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Karsten Schmidt
‘If we don’t take responsibility as makers we sacrifice everything sooner or later. We have the power! The people who create things, who make things work, we have the power. No politician has that.’
THE BACKGROUND
‘I’m not a very linear person I’m afraid,’ says Karsten Schmidt halfway into a wildly discursive interview that takes in everything from literature and architecture to education, designers’ social responsibility and the arrogance of creative directors who talk dismissively about ‘techies’.
Hailed as a virtuoso among new-media designers, Schmidt has collaborated on some of the most striking projects of the past few years, including the identity for Onedotzero 2009 in London (with Wieden + Kennedy); award-winning projects for the London College of Fashion (while at Moving Brands); and the open-source identity for this winter’s V&A exhibition ‘Decode: Digital Design Sensations’.
Sometimes hailed as a ‘Processing guru’, Schmidt is at pains to underline his desire not to be defined by any one program or language; ‘code is far more flexible than any tool’. He is currently building a collection of Toxiclibs – ‘building blocks’ for Java and Processing development.
Schmidt argues, in essays and seminars, for a more interdisciplinary approach to the process of design (and design education), and the need for designers for become less specialist.
In retrospect, Schmidt’s own education and career path has followed an ideal trajectory. Born (1975) and raised in Chemnitz, in the former East Germany, he didn’t know what a computer was until he was thirteen.
After detours into community service (as an alternative to military service), music and music production (his DJ name was Toxi), Schmidt enrolled at Dresden’s Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Dresden in 1995 to study media-informatics …
In 2007, Schmidt formed his own one-person company, PostSpectacular, based at his north London home. In parallel with this, he is also part-time director of interaction for Matt Pyke’s Sheffield-based Universal Everything.
THE INTERVIEW
John L. Walters: What were you like as a kid? Did you incline towards science, arts, music, sports?
Karsten Schmidt: I grew up in East Germany and my education was much like for everyone else in the country during that time. The polytechnic school system was standardised (as everything else) but tried to keep a fair balance and equal measures of subjects throughout the ten or twelve years of compulsory education. We had everything from the usual maths, science, languages, art, music, history, geography, philosophy to several years of electronics, wood, metal and plastics workshops. This was in contrast to the bias of many western systems where kids and their parents have to decide upon a direction relatively early on.
JLW: When did you first encounter computing?
KS: I didn’t know about computers until my early teens, when the first Atari and Commodore ads appeared on West German TV (which we watched illegally). When I was thirteen, my mum signed me up to an after-school computer course … from the beginning our tutors helped us to see the computer as an almost limitless creative tool … This year [1988] was a turning point, after which I knew exactly what to do in life.
I always had an interest in maths but maths was much easier to understand in code form: it was a an achievement to see a pixellated circle or my first 3D vector graphic drawn on screen.
For Christmas ’88 I convinced my parents to sacrifice all the western money they had saved … to buy an Atari 800XL … After the wall came down I was finally able to buy a tape drive and actually save projects and I started becoming more active …
JLW: Why did you decide to study ‘media-informatics’ at Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft in Dresden?
KS: In a world of technological convergence, it’s often more necessary or helpful to be ‘proficient’ in a variety of fields than to be ‘expert’ in one …
During the Christmas holidays I taught myself HTML and made my first website, which I used to get a freelance job (remotely) with I-D Media, one of Germany’s first multimedia agencies. Because of this work, I ended up skipping a lot of my studies and then decided to do an internship in London from which I’ve yet to return.
JLW: Who were your early role models?
KS: My dad was a role model for sure. He taught me to always strive beyond mediocrity and question things … My interest in electronic music was awakened first by the American radio station RIAS Berlin (Radio in the American Sector) in the late 1980s and the German DJs Torsten Fenslau and Sven Väth who created the most amazing radio shows.
Because I mainly came to London to get a better grasp of the English language, I started reading lots of books: non-fiction, science, architecture, physics and a lot of Umberto Eco, Neal Stephenson, Fritjof Capra, Alan De Botton, Oliver Sacks, Ivan Illich, Frank J. Tipler, Jorge Luis Borges, David Bohm, Carlos Castaneda, Rudolf Arnheim, David Foster Wallace, Bruce Sterling, John Thackara. Most of the views I hold today I’ve got from their books.
JLW: Was there a breakthrough moment when you realised the potential power of computer code?
KS: It was a gradual development, although I realised early on that coding is a unique route to achieve results in many different media …
Essentially a computer moves numbers from one place to another, manipulates them or compares them against another number. Any concept, however complex, boils down to that. In the beginning, from the 1940s to the 80s, machine code was the main language for all the systems. That’s why what a lot of the old-school people learned then is still valid – because you can treat concepts the same way.
JLW: Is coding design?
KS: It’s funny how the moment you start talking about code, you start being channelled into a technical role. Because so many people are alienated. They know they don’t understand … but they want to protect their status as a ‘creative’.
When you work with code, actually typing code is absolutely the last thing you think about … writing code becomes a background task, because you’re actually building a mental model of what you want to do. This is what makes code work. This is where you work as a designer. Mapping is what we all do automatically, but for code it has to become a conscious act.
JLW: When you’re designing something?
KS: Yes – even when you do a poster. You have a mental image and that image doesn’t pop into your head. You really focus on it, you have to analyse what happens and you have to break this process down into such small parts that it becomes encodable as code.
JLW: So is there an argument that some computer programs take away these mental tools?
FS: Well there’s something I said at Flash On The Beach in Brighton – that Kenneth Boulding quote: ‘We make our own tools, and then they shape us.’ If you depend too much upon any tool – Flash or whatever – sooner or later your idea will be channelled through that tool’s metaphors, and there goes your idea!
JLW: But when you got into digital agency work you used programs like Flash and Director.
KS: Sure, I did Flash for seven years and I got bored and frustrated. With commercial software you invest your whole professional life in learning this tool and mastering it, and there are all those bugs …
JLW: Do you think ‘traditional’ design can learn from coding?
KS: Yes! But again there is this whole astigmatism or stigma – yeah, it’s astigmatism as well! – there’s this whole stigma with creatives and software, because they think they don’t need to be technical. ‘Technical is something techies do, I’m a creative – I don’t touch that!’ This is the biggest problem and I don’t understand why designers have such big egos! What justifies that?
JLW: So it’s a cultural problem?
KS: Yes! That’s why I’m trying to get into education, doing workshops and lectures, to try and change perceptions and show viable alternatives.
But within the colleges everything is so channelled. Like, I’m supposed to do a Processing workshop soon, but the essential skill is not to learn a program, it’s to think in code. …
In workshops, it’s always the girls who do the most interesting work. They somehow grasp the potential on a more human level. Like boys really tend to get stuck into the technicalities. They show off – I can show that to my friends! It applies to the whole addiction to tools we have.
JLW: But ultimately a tool is to get …
KS: … stuff done! It’s the thing which we often forget.
JLW: So how can we change these attitudes?
KS: You need to think about the bigger picture – what technology is today. It’s totally distributed. The most important thing in the next few years will be the interactions between the systems we have – the semantic Web (which Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about). And they need to be designed. If we don’t take any role in that as designers, we’ll get politicians designing things …
JLW: So you’re talking about designers taking leadership …
KS: Yes. There’s a French industrial designer, Jacque Fresco, who basically says: ‘The world belongs to the makers.’ If we don’t take responsibility as makers we sacrifice everything sooner or later. We have the power! The people who create things, who make things work, we have the power. No politician has that.
JLW: You talked about design being a verb, a process, and make a lot of things that have no fixed end result…
KS: It’s about building new platforms and this is what Toxiclibs is all about. The long-term aim is to have this collection of building blocks, like Lego, that can be mixed and matched and plugged together to form something bigger. [See toxiclibs.org]
JLW: Are you getting a sense of who is using them?
KS: Not really. But I really want them to be generically reuseable so they can be used in all contexts possible. So that even when Processing is not around anymore, the work I put in is not lost
…
JLW: Are you an architect or an artist?
KS: I see myself more as a designer. Yes I do eye candy stuff but this is not the main thing for me. The eye candy is what makes it sellable to clients. The underlying work for me is to create.
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