I was designing a logo the other day. The process involved writing a small computer program, while putting a number of variables into it to control things like line thickness, spacing, proportions between the various elements, and so forth.
Once I did that, tuning the parameters involved a mix of two kinds of thinking: (1) What looks good to me, and (2) what message am I trying to tell to others? In this case, I was going for a particular balance between formal and casual, homespun and elegant, harmonious and striking.
At the end of such a process, there is, traditionally, a single result, which everyone will see. But now that I’ve been working on sharable virtual realities, I’m wondering whether a single result is too limiting.
Maybe a logo — or any other designed object — should ideally look different to everyone, morphing itself somewhat in response to the tastes of each beholder. After all, the communication of any design — or any message for that matter — is an interaction between two participants: The sender of the message and the receiver of that message.
If my intention is to convey to you a message with a certain degree of warmth or sophistication, of casual friendliness or lighthearted seduction, why shouldn’t the system that conveys my message take your tastes and preferences into account?
Perhaps, in a virtualized world where we can each see our own custom view of the objects around us, there should be at least two stages of design: (1) The decisions made by the object’s creator, expressing an aesthetic intention, and (2) the decisions made by a software agent tuned to each observer, which renders that designed object in a way best suited to that observer.
Honestly, I have been discussing exactly this with a thinking friend of mine.
The advent of the a recent suite of tools created by two large well known companies to seamlessly deliver 3D content directly in the browser seems to feed back exactly into what you are saying here.
Properly harnessed the web could easily be re-imagined to look unique to the user. I have already made the first steps to realising the tools for the job and feel that technically, even now, most of the actual bits are in place for the presentation end of things.
I was looking around for good abstraction algorithms at approximately the time you wrote this (not being a genius, recognise I need help sometimes) however I could find no work on abstracting raw, mainly uncategorised data into helpful lumps. Outside of AI. Hey ho.
Love your work, had great fun hurting an Xbox with a variety of your mathemagics in the past. (love the Mandelbrot in your header)
Excited about the future. Have been basically saying, what you are saying here for a while now, the verge is upon us.
You can see where I shamelessly edited out the actual company names and didn’t check the grammar.
My sincere apologies, I was attempting to avoid appearing disingenuous. Having some professional association or monetary interest in the propagation on an individual technology, which I certainly do not, would utterly undermine the point of openness in my opinion. Hence my haste.
Kind regards,
No worries, thank you for the thoughtful comment, and thanks as well for the kind words.
There is a down side to all this. As Andy Lippman’s research was starting to suggest well over two decades ago, there is always a danger that we will each unknowingly retreat into our own individual echo chamber, only seeing the world that already conforms to our personal set of biases. There are clear suggestions of this in Google, Facebook, and other social media service providers.