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SIRI Walks Into Bar and Meets HAL 9000 – Concept Check Please…

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MOTION DESIGN & POST-PRODUCTION  / SOFTWARE / INNOVATION & CREATIVITY

Over the last 20+ years, companies like Adobe, Autodesk, Avid and Maxon have helped redefine the realm of possibility for video producers and motion designers – with After Effects, Photoshop, Cinema 4D and Media Composer, among many others, being relied on for even the simplest project undertakings.  They’ve helped make our jobs easier – and, without them at our disposal, much of what we do now would be technically impossible or financially impractical (which is the same as DOA).

A question to consider, however, is if this same software – this seemingly bottomless resource of ever-evolving apps that we depend so heavily on to produce our projects – is also squelching our creativity and ability to innovate.  To put it another way, does using software make us better at what we do by enabling us to more fully leverage our creative skills – or, does it allow us to easily generate viable but unoriginal solutions?

Does it matter?

The answer to the first question lies somewhere in between – a genius idea, brilliantly executed, is what we aim for – but, more often, a practical solution, professionally executed, is where we land.  And, the easier it is to achieve “professional” results, the less important it is to develop ideation skills – the less important it is to be creative – the less obvious it is when software is doing the real work.

Yes, it does matter.  It matters from an educational perspective, making it more important than ever to focus on ideas over software and technical skills.  It matters from a branding perspective, in that copying and recycling of older ideas is easier than ever – making techniques and visual styles less proprietary.  It matters from a technical perspective when the popular developers have no desire or financial incentive to generate new products that could negatively affect their sales or compete with their current products.

And it matters from a creative perspective – because, eventually, designers may be little more than highly trained recyclers.  The tools that once blew us away by making video look like film, or pixels like paint strokes, are now the only “paint” and the closest thing to film that some designers have ever used.

According to Alvy Ray Smith in an overview for Microsoft Corporation in 1997, digital paint systems can be traced back as far as 1969.  Since that time, developers have invented a myriad of ways to mimic, and improve on, traditional art, craft and design and production skills.   Originally, their progress was judged by the software’s ability to do just that.  Now, however, the effectiveness of a particular release of software is assessed on its ability to elaborate on those earlier introduced functions – the more nuanced, the better.  Big and innovative ideas have been replaced by an endless rollout of updates, and the complexity of design software continues to compound.

pen and ink - concept drawings for appliance

pen and ink - concept drawings for appliances #2

pen and ink - concept drawings for appliances #3

3D concepts - worked out sans-computer. Software can make illustrating complex shapes less time consuming, but the results are rarely as interesting to look at.

In the not-so-long-ago early-ish days of motion design as we know it, software was proprietary and inseparably tied to clunky and expensive hardware.  Getting an upgrade meant purchasing the latest model, like a car in a showroom, provided you had the five or six-figure budget necessary to do so.  A handful of companies in New York and Los Angeles ruled the roost and the majority of their work came from the networks or cable companies whose offices were a delivery-convenient block or two away.

Innovation and change came to the industry quickly.  Within a few years, vector graphicsnon-linear editingdigital compositing, desktop design & animation software and the web changed the way we did everything.  Every couple of years, in fact, something came along that caused a sea change, overturning the industry and forever altering the playing field.

Innovation hasn’t stopped, of course, and new products and tools are released, seemingly every day.  Software continues to evolve and new technologies pop up year after year.  What has changed is the way these tools are applied, and by whom.  In the last twenty years, the most prominent development in design software has been in its shift away from overall accessibility.  Rather than enabling artists and designers to broaden their range of capability with minimal effort, the focus has been placed on ever more specialized and idiosyncratic tasks, requiring advanced training for increasingly technical (read less creative) users.

Sharing stories recently with another early adopter, of sorts, the conversation evolved to a guessing game of technological advancements on the horizon.  It reminded me of something my fellow design students and I used to do (back in the day), which was to toss around ideas for products we guessed would be introduced to the market forthwith.  In the spirit of those pre-real-world brainstorms, I would like to take a stab at the innovations I think will be necessary to revolutionize design the way computers and software once did.

Drum roll please…  First, hardware that incorporates the full range of hand motion and accurately reflects a variety of physical tools used for creating marks, textures, patterns and 3D shapes.  As long as we continue retrofitting essentially the same keyboard, mouse and tablet with software that references itself as a measure of advancement, we will be stuck in a never-ending loop of increasingly technically enhanced repetition.

Next, concept check.  Like spell check and grammar check, concept check could scan the web and media databases to help designers and producers (and clients) identify pattern similarities, overlapping imagery and outright plagiarism.

And third, software with a completely visual and verbal interface to remove any technical barriers that might limit its full range of potential users.   Think of it as SIRI meets HAL 9000 - combined with hardware that functions as intuitively as a hammer or a ball of clay, this type of user experience would help creativity to, once again, replace technology in the driver’s seat.

In other words, we need better tools so that we can focus more on ideas and solutions and less… on our tools.

© Markus Horak, 2012

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Filed under: Business, Creativity, Design, Graphic, Motion, Video Tagged: broadcast design, Creativity, design software, graphic design, innovation, motion design, video

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