Aesthetic Systems

To develop projects whose outcome represents an advancement in your own work (i.e. to advance in artistic, technical or contentual areas) and possibly surprising to yourself an organized iterative approach is vital. This means to us:

* The creative process as a continuous research in which results emerge from purposeful experiments rather than from unsystematic jamming
* Applying the divide and conquer principle
i.e. splitting up a yet unclear concept into smaller logical sub-problems while gradually converging to and readjusting your vision

Applying this to our project management methods, this leads to the following structure of alternating planning and production phases.

1. Idea

• brainstorm and discuss to develop an initial idea
• roughly define the boundaries of the project
• reflect on the idea by facing the necessary steps (technical, artistic, contentual) between your current position and your goal

2. Plan

• check the feasibility against your timeframe and eventually readjust your idea
• plan sketches and experiments to examine sub-problems of the idea

3. Experiment

• execute the sketches and develop sub-solutions
• explore neighbouring fields of interest

4. Concept

• develop the concept from the initial idea and the conclusions of the experiments
• plan the production schedule

5. Production

• follow the production plan
• if you encounter unforeseen problems apply the divide and conquer principle again which most likely means another (quick) round of planning and experimenting followed by readjusting the concept

6. Feedback

• critically examine the finished product and its development process
• develop further ideas from the experiences made during the production and the experiments

During the past days, we have been working on a new concept revolving around a cinematic abstract narrative, which we will be using as a showpiece for our aesthetic systems methodology.

When two invitations to participate in exhibitions were confirmed for October, we knew we had to be efficient.

At first, we thought it must be best to develop a strong and detailed concept in the beginning to speed up the actual production process. In several intensive discussions we elaborated an idea we quite liked, involving generated and edited arctic landscapes and animated morphing geometry. Although we made some good progress at first, we started hitting walls when it came to the details. On the one hand, our concept was not precise enough to define a clear creative and technical approach to it. On the other hand, we knew we needed to pick up completely new techniques, other than the ones we had used before. We got stuck, and time was running.

After a family visit interrupted our daily routine, it suddenly became obvious that we had been trying too hard, making three steps at once. We had focused on a target too far away from our current technical and creative position, and therefore failed to see a possible connection from A to B.

To avoid this happening to us again, we wrote down method #2 process = organized flow.

We learned that a) you must not focus on the goal alone, but also on the path towards it. b) this is why the process / an iterative approach is so important to creative work. c) there are no shortcuts.

Definition

The term Aesthetic System describes a programmatic solution to a design problem.

Characteristics

A programmatic design solution can be:

1. alive
   • reactive
   • emergent
   • interactive
2. serializable
   • scalable (duplicable, transmedial)
   • customizable
   • infinite variations
3. a problem specific tool
   • transferable (useable by other designers, clients, end users etc.)
   • new aesthetics (breakout of the design tool ghetto)
   • free from traditional boundaries
4. open
   • collaborative (see transferable)
   • toolkit solutions (i.e. reusing code, programming libraries etc.)
   • recursive; meta systems are not only limited to usage but open for modification (i.e. open source approach etc.)

Effects

Effects on the creative process:

1. Requires a clear formulation of the idea beforehand
   — suggests an iterative approach to the development of the system
2. The result is not automatically emotional and personal (i.e. as it normally is in traditional illustration)
   — requires special attention to the emotional and personal aspects of the design
3. The process is not automatically intuitively accessible
   — requires an extra effort to make the system’s internals accessible (i.e. user interfaces)
4. Selection becomes equally important to the production
5. Initial development is relatively work & time intensive

trust & reputation is a designers best selling method.

• divide the day into 1-3 focussed working sessions of 1-3 hours each
• each session needs to be followed by a 30min - 1h break somewhere else than on your desk
• define a clear task for each session
• make it clear when you start or end a session. keep record.
• turn off email, instant messaging, unused processes and other sources of noise
• answer your email, browse the web and chat only inbetween sessions
• dont interrupt the other one when its not time-pressing
• communicate important things and news in written messages
• when others show up and ask for help, make an appointment with them for after your current session
• have a 15mins chat about topics and status in the morning, after lunch and before dinner
• explain to yourself and the other one what you plan to do, how long you expect it to take, and why.
• avoid having these chats during meals
• end the working day with dinner
• fill 1.5 to 2 days of the weekend with completely different stuff