Students in my Theory I class at CalArts were recently assigned your “Design in the Age of Biology” among others readings concerning systems and complexity. Passing on the following note I wrote to the students following the discussion. Hope it’ll provide a smile…

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I just finished reading through the Systems and Complexity exercise that asked you all to hand in on Monday. (Still need these from a few of you!) From the responses, it seems that the interpretation of the assignment for many was to literally quote or paraphrase or extract very specific definitions by the writers of “complexity” and “systems” rather than interpret these as the larger ideas represented in the writing.

I feel this is such an important subject and these 4 writings so significant that I want to make sure to pass on what seems worth “getting.”

First, a few definitions of the terms:

By complexity I mean “not simple.” Like our lives today — so many things, considerations, concerns, and interests, all to be dealt with, managed, considered, consumed, as well as how one thing impacts another. Changes in technology and media are very particular examples. As designers, this is not only the reality in which our professional lives exist, but raises serious challenges and potential opportunities for our design work. How designers have dealt with complexity — whether ignoring or embracing — it underlies essential values that have, and continue, to impact design decisions.

By systems I’m referring to all the mechanisms and tools for managing those complexities. As Izzy, Ben, Thomas, and Nate pointed out everything in design is a system. Grids, typography, and typefaces — all of which are the fundament elements of graphic design ARE systems. And most importantly, for language to be a language, it must be a system.

Discussion of complexity and systems are thus fundamental to any discussion of design. Seeing how discussion of the significance and meaning of these two concepts has evolved through design’s past hopefully provides useful insight for thinking about design today and to come. And I believe the readings were useful in that respect.

Beginning with Gerstner, he sees a system as a means to account for a vast variety of design characteristics to be combined into a great variety of potential design outcomes. This machine-like managed process or methodological approach to designing attained an ideal of modernism — rational means to design outcomes. While Gerstner doesn’t discuss complexity, it seems implied by his system as a means to manage and utilize a “complexity” of elements to result in great variability, yet restrained, outcomes — most specifically for logotypes.

What resonates for me today about Gerstner’s system of design is that it would easily convert to an actual machine-system — i.e. the computer. In fact, I mentioned at some point this semester, the Design N-Gine project that I’d come across years ago. Essentially it turned design styles into algorithms that could be applied to different forms (websites, logos, brochures, etc.) to create stylized results. But if machines repeat human “creative” labor, then who needs the humans?

Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” represents an extremely significant turning point in design — the turn away from ideas like those represented in Gerstner’s rationalist notions of design as an example of the kind of approach that avoids the reality of complex and messy existence — and complicated needs. Venturi argued for design situated in REAL contexts rather than idealized ones. For one, it’s hard to imagine Gerstner’s systems applied to anything beyond logotypes. Gerstner’s is a utopic dream of design (mirroring the modernist utopic vision of tidy, controlled and rational life) and it’s this simplistic notion that Venturi — and post-modernism in general — undermines.

Which leads us to Blauvelt’s “Towards a complex simplicity.” One of the reactions by the graphic design community to the ground-rattling writing of Venturi was the kind of work that Blauvelt refers to as “simply complex” — complexity for complexity’s sake (the very thing that Venturi cautions against). This simply complex work could be seen as a response to the pent-up ambitions and emotions of a community over-constrained by the stricture of rational, predictive systems like Gerstner’s.

Blauvelt is concerned with the simply complex reaction of design to Venturi’s call as much as the reaction to the reaction (we could call this “simply simply”): On the one hand the implied “anything goes” of post-modern design leaves no room for critical response (because there’s nothing to measure against if EVERYTHING is acceptable). On the other hand Blauvelt is equally troubled by the back-peddling to the good ol’ days of simplicity (the Gerstner ideology more or less). The real issue remains unaddressed — finding a means of representation that goes beyond simply mirroring the complexity of existence to any sort of functional end.

So how do we move forward asks Blauvelt. What he suggests is “complex simplicity” — an approach that takes all the exuberance of the simply complex and using structure allows a subject to be “accessorized.” In other words, rather than simplify a subject into a tidy representation, a structured approach allows for the complexity of the subject to be represented. Like Venturi, Blauvelt’s concern is with the tension between real reality (the everyday and ordinary as he refers to it) and those who are charged with in some way regarding it, responding to it, and representing it (designers!). (But one last note, Blauvelt leaves us with a final caution — that potentially nothing escapes the high-powered velocity of branding — consuming everything in it’s wake, including the everyday, and selling it back to us as the everyday.)

But I believe we are still left unsatisfied with a response by design that accounts for reality beyond representations such as complex simplicity. And this is where I believe Dubberly’s, “Design in the age of biology” offers a significant response for design.

While this writing may appear somewhat banal on its surface, one glance further reveals a radical response to the issue of how designers might respond to the factors and characteristics that describe the nature of humans and the conditions in which we live (reality as is rather than hoped for) — what Dubberly describes as a “bio ethos” over the machine one. But what particularly distinguishes Dubberly’s ideas is his concern with a process rather than outcomes that formally represent. The concern for HOW we think to begin with rather than the WHAT that we’ll end up with. What Dubberly offers I dub (ha ha) “complexity systems.”

Hugh, thank you for bringing this conversation to MassArt and for meeting up at DMI Headquarters to deepen the discussion and engage us all in the extended conversation. I especially appreciate the references you gave pertaining to ‘total design’. My own thesis topic for graduate studies at The Dynamic Media Institute pertains to ‘media translation’ … which for me includes discussion of translation versus interpretation, the occasional poetic impossibility to fully bring exact meaning from one mediaform to another, as well as Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk … and how the role of the designer becomes less and less about a particular medium or format and more that of a strategic visionmaker of environment, experience, culture, systems … basically a re-inventor of new language.

Is there a new media equivalent to Esperanto? Or will we need to weed through babble to distill meaning from a multi-lingual onslaught of expression in this dawn of participatory dialectics?