What happens when the gap between thinking and making closes?

It’s not shocking to hear that the creative industry is in a disruptive state; you’re probably tiring of hearing about it. New technologies are changing how creatives work, regardless of discipline and, in fact, even those disciplines are perhaps now up for debate. Roles were once siloed, identified by their titles: designers designed, developers developed, engineers engineered. But now we’re entering a time where the new tools at our disposal are dissolving the boundaries between who’s who and who does what. Now, to varying successes, you don’t need to be an expert in a discipline to create work that previously relied on specific expertise. Technology has felled the gap between thinking and making, so what happens now? Well, it seems like it’s all up in the air, and it’s our choice to find where it falls.

“We’re at a moment when technology allows us to create anything we can dream of,” Seth Akkerman, director of creative technology at Instrument, says. “The question is, how big are we dreaming?” New tech is affording creatives a freedom they didn’t have before, so now, through Instrument’s eyes, it’s open to where we take it. And, as a by-product, co-creation is now the name of the game. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is pushing what we dream of because we’re bringing practitioners, minds and ideas into subject areas they weren’t previously part of. This is, ultimately, changing how people actually work together day-to-day, with different people learning different disciplines and – consequently – building a shared language around the problems they’re solving, rather than just handing them to a specialist team.

Particularly within design and technology, co-creation has become core to creative practice, as designer and coder Talia Cotton says, “co-creation is quite literally not one without the other. In order to create, the process is heavily integrated with technology from the very beginning and throughout the entire process.” So, with technology and co-creation being inextricably linked to the creative process, the future of disciplines and practices becomes not what’s being used and, instead, what shape do creatives take.

For Seth, tools and technology are affording democratisation, whereby more people can make than ever before. “I also love that technological advancements are allowing a wider range of people who couldn’t afford tools before,” he says, “but were inarguably just as creative as folks who were always at the table to offer their perspectives.” These new heads around the table mean that ideas are what reign supreme and the act of making isn’t consigned to discipline. As a result, there are also more opportunities for people to challenge existing assumptions – build on each other’s thinking. “There are smart people across all the disciplines!” Seth adds, “let them cook!”

Talia feels similarly and argues that the collapse of traditional creative specialisations has led to makers who can offer broader capabilities. “In my experience, the people are integrated as one, that is the co-creation,” Talia says. “The designer is the technologist, and it wouldn’t be any other way.” They are able to utilise technology directly within their creative process, “and that’s the beautiful thing”. She suggests the same goes for plenty of other titles too, be it writers and strategists who share an understanding of either discipline, which leads to something profoundly contemporary. “This opens the door to an entirely new type of designer,” Talia says, “a new expertise, a new trade: the designer who codes, the creative who understands technology.” To this end, creatives are neither either/or, but integrated as one role, with boundaries between disciplines permanently blurred.

This is perhaps why creative teams, especially those straddling design and technology, need sandboxes in which to play; after all, if co-creation thrives on experimentation, teams need somewhere for that to happen. This is exactly how Playspace started, Instrument’s own online library of sandbox experiments. “Playspace grew out of a simple question: “What if?” Seth says, suggesting that some of the most intriguing ideas come from small explorations and curiosities, not specific client deliverables. “Often those ideas evolved into something much bigger,” he adds, “such as a new tool, a new capability, or even a client project.”

Playspace is a prime example of what comes from the convergence of technology and creativity and the need for a space for open play, failure and exploration. “Playspace is a home for experimentation that helps people test ideas, share knowledge, build on each other’s thinking, and discover new possibilities together.” Here we find something incredibly valuable with Playspace – the opportunity it creates for other people throughout the studio to get involved. Iterating, contributing, challenging what’s already there with a completely novel perspective. It allowed the Instrument team to write their own briefs. “It gives us a place to scratch itches, prove theories and explore ideas that might not have an immediate home,” Seth says, “but can later become capabilities, tools, or starting points for client work.” The latter of which is particularly important, because “it lets us show instead of tell”, he explains – something useful when new technologies and ideas can feel so abstract to clients.

#Showmewhatyoureworkingwith, a weekly experimental Slack thread at Instrument, served this purpose very well. What started as a sandbox project – hosting a number of AI tools, prototypes, plugins, and automations that the team had developed – ended up as useful, practical infrastructure within the studio. “I built the first version in five days, turning years of scattered explorations into a living knowledge base,” Seth recalls. “Today it helps with everything from scoping new opportunities to onboarding collaborators and building presentations.” In a way, the tool became an entirely new experiment in itself – “an AI-powered resource for understanding a collection of AI-powered experiments.”

That said, not all creatives find experimentation within surprise and unrestriction. In fact, quite the opposite. For Talia, the value of experimentation is within control and structure. While Seth sees experimentation as a source of discovery, Talia considers the latter as useful, but only when bound within systems. Experimentation within cohesion.

“From the technology approach, the metaphor I equate it to is the classic ‘happy accidents’ you have when you are in a design tool,” Seth says, finding expected moments of creativity. “The best happy accidents aren’t just between a person and a tool; they happen between people.” It’s perhaps in this notion that co-creation is at its most visible, not in the technology itself, but rather in the conversations and unexpected developments that occur when people with different perspectives work closely together. For Talia, however, this isn’t the case. “Nothing we do is experimental by nature,” Talia says, “everything is incredibly controlled – or, better yet, ‘designed’,” stressing the importance of the role of the designer and the meaning behind design itself. “Design is about creating solutions; there is a sense of control, there is a purpose, there is a function,” she continues, “even the beauty is controlled to a degree.” An example is the generative motion graphics system that Talia created, in collaboration with Mother, for the Crypto coin USDC.

Within the visual identity, Talia developed a custom tool that generated guilloché patterns, in reference to the historical patterns used in traditional finance. Alongside set, systematic parameters – including height, width, density, and speed – Talia had to create algorithmically constrained rules within those limitations. “As you adjusted one parameter, another parameter would automatically change its available range,” Talia says, “that ensured every possible output looked good.” As Talia suggests, especially considering the ease with which people can generate things, the “designer’s eye” is now more important than ever. “The designer’s job is to create an airtight generative system that considers every possible case and every possible output,” she says, “so that every single output always looks great, no matter how different it is.”

Whilst Seth and Talia differ, it’s clear both only consider experimentation with technology something extremely valuable when it’s counterbalanced with decisive intention behind it. So what role should technology play within the creative process? Or, instead, is technology a creative medium in itself?

In discussing what technology allows creatives to communicate, Talia sees it as a way of expanding our capacity and reach. “I’d say design comes first, but design is also made possible by technology,” Talia says, “just not in the way people typically expect. If you think about design in general, it’s always so much more than just deciding whether something should be read or whether something should move, it’s always about the why.” It’s concerned with what needs to be communicated and not intrinsically concerned with how it needs to be communicated, Talia adds. “What we find is that with these new potentials in form and function, there are also entirely new potentials in meaning and impact,” such as the active participation that interactivity offers, the real-time evolution of using live data and the greater diversity that generation offers over traditional methods. “You’re almost using the computer as part of the design process,” Talia says, reducing the inherent bias of the designer and leaving you with an infinite set of outputs, each entirely unique. “If you think about what that symbolises as human beings, no two people are alike,” and, likewise, “no two products are alike, no two places are alike, and no two experiences are alike.”

The end result of whichever side you fall on in terms of design and technology’s interweaving is the importance of the creative – after all, when co-creation is king and disciplines have dissolved, that singular title is what you inhabit – and the message one wants to pass on. “Once you understand the meaning that needs to be communicated, that’s when we begin to think about the creative solution,” Talia stresses, “and when we begin thinking about the creative solution, we look at the unique benefits that technology as a creative medium can provide.” These capabilities, Talia ends, can “communicate that meaning in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible”.

In returning to Seth’s musing, perhaps it truly is the dreams of the creative that are perpetual, both informing the direction of design, technology, co-creation and experimentation, and existing separate to them all – intrinsically linked to the creative, exterior to design and tech. Without the constraints of discipline, Seth ends, “the leash is off, and this dog can run wild and free… it’s liberating,” – for the challenge of creative teams now isn’t access. The practice of creatives is decisive: the conceptual, playful, practical, and experimental decisions they make in expressing what they want (or need) to express. The future of co-creation may be defined less by the tech that fuels it than by the people, processes and spaces that allow ideas to move freely amongst them.