Category: design theory
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Visual Thinking as Design Practice
Design is often understood as a discipline of communication. But what if its primary role is not to communicate ideas, but to generate them?
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When Digital Tools Become Environments
Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” seems more relevant than ever in our age. This article explores how technologies evolve from tools into environments, shaping habits, attention, and expectations, and why this shift places new responsibilities on UX and UI designers. Design increasingly operates not at the…
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From Dada to Data: What Contemporary Generative Design Can Learn
At first glance, the experimental collages of Dada and today’s generative design systems seem to share a common logic: fragmentation, recombination, and the use of existing material. Yet their cultural intentions could hardly be more different. While artists such as Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Kurt Schwitters used disruption and contradiction to challenge established systems…
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The Loss of Distance: Real-Time Systems, Perception, and the Digital Present
Contemporary digital systems increasingly eliminate temporal, spatial, and cognitive distance. Drawing on Paul Virilio and Vilém Flusser, this essay examines how real-time interfaces, AI, and platform logics transform perception into an operational process of immediacy, prediction, and behavioral stabilization. In contrast to media artists of the 1960s and 70s who used technology to expose interruption,…
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Vilém Flusser, Technical Images, and the Aesthetics of Coded Systems
Contemporary digital design increasingly operates through systems, interfaces, and algorithmic processes rather than fixed visual objects. Revisiting Vilém Flusser’s theory of technical images, this essay examines how contemporary practices by artists and studios such as Defasten, Refik Anadol, Ryoji Ikeda, and Casey Reas reveal a profound cultural shift: from images as representations to images as…