s ‘graphical user interface’ (or GUI for short) enabled users “to navigate through the internal structure of the machine using images and icons, rather than wrestling with complex text and number based command line instructions.” This was a momentous occasion for all kinds of visually minded folk. Graphic icons, pens, mice, colour, and new graphic software did for the design industry what the spreadsheet did for accounting.

Similarly, the future generation of gizmos (headmounted displays, data gloves, stereoscopic ‘booms’, force-feedback joysticks, and artificial reality environments) will further. contribute to the design and testing of industrial products. These tools allow ‘virtual’ design objects to be manipulated and tested in the computer itself. Today, a shopping mall or a set of kitchen utensils have a long life as digital information well in advance of their concrete form. Computer technologies offer new kinds of reality for the designer to play with.

For example, in a process known as rapid prototyping, a machine can make full scale 3D resin ‘stereographic’ models from computer images. Press the ‘print’ option and a few hours later, out pops a solid 3D prototype. Seemingly impossible objects can be materialised and held in the maker’s hands. Similarly, the discipline of ‘shape grammar’ allows the designer to create novel typologies of form within the computer by analysing and reassembling shapes that together can make up a new design language.

Most of us are probably more familiar with the idea of the computer as a seamless environment for photographic retouching. A form of digital collage, the computer enables the designer to cut-and-paste their own representations of reality, regardless of whether they have a basis in fact. According to Baker, we have thus entered into a post-photographic age that “sees the computer in its role as a universal machine, capable of synthesising traditional media and integrating them into a new, generalised image technology.”

Unlike other single function machines, the computer is capable of simulating the procedures of a large range and variety of tasks. For the designer, whose primary concern is with the shape, function and meaning of material culture and environments, the computer is laboratory and factory rolled in one.

Baker also reminds us that the computer can perform routine, innovative or creative design tasks. It has continued to mesh with the traditional work practices and approaches of designers, but it also creates new possibilities. Computer-aided design (CAD) may have first been introduced to perform mundane drafting tasks accurately and efficiently, but it has also made for a designed world that complies to the specifications of a computer.

So, do computers encourage a uniformity and tedium of culture and design? Do they encourage sameness, a pop-out press-this-button-here brand of instant design?

Baker answers by leading readers through an illuminating discussion on the evolution of tools and technique. The fact that Goya, Cezanne, Gainsborough and Turner used similar tools (the paintbrush) does not mean they produced the same kind of work. Same goes for the computer. It can simulate many techniques for a variety of tasks simultaneously and accurately. It can cut development time and provide a range of design alternatives, allowing manufacturers and businesses to respond quickly to an ever differentiated market. But computers are ultimately only as creative as those who clock up countless hours working with them.

While computers may have enhanced the quality, accessibility and efficiency of much design work, they still have definite limitations. Today it imay be a relatively simple task to get a computer to guide a space-shuttle to the moon. Getting it to design your next office newsletter in the style of Neville Brody is, for the moment at least, another matter altogther.