The Post-Digital Week – 18 Mar

Post-digital discussions from the last week, on definitions, paradoxes, contexts and windsurfboards.

What have people being saying about this year's conference theme elsewhere?

Inevitably, the post-digital definition game continues:

My first assumption was it meant 'after digital' – what's coming next. In reality it's merely a description of when digital grows up – well, in fact it should be more truly described as when we mature to include digital as a central part of the world we live in rather than a change agent or new toy. In reality then the idea seems to be that everything is now so integrated and multi-device, that digital has no real pulling power as a term or channel in its own right any longer. It seems to me that a more accurate description of the more assimilated-digital than actually post-digital.

Others are confident in the description, and using it as a guiding principle in actually making things:

A few years back, Kluyskens founded Made on Jupiter, a collective of seasoned graphics engineers and industrial designers interested in exploring new ways of making things, in what they call a ‘post-digital’ world: a world where “atoms are the new bits.” MoJ works at the confluence of digital manufacturing techniques and entertainment graphics software.

And what do they make? Windsurfboards. That's small scale for some people. A “post-digital maker” reimagines cities in new forms.

But post-digital isn't just about the new. It can be about digital providing a new context for the old, such as physical media formats:

Paradoxically, we believe that if done correctly, selling download files will help generate more physical format sales. This isn't as mad as it sounds, for the trend in music sales has already begun to support this instinct, with vinyl sales rising significantly over the past year, in what's now increasingly being termed as a post-digital age.

And where does new context lead us?

It is a unique opportunity for marketing – as technology integrates into our everyday activities and we enter the post digital world – to not only make the product better at what it is doing, but discovering how to combine it’s existing context with other and new contexts that extends naturally on its original environment.

Better products.

And, lastly, for the seriously post-digital artist there's a congress coming, with a call for papers.