[Many things have already been written about code as a creative medium, this is my little and unpretentious contribution.]

Fourteen years ago I had a breakthrough in my professional life: I was not happy with my engineering career, so I decided to start studying visual design.
Since then, I keep on asking myself what exactly is my new job, and I still do. During the years I tried my hand at graphic design, exhibition design, interaction design, UX design, UI design, front end development and data visualization.

Throughout all these experiences, one thing never changed: my love for the mixture of design and technology.

Considering my engineering background, this could seem pretty straightforward, but I don’t think I loved creative coding at first sight just because it represented the perfect match between my previous and my next-to-be professional lives.

People think I changed my job because I wanted to be creative, but this is far from being true: engineering itself can be extremely creative. What I really missed in my previous life was a direct connection between my thoughts and the result of them: I was part of a big team designing memories for mobile phones, which are such complex objects that anyone designing a tiny part of them easily loses any kind of connection between their actions and the final product.
I felt like a miner hidden in a deep cave, looking for gems without any idea about what to do with them. I lacked knowledge, experience, patience and attitude to be able to link my specific job with something greater. Indeed, nowadays the complexity of the majority of products and processes usually makes the distance between an idea and a product really huge.

Craft as a way to overcome detachment

We live in a highly industrialized world, surrounded by very complex things that are the product of really long supply chains and complicated design processes, and we don’t understand most of these things.

A craftsperson understands something in its entirety. Craft arises from a sort of closeness between a creator and what that person is creating: that’s the difference between a craftsperson and just a producer. For a lot of engineers and designers manufacturing is a constraint: you have a beautiful idea and then you discover that the mold that would be required to make this shape is going to cost $ 400.000 and it’s not going to work. When you’re a craftsperson, and you’ve internalized the process of your craft, you’re able to use the process as an inspiration rather than seeing it as a constraint.

This is a quote by Jon Bruner, a journalist and programmer featured in Takumi, a documentary produced by Lexus in 2019 which presents some very skilled craftspersons, masters of their job (the term Takumi denotes the highest level of artisan in Japan), and wonders whether they will survive in an increasingly “AI-powered” world.

Hisato Nakahigashi runs a two-Michelin star restaurant in Kyoto. He’s not only a master chef, but every morning he fishes in the local river and forages for local herbs and mountain vegetables. Likewise, the Japanese paper-cutting artist Nahoko Kojima is not only able to sketch and cut wonderful and intricate patterns, but she also manufactures the paper she’s working with, by herself.

When I saw the documentary a light turned on in my head, because it hit the core of the reason which drives my attitude in carrying out my job.
I think that the deepest reason why I always try to mix design with code is because I want to design as a craftsman, trying to move ideas and outputs closer, to access an intimate knowledge of the raw matter I manipulate and —as the quote above says— to use the process as an inspiration rather than seeing it as a constraint.

Seeing the process as an opportunity is one of the main keys in Bruno Munari’s design approach, and his Falkland lamp is a clear example. Originally designed using a tubular elastic mesh produced in a stocking factory, it “spontaneously” assumes its appearance when it is suspended.

«One day I went to a factory of socks to see if they could make me a lamp. — We do not make lamps, they said. — You will. You’ll see. And so it was.»

Code as a crafting tool

Visual things are made of points, lines, surfaces and pixels, so to access the basic building blocks of them you should deal with Mathematics and Geometry. The tools used by designers completely hide all these aspects, but I could still access them using code, building my own custom tools.

I’ll give you an example based on a personal project I did at the beginning of my career. I developed a series of office wall decorations for an Insurance Company, representing four different company values with image compositions featuring body gestures (using Eadweard Muybridge’s photos). I decided to process them using a halftone screen effect, but I wanted to make it more sophisticated and more consistent with the company brand.
Standard design tools (Photoshop, Illustrator) had two major limitations: they had available only the traditional halftone screen effect with a very limited set of tile shapes (circle, square, diamond, line) and they were not able to process the resolution needed to come up with a 340 × 270 cm print (leading to several hundred thousand shapes).

At that time I used Processing (still the most popular creative coding platform), and I wrote a custom piece of software able to sample an image at a chosen resolution, associate output shapes to the sampled input pixels according to a chosen formula (the standard one, shape size being inversely proportional to pixel brightness, but also custom ones), draw any kind of custom tile shape and export the whole thing for print.
So I designed compound shapes inspired by the Company’s visual identity, and I made them change not only their size but even their structure according to the pixel brightness.

The result was in some cases quite surprising and much more sophisticated than the traditional halftone screen effect, and the client loved it. The most interesting aspect was the wide variety of the output tile shapes, resulting in a pattern which at close distance appeared richer in detail and more lively than the usual ones.

Digital primitivism

So, growing my design practice as a craft, I sometimes use code to self-build the tools I use in my job. But, since I’m not a software engineer, these tools are not finished plug-and-play nice-looking applications: they’re coarsely made assemblies doing their job, like rough equipment put together in a garage by an amateur.

This is the reason why I consider myself a digital primitive.

In his “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” —a very popular book surveying the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on the Homo Sapiens— Yuval Noah Harari writes:

Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. […]
To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. […]

What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

Sapiens are the kind of artisans I look like: able to self-build rudimentary tools that enable them to manage their own job (in their case: staying alive).

This is my way to find connection, understanding and finally meaning in how I carry out my job: to tackle specific topics where I can broaden my area of intervention, leveraging code to put my hands into the DNA of things.