Part of what makes design fiction so interesting is that you have to speculate, an exercise almost unheard of in the traditional practice of design. In fact, after 30 or more years in the profession, most clients would probably concur that the designer has no right to be wrong. Market research, iterative design and prototyping, along with the rigor of the design process should eliminate ideas that don’t cut it or won’t cut it in the outside world. Design, as we know it, is a criterion-based practice. Time, money, market, manufacturing, competition, user analysis/interface, usability testing and a myriad of other forces are what shape, and ultimately mold, the final solution. It is a fact-based, reality-based endeavor. The exercise, if you will, of design fiction, forces the designer — not to abandon research — but to venture forth without the comfort of the conventional design climbing holds, or to create their own. Building design constraints for a speculative future can be approached two ways, through pulling threads of existing technologies and social trends (which seem to be becoming the same thing) or through wild unbridled fiction. The latter carries the dismissive, “Don’t ask me how, it’s just that way”, as something akin to the writer/artist’s artistic license. Hey, it’s fiction. The former blends the brain of the designer and the writer/artist and insists that he or she ground the idea, however speculative, in the roots of some plausible science or social momentum.

Hence, as I begin crafting the visual world for my graphic novel, I find myself struggling with these challenges daily. This summer, I am working on the self-imposed deadline of August 31 to have completed character designs for the eight, key cast members. Each character is posed in a relevant (though not apparent without having read the story) scene from the book. That requires not only the design of the character and the questions of what they would wear, the material, the design, and the function, but also the design of their accessories, as well as the design and construction of the set on which they are standing. The decisions seem endless, sometimes terribly frustrating and enthralling at the same time. The CG workflow, which at this level often distributed between specialists in modeling, texturing, posing, lighting, rendering etc., lies squarely on my shoulders. Since I don’t posess virtuoso proficiency in any of the above, it adds to the challenge. On the up side, I may well be a virtuoso (at something) by the time the project is completed.

I plow ahead, but I am excited to show my progress, and hopefully on, or near to the deadline.

Now for the style discussion.

There are so many fabulous art styles for storytelling out there and there is a rich history of masterful execution. I’m going a different direction (and perhaps down a dark alley). As I have alluded to in prior posts, I will be using CGI for the core of my graphic novel visualizations. There isn’t a lot of precedent here, though there have been attempts. While I would not want to say that past attempts have failed, I think it is safe to say that hand-drawn comics and graphic novels still account of the vast majority of books out there. I have to draw a clear separation between computer assisted imagery and full CGI, however. First of all, computer assisted imagery in the form of digital painting is extremely common, in fact, the league of master digital artists out there is, in my mind, unapproachable. I can’t even begin to list their names but a trip to the CG Society, Concept Art World or Concept Art.org will give you a taste of the lofty realms these guys inhabit. Even though I will likely be employing the digital tablet and employing lots of post production enhancements, I will be generating all my character imagery and settings in 3D wireframes. Even though this is not unprecedented either, it is fairly unusual since it is so time consuming and expensive to do.

The magic, however, is in the final rendered image, and software greatly influences this. Different rendering engines produce a different look and feel for the art. The trick is to suspend the reader from saying “this is CG” throughout the whole book, which frankly, most of what I have seen does exactly that. But please, I do not disparage these attempts as many of their images are stunning, but it doesn’t take much to break the bubble and this makes my task all that more daunting.

On my site you can see some attempts at this styling, though I don’t necessarily feel that any of these examples is quite on the mark (at least right now), though some of them are close.

I have two clear objectives in my style: 1. cinematic feel, 2. realistic detail.

The style of my art is going to be ultra important, so I’m going to keep this thread alive. In an upcoming post I’ll note what some of from the world’s comic book scholars have to say about the issue of style.

Let’s face it, I came to Ohio State to make a graphic novel. For me, it was the epitome of holistic design and a realization of “epic integration.” In the professional world, I was forever battling to make clients and decision-makers embrace the idea as it applies to brands and their stories — experiences. Over the years though, so much of your design sensibility becomes second nature, intuitive. What seems obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. Thankfully the faculty prodded this out of me and as a result there was the discovery of design fiction.

Through design fiction, idea-objects gain knowledge mass and a sense of credibility. But design fiction is more than just constructing a set of plausible constraints through which a design might exist. Bleecker states that drama is of great importance. “We can put the designed thing in a story and move it to the background as if it were mundane and quite ordinary — because it is, or would be. The attention is on the people and their dramatic tension, as it should be.” (Bleecker, 2009:37) Thus, design becomes that invisible collaborator with culture in making life seem as real in the future as it is real for us now.

In fact, science fiction has a long history of introducing new technologies and artifacts that go on to become real world devices. The gesture-based interface of Minority Report or the multi-storey videos of Blade Runner are only two examples.

Evolutionary geneticist and science lecturer David Kirby calls these props “diegetic prototypes” (Kirby, 2010:1) “Film-makers and science consultants craft diegetic prototypes and enhance their realism by creating a full elaboration of the technological diegesis which includes any part of the fictional world concerning the technology. Through their actions they construct a filmic realism that implies self-consistency in both the real world and the story world.” (Kirby, 2010:46).

While design fiction can be used in filmmaking to create acceptance of a concept or idea as some kind of future product placement, that is not its greatest potential. “A particularly rich context, a good story that involves people and their social practices rather than fetishizing the object and its imagined possibilities — this is what design fiction aspires to.” (Bleecker, 2009:27).

Playing around with these concepts makes for a very rich exploration into a future design. Stay tuned for the story synopsis, characters and more – coming August 2011.

References:

Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction: A short essay on design, science, fact and fiction. Online. http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com

Kirby, David. 2010. The Future is Now: Diegetic Prototypes and the Role of Popular Films in Generating Real-world Technological Development. Social Studies of Science, 40/1; 41–70, February 2010. http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals

As promised, I am passing on the results of my survey that many of you participated in via Survey Monkey a few weeks ago. I did not get nearly as many responses as I had hoped for. It was the week before finals and a lot of people here must have been too busy to to get to it before it expired. Thus, far from conclusive, it satisfied the assignment, and as with all research, it just leads to new questions. Herewith, the executive overview. The whole idea was to test comic scholar Scott McCloud’s assertion from Understanding Comics, that readers have more difficulty “filling-in” the gutter (the gap) between panels (the frames) when the artwork is more detailed. He also says that people identify more easily with a cartoon figure than a realistic figure. I found this somewhat hard to swallow, so I set out to test it. As you know there were two, very short stories; one in cartoon fashion and one using CG renderings. Essentially, they were intended to tell a similar story.

The first question asked participants to tell what happened in each story. There were various responses for each, but for story 2, the realistic one, people were able to read much more detail into the character and his predicament. In question 2, participants were split equally on which story seemed more “real”. For question 3, story 2 was clearly the winner in conveying more emotion. It was also the preferred story to “continue reading” for question 4, though there were a fair number who would like to have read both. If you’re into the nitty-gritty details on every question you can download my project summary report via this link.

While I didn’t put Scott McCloud on notice with conclusive research, I got enough of a response to at least put his theory in the “subjective” category. Thanks to all who participated.

The last post was Halloween. How embarrassing! Well, as I said then it is the curse of the blog. But in all fairness, the blog is not my business. So it’s time for an update to all those who pay attention to this (greetings to both of you), on what is going on. It’s not like I’ve been lazy or anything, in fact, anything but. Part of the rules of the blog are that I don’t talk about work, but I did finish an epic project at “corporate”  that’s been going on for 18 months. But the real news is that I’m leaving that to go back to school. Yes. I have accepted a formal offer from The Ohio State University Department of Design for a 3-year Graduate Teaching Associateship while completing the requirements for my MFA. As the Masters Degree is the terminal degree in the design profession, it will position me to directly pursue a professorship with a design school at some point – or back into the corporate realm. OSU is the 5th rated design school in the country and the place where I received my BSID.

This requires selling the house and moving to Columbus for the next 3 years. Huge. But why? Even parts of two things: 1.) I feel as though I can reboot my corporate contribution with fresh insight. 2.) 3D has long been a back room passion of mine. I’ve woven it into the workplace whenever possible when designing trade show architecture, showrooms and retail display but not enough to keep me energized and growing. I decided seriously a year or so ago that I was going to really develop the skill particularly in concept design and concept art. Noodling around with ways to quantize my skills I decided against jumping into some other corporate situation. Two years back I put out some feelers to a couple of universities, Parsons New School of Design, and Ohio State, (my alma mater). Both respectable, but Ohio State is clearly rated among the most advanced, plus they work closely with the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. (See where this is going?) When OSU offered me the Graduate Associateship and the endorsement to jump into my own theories of epic integration. See the website and previous blog entries. I decided, “Hey. I’m not getting any younger.” So I went for it.

The idea: At OSU the Design Department has 3 disciplines, Interior, Product and Visual Communications and together with the co-program  at ACCAD this gives me the opportunity to further explore the idea of epic integration, how brands, stories, and experiences are intensified when everything is designed with co-dependence on everything else. At this point I’m looking at the idea of fabricated experiences. My interest is to delve into the fabrication or simulation of real or fictional environments that employ a rich back-story. Taking the form of graphic novel, animated film, concept art/design, or interactive story the exploration would make full use of the potential of digital visualization together with a multi-faceted design narrative that embodies concept interiors, lighting, product, and visual communication design.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. With getting the house ready to sell and pitching junk from the last three decades my weekends, which are usually reserved for concept art and my web novel, have been fairly non-productive. As soon as there is something decent to post (visually), I will.

I guess Halloween is a good time to post on the curse of the blog. I can’t believe it has been over a month since my last post. I was pretty delighted to see that my cordial glass design was so well received on Yanko Design. Despite some initial naysayers, it was in the top 3 for September visits and added 10x the monthly hits to my website. In addition, it was picked up by another eight or ten global design blogs. All in all pretty amazing — for me anyway. I have been working on a handful of other projects from concept designs for my LayerCity project, to a general atmospheric piece, some character designs, as well as a design  for a new modular hotel. On top of that I’m trying to re-acclimate to Maya, which I have been away from for at least five years. The program has changed dramatically and it was uber sophisticated back then. On top of that there’s my day job. So maybe you’ll understand why I’m not posting much these days. I think I will be focusing on the hotel project for the time being and hopefully have something to post soon.

Until then, here’s a preview of my LayerCity project a post-apocalyptic outpost the size of Manhattan — maybe a story there,too.

A post-apocalyptic outpost the size of Manhattan

That’s the update for now, Happy Halloween!

I’ve been working on some glassware design concepts. This one is for cordial glasses that fit on to a tray. Kinda cool.

Just finished these and thought they were good enough to post.

Comments welcome.

Steve Goodin

Illustration of the week. I stumbled on this somehow from digital artist Steve Goodin.  The guy loves Avant Garde, and while this example doesn’t show it the link has some great examples — About as well as I have ever seen it used. The mixture of 2 and 3D is most impressive. Very nice. Seamless. I’d love to see the wireframes on this. Not to mention this is not his day job. Lush.

If you’ve browsed my portfolio you see that I do a fair amount of 3D rendering, mostly for work but the tools are so superior these days that I have begun working on a few personal projects that let me stretch my modeling skills. The killer is always the time it takes to render and the final quality. To that end I just added Maxwell Render as my rendering engine. I found that it had a fairly steep learning curve and there is a lot more to learn before I could say that I’ve mastered it. There are some truly exceptional artists out there using it and are extremely proficient. You can explore it at http://www.maxwellrender.com

I use SolidThinking as my modeling tool primarily because I’m Mac-based and there aren’t too many NURBS based modeling platforms for the Mac. ST has its problems for sure, but it’s far more economical than say, Maya. Though, I think I will probably end up there eventually (save my pennies). I actually learned modeling back in the old days using Power Animator, on an SGI, moved up to Maya when it was Maya 1.0. Never was able to keep up with the upgrades.

Anyway, it seems like you could research rendering programs forever. I was looking to increase render speed when I started my search and I looked at Bunkspeed before settling on Maxwell primarily because of Maxwell’s materials editor. Really great stuff. Now, however, I am hearing a lot about VRAY. I’d like to hear what others are using and some of the pros and cons.