How the Internet and the Masses Gave Us “Participatory” Design

A New Book Talks about Designing Art with User-Generated Content

For graphic designers, the times they are a changing
            That’s the message of a delightful new book, Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content. In a concise 160 pages (with lots of pictures), the paperback aims to help artists find handles on the nebulous Internet and software revolutions, which are rapidly changing art making.
            The first kind of handle is the term “participate.” The authors, Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovic (both college art instructors), define participation as different from the more traditional “collaboration” in art. In the fast-paced world of Internet relationships, collaboration by co-equal partners is being eclipsed by lots and lots of people joining in a particular art project.
            This is the brave new world of participation: Artists must now expect their audiences to want to add on to artworks, contribute to information flows, and even alter the images and advertisements of products and services they buy. During participation, in fact, there may not be a final product. Participation is about a process that may be unfinished. The payoff could be an artwork, or a cash benefit. It may also simply be social therapy—the satisfaction of joining in. As every politician now realizes, Internet participation creates the “base” and brings out the vote. The same is true in organizing art projects, apparently.
            This is changing the ground rules for graphic design, the authors say. “Graphic design is often about control—controlling what the audience sees, controlling the typography of a piece, controlling its concept.” In contrast, “Participatory design requires user content for completion. Rather than delivering clean, finished products to a passive audience, participatory designers are creating open-ended generative systems.”
            This may sound a bit nebulous (as is the Internet itself). But as the authors know well enough, big business and big media are taking this nebulosity quite seriously. Facebook and Goggle have become behemoth industries. Time, Inc. has just hired a digital advertising pro as its new head. The new editor of the New York Times says her goal is to make the grey old lady of newsprint “interactive” to consumer participation.
            The great shift is generational, of course. Older folks are accustomed to the old model of hard copy art and media, produced by individual writers or artists. This has grown too costly and no longer has cache. The younger generation through the thirties, even forties, is shifting its mindset entirely, we are told, toward Internet products, mobile devices, apps, Internet groups, and just about every new bell and whistle you can buy at an Apple Store (or purloin from the Internet).
            So what is the graphic designer to do? According to Armstrong and Stojmirovic, the designer should keep four themes in mind: Community, Modularity, Flexibility, and Technology. The book, published by Princeton Architectural Press (in New York) is nicely organized around these four topics. Each section has a critical essay, examples of participatory design, interviews with designers, and projects for students in the classroom.
            The authors start with Community. They make a fairly persuasive argument that the social Internet is based on the number of “conversations” you can get going. From these come “connections” and finally a semi-permanent community. That community can join projects, buy products, or simply produce fun and enjoyment. These communities are also “wrenching cultural production from the hands of mass media.” Thus, the tone of the new approach, while commercial, is also rather anti-establishment and anti-corporate. As one slogan goes: “Content is Not King—Contact Is.”
            These communities can create artwork on the Internet (or by meeting at real places) through the use of Modularity, or pre-designed small pieces (modules) that can be added on. Modules have limits. But the adding-up power is unlimited. So for example, in participatory art projects people fill in templates, or add new modules to a growing accumulation. This may not suit the aesthetic tastes of everybody. But as the book’s examples show, it is a growing phenomena in the art world. Today, you can punch out your own modular book or piece of clothing “on demand.” Another slogan fits here: “Mass customization.”
            What, then, is Flexibility? This is the fact that product logos and brand names can no longer be carved in stone. A company or organization must interact with its community and alter the brand image as the community likes. This moving “from corporate mark to flexible identity” is delicate. The company must retain its integrity while still responding to whims of the mob. Like it or not, this is being called for in the new Internet market, and designers must pay heed.
            The final concern is Technology. The authors give an overview of the high-tech revolution beyond just computers: It includes the “open source” software revolution begun with Lenix in 1983, followed by anti-copyright movements such as “copy left” and “creative commons.” Meanwhile, the key to technology is that computers create algorithms: set patterns that computer code experts make and put into action. For artists, these algorithms (or “parameters”) can be off-the-shelf tools to create designs quickly, cheaply, and with a degree of chance mixed in, hopefully to produce new creativity.
            The challenge for designers is to become comfortable with the brain-numbing fact of code, indeed, thousands of lines of it everywhere. When it comes to writing code, “Code easily intimidates.” The tyranny of code experts may now be upon us. Despite dreams of democracy, it is unimaginable that everybody will write code. Nonetheless, the authors say that the algorithm-based technology has for the first time opened the way for enthusiastic amateurs to invade the art and design field.
            This problem of who controls the code is one of many challenges the book states plainly enough. Another is the copyright conundrum: How to be law-abiding, yet make code and products free, and yet still allow designers and artists to earn money. On this battlefield “between corporate control and open source ideology,” the book does not presume to offer a solution. Its goal is to introduce projects and opportunities.
            If there’s a gap in this discussion—and it appears in most works about art and the Internet—it is the ethical side. Art usually avoids ethical questions anyway. It simply wants the largest playing field for creativity. Recall also that it was telephone line “hackers” who launched the computer-Internet revolution. Seen in this light, participation ideology may be the early glimmers of an “Occupy Wall Street” for art and design.