Man makes robot makes book.

CHALLENGE

HELLO ROBOT- Design Between Human and Machine is an exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum that embodies the history of robotics. We were asked to come up with a design strategy to create the book. A printed book? In this day and digital age? What relevance, meaning, and social impact does it now have in our society?

INSIGHT

For us the research and our knowledge goes all the way back and it’s been a long way from Gutenberg’s invention of the movable letters to today’s ebooks. So we were challenging the idea of the book format yet another time. What is the relevance of a printed book these days – especially in this case when talking about the digital age and the history of robotics. What is the social impact of a book today. The success of the Gutenberg bible was that it could be printed many times and was therefore widely distributed, compared to the handwritten bibles before then. As are ebooks. Digital seemed to have solved it all – distribution was not the problem anymore. But why do objects become more and more fashionable again. Vinyl record sales in England overtook digital sales last year for the first time in a decade. Although turntable sales did not increase. So, objects became the fetish again. Owning a vinyl record, a framed piece of art on the wall or the selection of books in a shelf are showing what cultural scene the owner belongs to. The iTunes and iBooks library as a whole is not visible to anyone but the owner and his device.

SOLUTION

We had the book designed by a robot in a broader sense. An algorithm took over the job of ours after we fed the system with the rules we wanted the algorithm to follow and then had to optimize the typesetting and final layout. In this sense we switched places with the robot. We turned the system upside down. The robot did the design work and we did what robots usually do better than humans – optimizing a process. So – true to theme – the book has been laid out by an algorithm.

RESULT

The book now is in reprint since there are only a few copies left and this is a travelling exhibition – and has travelled from the Vitra Design Museum to the MAK Vienna, on to the Design Museum Gent and further on to the Museum of applied arts in Winterthur and will stop over in the US soon. The book cover and the book was mentioned in many publications from Wallpaper to Dezeen and was well received by many different fields of work, be it artists, scientists or robotics fans.

The layout for
Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine
was devised by an algorithm.

THIS IS HOW IT WORKED