LO-09: Learning from Peers’ Blogs

For Looking Outwards this week, I chose to review a blog from the one of the initial weeks of the course. Having joined this class late, I missed out on the first two weeks of work and that’s why I chose to use this week to review LO essays from those weeks written by peers.

I reviewed a post by Mark, where he talks about one of the artists who inspires him: Kyuha Shim. I chose this post to review because Shim, is not only a CMU professor, but also someone I had the chance to learn from, last year as I am a part of the Department of Design. Kyuha’s body of work is hugely inspired by what he calls computational design thinking.

While designers have several visual tools and software at their disposal to create and design interactions, experiences and interfaces, Kyuha’s work focuses on bringing computation into that design process and looking at computation as material. Kyuha was an artist-in-Residence at Facebook and he used computational methods to iterate graphic design compositions using deconstructed emojis.

In the process of iteration, he uses computation as material to create artworks/compositions at the frequency of “thousands of compositions in seconds” which expands the boundaries of thinking.

As a designer, this way of approaching code is inspiring. Rather than going in with an entire plan, going in with the right computational tools, can give rise to many visual design posibilities, which is true about p5.js as well as Processing

This is also a great example of an artist building up a particular practice or approach and using that approach for a versatile set of projects.