Three hundred years ago, technology created a deeply entrenched division between artists and artisans* in order to systematise the industrial production massively. Nowadays, technology draws artists and artisans back in order to portray their ideas effectively, have more control of their creative processes and achieve meaningful results. Graphic designers take part in this change. As a result, not only do they have to think visually, they also have to think through all their senses.
Tim Ingold asserts that artists and artisans were seen as equal by the people in the seventeenth century and their working methods were considered “technical”. Subsequently, the industry treated these working methods systematically so as to increase the production during the Industrial Revolution. This treatment was called: “Technology” and it came from the Greek word “tekhnē” which means human skill or craftsmanship. Under these circumstances, artists were tasked to think conceptually and artisans were tasked to perform routine technical operations. In other words, creative intelligence and bodily techniques were separated into different fields. In the same way, it allowed the industry to replace the bodily procedures for the mechanical performance because the machines could execute faster operations and more effectively. As a consequence, the artisans were bound by the mechanical implementation with regard to the objective and impersonal system of productive forces (Tim Ingold, Lines: A brief history).
Conversely, an interaction looks back at the body through the use of technology and it attempts to re-link the creative intelligence to the bodily execution these days. To be more precise, this interaction takes the body as the main medium to perceive and interact with the creative, artistic and physical work instead, serving the objective and impersonal system of productive forces. The interaction is called “Embodied Interaction” (EI). A good example to explain it is tangible and social computing.
In his book “Where the action is: The foundation of Embodied Interaction” Paul Dourish has affirmed that tangible computing attempts to achieve a more meaningful and richer interaction between users, medium (device) and the daily experience of the physical work. It covers different approaches. Firstly, it aims to reconfigure the media themselves to the environment in which they work, particularly in responding to certain stimulus such as location, proximity and position. Secondly, it augments their interaction with their everyday world by reacting to any external change, mainly by the user manipulation. Thirdly, it manages the interaction between the user and the medium differently from the traditional graphical interfaces, especially in interacting directly through physical actions and artifacts. On the other hand, social computing attempts to establish dialogues between users and computers by the similar or dissimilar way that human beings interact with each other. It collaborates with creating social action models and organising communal activities.
Paul Dourish has signalled that tangible and social computing come from the same sphere of investigation, after studying the characteristics of both. Thus, Dourish has ascertained that tangible and social computing gain advantages from our familiarity with the everyday world. Essentially, this means that we need to use our body every day to interact with our environment powerfully. Without our body we can do almost nothing. Similarly, we socialise with people and experience our world with and through others.
Dourish established that tangible and social computing are derived from the same idea. To describe this, he coined the word “embodiment”. Embodiment gives us the capability to meet our world directly rather than abstractly because we and our actions are embodied to the everyday world at the same time. Dourish defines embodiment in this sentence; “embodied phenomena are those that by their very nature occur in real time and real space”.
EI does not only make artists and artisans work together but also make their creative intelligence and physical techniques return to their original states where tools serve mind and body. In fact, EI is the evidence that the boundaries among all the art and design disciplines are fading out. A good illustration of this is how physicality moves into digital technologies (DT) to facilitate the creative work. This can be looked at different projects like Evan Roth’s Graffiti Analysis, Racer and Ballet Font Project.
These projects have led graphic designers to push their visual boundaries so as to empower their other senses and include them in their creative process. Therefore, the starting point can arise visually and be resulted in audible, haptic, olfactory, movable, spatial means or the other way around. For instance, Graffiti analysis makes the unseen gestures become seen ones. The drawn lines sometimes intersect each other on the two-dimensional medium so it creates a visual effect called “addition” whereas the sculpture on the three-dimensional medium is different because the lines do not intersect with one other. As a result, there are not super-positioned visual effects. The line, which was super-positioned before, has different points of view. By this, designers have a powerful capability and using peripheral vision they are able to take more information and capture the structure of information in a real space.
Likewise, DT permits the graffiti to move from one dimension to another. This demands a good understanding of the space by designers because they have to grasp the advantages or disadvantages of this kind of movement. For example, this project comes from a physical action, moves into the digital tools, and it then comes back to the physical world. Moreover, it is perceived by the sight sense at the beginning and it can be also perceived by the touch sense at the end.
*What this statement means by artisans is the skilled people who are involved in solving a certain problem and get a specific result, such as industrial, interactive, game, interior, fashion and graphic designers.