While offbrand is not just about flexibility and variation, I have been considering recently the opportunities afforded by digital printing and production for infinite print objects in design projects. A great article in the current Eye magazine by Luke Prowse looks at Processing 1.0 (BETA) and the outputs this generative approach to program and image making is producing. He notes; “Programming gives great power to variation, making use of the power of the computer to produce a multitude of customised” (or random ed.) “results”…
“The idea that ‘control is lost’ is not true, though the control you have is of a different kind … By allowing endless variation, the programming-based processes of Processing can be seen as part of the backlash against the homogenisation of Modernism. We must however be wary, lest we accelerate ourselves to a point where nothing is new, a landscape of super-variety*, even more bland than the eclectic postmodernism of today’s commercial culture”.
*More on this feedback-fuzz of contemporary design at somepoint in the near future, but while we’re on the subject of flexibility and chance in identity, there’s this to look at.