Ischemia

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A few weeks ago I fell off a stool and ended up with 12 neat staples down the back of head. This goes some way in explaining the visceral nature of the following text.

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Graphic Design is bleeding out. It’s death by a thousand cuts. But as the bloated carcass of modernist dogma coagulates around it there is one would-be assassin that could also offer salve and a means to stem the ischemia. We need to change the way we face it though—not as an insidious body snatcher come to replace us—but as, what it is—an assistive tool that happens to be (de)composed of the congealed fat-burg of human knowledge that has been shared online—or what has been commonly titled, Ai.

From this ‘assistive’ vantage point there’s little difference between entering your query into the gaping maw of a search engine’s query field; or consuming an online tutorial; or scrolling down the spine of a site that is essentially a database with a happy face drawn on it (thinking Pinterest or Arena although I love Arena, not so much Pinterest). Ai as an assistive technology is just all the interfaces we have grown used to, stripped of their skins with their meat reassembled into a friendly amorphic mass that you can converse with. A mass that seems to get your vibe; that you can have ‘fun hangs’ with.

This framing is about a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship. You maybe alone at your desk but you also have an amiable work colleague nearby who happens to have had their bones knitted together and compounding flesh shaped out of a vast field of pre-existing voices and knowledges. In turn you provide eyes, ears and other senses for them as they are essentially deaf, blind, without voice or touch and yet infused with the acuity of ages.

Design students anemic to Ai need to wet their faces with it. They need to slather it on like woad. They need to absorb it into their skin and let it become a type of armour. They need to push through the initial biological shock to wrestle it into a shape they understand and let it macadamise into just another graphic designer tool, like the many we’ve had to adapt to in the past. Graphic design might be bleeding out but the bandages are here and although these wounds might never heal, we can still become fortified by the process and get to show off our neat scars.