Introduction

Jon Rogers

Being at Digital Design Weekend

Something very exciting happens when a citywide event gains the kind of global traction that London Design Festival has done. When this energy of possibilities is channelled through a world-class museum such as the V&A you arrive at something rather special. In the globally connected world we all play within, having a focussed physical place for activity is very important. Which is where we find the Digital Design Weekend, which acts as both an arrival point for great work and a departure point for incredible new thinking. Seeing how this has evolved with LDF over the last five years illustrates just how important an event it is.

We Don’t Know What The Digital Future Is

Nobody knows what the digital future is going to be. No one knows who or what are going to be the ideas and people influencing and shaping this future. People from many walks of life and many skills can and will make the digital future the way they want. I often wonder what would have happened if storytellers, playwrights, and performers had been at the heart of the development of radio and television technology; would there be a very different language of interaction? Would we still have channels? Would we tune into a show? Or something entirely different, perhaps more human? I’d love to see a furniture designer working with iTunes or Dropbox to collaboratively make a more human system for storing our digital books, music and films. I’d love to see a jeweller work with content providers to nd how to create personal content. After all, it took a jeweller, Johannes Guttenberg, to revolutionise the book world and completely change how books were printed and distributed. The reason being that the physical world stores more than the content it carries. A book is an object that not only stores the content on a page, it holds within it the human act of reading. A radio or TV might broadcast content, but they both also store social rituals of family time, personal time and shared experiences. Beneath all of this is the underlying principle that objects directly and indirectly capture and re-play the values of the inventors, designers and makers that created them. By curating Digital Design Weekend, Irini is curating a shared knowledge and shared value in objects - a collective knowledge and collective value that goes beyond each piece to form something new.

Collaborative Making

Exploring values demands a highly participative approach. It needs people to be sharing knowledge, ideas and viewpoints together. We’ve all seen how collective values can be both a powerful force for good alongside a banal representation of institutionalised thinking at its worst! To understand and harness the latent capacity within digital value, we need to do this in an open and collaborative way. In recent years hackathons have started to gain popularity as ways of bringing people together to solve problems in a shared space. I’m a little critical of what this means, because in the main this involves people being taken out of everyday life and everyday activities and placed in a closed space, often working through the night in secret teams. I don’t think this is particularly productive, and although often with great intentions, I’m left with a sense that potential for radical ideas and thinking is never quite achieved and that openness is sometimes left the other side of a closed door. I much prefer to think of this process as Collaborative Making, where it is more integrated into people’s lives in a manageable way; that you can have connected events and spaces that ideas and activities progress through. Our museums being at the heart of this is a very cool proposition. The idea that the future could come from collaborative public events that anyone can take part in - going beyond the hackathon community and into something more human - is very much a part of what Digital Design Weekend is trying to do. By challenging our existing familiarity with the processes of our digital suppliers we will create all sorts of problems in terms of ownership and intellectual property. This might mean we all have to take a bit more responsibility to increase our digital literacy, bearing in mind that digital literacy might not be about writing code; it might be about understanding citizenship or tone-of-voice, historical analysis, publishing or identity. It could mean that digital literacy cuts through everything we think we know.

With the public drawn into Irini and the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend there is a real opportunity to raise the debate on what our digital future is, how we might all get involved and just how important a diverse community of makers really is. It is events like this that point to a future where the Internet could be in everything, where data can be collected everywhere and when jewellers, historians, ceramicists, performers, writers, scientists and coders are joining forces. It is personally how I’d love to see tomorrow’s world, being collaboratively explored in a museum that accelerates and then collides the past with the shape of things to come.

Things are about to get rather interesting…