Abstract
We are part of the digital era. While technologies of exploring what we now call digital are constantly emerging, a new language, mainly visual, is being born. A language that involves the understanding, the manipulation, and the exploitation of the parameters of the digital software and the manufacturing tools. These new media are able to offer us innovative ways of thinking and making objects, with new qualities, different and sometimes foreign to the ones we are used to through craft production techniques.
At first craft and digital seem to be contradictory and this is due to the fact that the hand is clearly close related to the definition of craft[1]. On the other hand, the verb to craft is defined as “to exercise skill in making”[2] and making takes place in the physical as well as in the digital. Designers nowadays are more and more interested in the emerging digital technologies in order to express themselves. The question that always pops up is how the designer could adjust these technologies without being dominated by the medium.
Computers through software provide a series of tools and become the new workshop for the designer. In order for the designer to liberate himself and be able to define his personal language, he needs not only to use these tools in alternative ways, but to be able to redefine them by designing his own digital tools.
The alternative and heretical use of software becomes a powerful tool, that involves the quality of the unexpected. Computers as complex machines with tremendous capacity for calculations are able to generate randomness in the design process not by lack of knowledge but by choice.
With this thesis, I am aiming to stimulate a critical position towards these media provided for the designers. I will try to define such a process of thinking, as well as designing digital tools by researching, analyzing and bringing forward elements from the arts and music, that explore the qualities of the unexpected and randomness. In doing that so, I will propose the introduction of the human body as the guide in order to reconnect the physical with the digital.
[1] craft : an activity involving skill in making things by hand. Oxford Dictionaries Online
[2] Oxford Dictionaries Online, http://oxforddictionaries.com/
