Before meeting Deuce for the interview I managed to head down to the London Design Museum for the first time, where the 'Beazley Designs of the Year' exhibition was on. The exhibition celebrates design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice and more. There was a range of design to see, from typography to physical products. It was great to see a variety of designs that have a real impact and effect, rather than designs that just visually look nice. Some of the work that appealed to me can be seen below.
My favourite piece of work featured in the exhibition has to be the Moth Generator, designed by Katie Rose Pipkin and Loren Schmidt. In 2015, Twitter disclosed that 8.5 per cent of its users were bots —software programmes that send out automated posts on the social media platform. That amounts to about 23 million of Twitter's monthly 271 million active users, and they are a growing presence in social media more generally. The Moth Generator is a Twitter bot. While most Twitter hots work simply, sending out tweets periodically or in response to specific phrases in user messages, the Moth Generator responds to tweets with art, by drawing endlessly unique 'fantastical' moths. Built in JavaScript, the Moth Generator's algorithm draws its moths stroke by stroke and point by point. They are then shared as a Twitter feed, making the Twitter timeline a platform for artwork. The moths provide unexpected moments of visual delight in a sea of words, but they also pose questions about human versus computer creativity.
This idea to produce something so creative purely from the analysis of data is incredible. As I am focusing on technology in my CoP essay, this got me thinking about my practical piece and how I could have focused my piece on data in a different manner. Overall, it was great to see such a wide range of fantastic design - I have taken a lot away from the exhibition and have clearly seen how genius, yet simple, designs can be to be extremely effective.
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