What is a designer as a producer for me?
Let me take you through my journey of how I came across p5.js. During my Masters at UIC School of Design at Chicago I took up p5.js classes as my elective. I was so curious that I started exploring and started what processing(1) and
p5.js was
actually made for.
I watched a lot of Daniel Shiffman's videos and also with the help of p5.js website, I started experimenting a lot using this technology.
I made many experiments each one just trying to break or push the boundaries of the technology itself and it just being an experimental gesture. I was still questioning what did all this mean to me? Am I taking the role of an
author? Or a
producer? Is the medium important to me to produce these things?
I took forward and pursued all these questions into my thesis. The first question I wanted to answer was how would the role of producer push boundaries by a designer?
I did so by making a chrome extension that changes any, or most of the websites's entire placement of the text in form of design patters and the typography to a different format as a whole while trying to print. I wanted this to be availabe to others, so I made it open source and uploaded in github. You can download it
here.
Some of the examples can be viewed in the book.
I didn't stop there. I wanted to explore how it can be brought into a physical format? So I made a book out of it. It had three main essays that shaped my thesis. So I made websites of these content and hacked them using my chrome extension and
made
a book out of it. You can view the book in UIC School of Design. The video is below.
Lastly I demonstrated the entire thing in my thesis presentation as enlarged rolls of hacked content on walls, portraying all of the essays I had referred to.
While I look back at all the work I started to question was this an art piece? As I thought about it I realised I do need the audience to participate in the work and pursue the work as they view it while using the chrome extension in their own
way by dowloading and sharing it. I also want to get out of the tools that are already existing and use computer is produce tools. After all computer is a tool to produce tools. There is more I will be exploring and inquiring would there be only
audience or is there a journey from audience to users?
1. Processing is an open-source graphical library and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals
of computer programming in a visual context.