The Style Machine: digital tactility through generative collaboration

This workflow provides benefits for both (human) collaborators; For the industrial designer, the collaboration allows a creative paradigm shift from prescriptive pre-meditated creativity, to reflexive and explorative creativity that maintains the hallmarks of their own developed “style”. For the generative artist, it provides a platform to explore how generative systems can be wielded in a collaborative context. The emphasis on collaboration shifts the focus from the process encoded by software onto the evolving multifaceted collaborative process.

A series of investigations, or “tactile conversations”, were performed to assess the relationship and tensions between the generative spontaneity of the software and the intentions of the designer. Through this process, we develop the software to act as a creative prosthesis that assists the creative process and functions as a collaborative mediator. The investigations involve different techniques to balance the system between all parties, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The techniques used to vary the parameters of the system are:

Using the human collaboration, and software with little generative automation (parametric software) as a feedback loop to evolve the software and artefacts produced.

Introducing stochastic generative features (apparent in the form and surface of the objects).

Varying the surface qualities of the printed artefacts both with software, and the 3D printer.

(you can find the full paper at www.generativeart.com, proceedings of GA2017)