Digital design
Dialogue with Cassandra Ortega
Comprehensive designer, digital artist and teacher. Through her practice she explores analog and digital mediums, paints in oils, designs graphics, NFTs, books and user experiences.
Figure A: “Amazing Axolotl”, NTF available on OpenSea. Courtesy Cassandra Ortega.
Figure B: Generative art workshop by Cassandra Ortega at Devcon in Bogota 2022. Courtesy Cassandra Ortega.
Q: How does design exist in the digital realm?
Initially, digital design has to do with things related to digital products such as user experience and user interface. It also encompasses digital illustrations, videos, and basically everything we see through a screen. But design itself goes beyond this; it's ubiquitous and it permeates all reality. Nowadays, everything is designed, everything is thought out and planned, and perhaps not always in the best way, but there is a design intention behind everything.
I read in X that a designer sarcastically said his job consisted of arranging rectangles on a screen, and if you take it to that specificity, a user interface designer does arrange pixels. But if you think more broadly, many other things are designed, not just software, but also hardware and the way we access it. This translates into experiences and other types of immersions, creating tangled layers between real life and the digital world.
Now, the fact that everything is designed doesn't mean everything is well designed. This brings to mind Don Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things," because it discusses how design isn't just about making things pretty, but rather literally everything is design. And thinking in this way, you begin to notice that design is both incredibly sophisticated and the simplest thing.
Design is both the screen and what we see on the screen. I read the concept of ubiquity in a novel by Philip K. Dick, where "Ubik" is a spray that seems to solve all problems, but its nature and exact effects are unknown, or left to speculation. I believe this is an interesting starting point for thinking and understanding many things about design. We can think about it from an academic analysis perspective, but sometimes it's very complex to understand it through theories or authors; design has many facets and many ways of being analyzed.
Q: What are the challenges of considering design in its physical and digital dimensions?
I believe the challenge is that we are so immersed in the digital that we overlook the physical, yet the material reality is there. Also, the way things are designed impacts how we consume. For instance, when we want to read a novel, we have the option of choosing between a printed book or a Kindle. One is a unique copy, while the other is a device that grants us access to infinite copies. The question then becomes how to make something analog appealing enough for us to pay attention to it, instead of endlessly scrolling on our phones.
White light has many effects on health, and a very relevant one is that it makes us release a significant amount of dopamine. Essentially, it makes us addicted, it alienates us, and I don't think there is a way to remove that alienation. I teach digital art at the high school level, and I've observed how that alienation goes beyond screens; now, there are these almost imperceptible headphones to which we're constantly connected.
The challenge is to think about what you want to communicate and how, and why it makes sense to communicate it through an analog medium. If it's for the pleasure of doing so, that's a very valid argument. There's a wave of artists, designers, and creators who are returning to analog mediums, especially painting and hand drawing. This happens almost as resistance to the digital, but it remains a niche. I'm one of those designers who loves printing things on paper and on different mediums because, for me, printed material holds a very different value compared to what exists solely in digital form. But I feel like this is going to go out of style, we're going to go back to digital again, and then that resistance is going to arise again.
I recall Travis Scott's concert in Fortnite a lot, because during the pandemic, there seemed to be a promise, which now seems amusing to me, that we would be completely immersed in the digital, but it wasn't the case. Technology brings interesting experiences, but we don't cease to exist in the physical realm. Futuristic theories, science fiction, and transhumanism often forget what makes us human, even though the future might bring flying cars and robots; we still need human connection and empathy. We remain the same, and we'll continue to have those same needs.
Q: How does the human act of designing interact with what Artificial Intelligence (AI) does?
I'm going to be completely open and transparent, because I believe we need to understand that there are tools we can use to facilitate design practice, and I think there's a strong stigma surrounding them. I literally put the questions you're asking me into ChatGPT before the interview, and I'm sharing this because I use AI tools a lot to trigger ideas.
Sometimes, anti-technology discourses fail to consider human-technology interaction. There's the idea that technology will replace us, but it is the people who know how to use technology that will replace us. I find it difficult to take a radical stance on this issue because I see it as completely inevitable. Instead, I believe we should focus on how we can turn it around and make it work in our favor.
AI is here and will also be, so the dilemma is whether we're going to use it or not. And that boils down to an ethical issue because there's undoubtedly a gap in regulation. I do believe we should use AI, but we need to think about the boundaries. Many illustrators have developed their own style for decades, and suddenly, an AI comes along, feeding on their art, and is able to create something in a second. I think it's crucial to study art history, film, and design, to understand the references and what has existed, so that we can then use the tools as a support.
In Web3 and the crypto world, several artists use prompts to create images. That is a very interesting topic because you have to know how to design a prompt, and that is where creativity lies beyond a tool like Midjourney that generates an image from text. But in my opinion, beyond the artwork or the final result, there's a process, and I think the process is very important. For example, oil painting is much more enriching as a process than writing a prompt on a screen. The fact that creating something takes time, that there's a need to iterate and face creative blocks, to eat ice cream and return to the canvas, is a very deep internal process in which you enter a state of understanding yourself and others. Maybe I am romanticizing a bit, but there's something very enriching in simply experiencing the creative process and improving a technique, which goes far beyond creating things for immediacy. I feel like this process is what differentiates us apart from AIs.