Discarded technology and its affects on graphic design and aesthetics.

[Aria.S]

Hi there,

Im a final year student at Univeity of the arts london. Im currently studying graphic and media design and beginning to write my thesis. The topic of my thesis is discarded technogly and how it has affected graphic design and aesthetics with the recent years.

The topic came about after seeing Pinot "this is America" recreation on a Macintosh SE computer. (

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After watching the video I began to think about all of the different ways I have recently seen the use of old technology within design, questioning why it is being used so much and what are the real effects of using discarded technology on relationship between graphic design and aesthetics.

I thought it would be pretty good to come on here and ask other designs what they thought about the use of discarded / obsolete technology in graphic design or design in general with the last few years.

My actually research question at this point is something like .... How has the use of discarded technology affected the relationship between graphic design and aesthetics ?

Any of the answers or responses would help me get a feel of what others designers think and not just the selected designers I have looked at.

If any of you have time to give your input on the topic or any suggestions I would really appreciate it.

Thank you!

 

[scotty]

How has the use of discarded technology affected the relationship between graphic design and aesthetics ?

I'm not quite sure I'm totally understanding the question so apologies.

The way I see it, it's a mistake to turn your back on obsolete technologies as with design, music and art there are constant renaissances going on.

A few examples are vinyl in the music industry, traditional sign painting and the .gif.

People thought gifs were obsolete to the point there Adobe dropped support for them in many of their app's like After Effects.
Traditional signs painting became almost a black art after cut vinyl appeared but people are wanting the hand crafted look again.

...and vinyl records.

Who doesn't love vinyl?

 

[Paul Murray]

Who doesn't love vinyl?

Check out my new coasters…

Ironically, in web design, some technology simply doesn't work with new trend and approaches. Some browsers struggle to support Facebook due to all the Javascript, and YouTube, because they can't handle streaming video at decent resolutions. The technology at the time simply didn't support what we can do now. Some old versions of Internet Explorer don't even support transparency in PNGs, something we take for granted now.

Most developers will install fallbacks that occur when something doesn't work as intended, to give a semi-consistent design and experience. But there's a limit, and some developers (and even some studios) claim to have a cut-off, stating they'll only support older browsers (*cough, Internet Explorer) up to a certain version, and only when explicitly asked to in the brief, because it's a lot of work and expense for a tiny majority of the audience.

It's just not possible to get a lot of modern websites working on obsolete hardware/software, and you could argue that the majority of designers and developers don't want to think about older technology any more than they have so as to not limit what they can do.