The Post Digital Week – 29 Jan

Adam Tinworth

The second in a weekly series of quick round ups of interesting posts around the idea of Post Digital.

The second in a weekly series of quick round ups of interesting posts around the idea of Post Digital:

David Warlock posted a thoughtful meditation on the idea of building businesses on top of Big Data – sometimes using the digital to inform the analogue:

We are moving in the network from manufacturing by extrusion processes through moulds, the industrial revolution pre-digital world, to additive manufacturing, creating products in software and instructing printing devices to build them in extremely thin 2D layers one on top of the other until the desired shapes and structures are created. Medical implants have had the publicity here, but gold jewellery was mentioned as an application. This is a design – intensive, network efficient manufacturing world in which design and the actual printer can be in totally different places. Printing can take place using any materials which can be chemically – adapted to the process.

Sarah Lugthart posted about the changes that a post digital world is bringing on Rupture:

For example, it struck me that the book ‘Program or Be Programmed’ by Douglas Rushkoff has many ideas that seem to fit well into this whole discussion of the post digital, and what it means – or can mean. Rushkoff urges us to take control, of media, of technology, and become a user instead of the used as he puts so poignantly. “When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.”

If we’ve reached the point where people are struggling to teach design, because they have to spend all the allocated time etching digital design tools, how can we make progress?

In today’s digital arts curriculum, students often learn how to be creative in art classes, and then spend time in technical courses learning how to use computers to actualize their concepts and ideas. Compartmentalizing creativity and technology in this way has subordinated the role of digital technology, perhaps to the detriment of both. Digital technology has, perhaps more often than not, been relegated to being a mere assemblage of tools or production skills.

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