Programming is a vital tool and creative medium for designers. With platforms like P5.js, Processing and Arduino, coding has become more accessible. Meanwhile, generative design and AI are reshaping aesthetic expectations. Despite advances in coding assistants, the question remains: should designers still learn to code?
We believe so.
Coding empowers designers to communicate with developers, explore technical possibilities, and engage with digital aesthetics. It enables them to prototype, iterate, and bring ideas to life independently, streamlining workflows and unlocking creative potential. Coding transforms abstract concepts into tangible results, revealing technology’s aesthetic possibilities.
While learning to code is challenging, it’s a transformative process that requires patience and resilience. The computing landscape has shifted from personal machines to distributed computers that generate code, images, and sounds. Though these systems are often complex, the fundamentals of programming remain the same. Understanding the basics allows designers to move from passive users to active creators.
We encourage a playful and experimental approach to computing and throughout this two week class, the students developed creative projects with guidance from the expert faculty, refining ideas and balancing ambition with feasibility. Through effort, resilience, and iteration, they deepened their skills and relationship with technology.
Dennis P Paul (Bremen, 1974*) works as an interaction designer and new media artist, lives in Bremen and holds a professorship for Interaktion und Raum in the Digitale Medien Program at Hochschule für Künste Bremen. He was the co-founder of the Berlin-based studio for spatial, media-related design The Product.
In his work he is concerned with the interaction between humans and technology and the relationship between the conceptual, the virtual, the immaterial, and the physical. His works frequently take the form of installations in public spaces, physical interfaces, and generative systems.
With great interest he is researching the communicative, playful, narrative, and critical qualities of new and digital media. He strongly believes that technology must be something warm and emotional. His work has been exhibited internationally and has received various renown awards.
Jacob Remin is an artist and engineer, composer and designer. Central to Remin's praxis is collaboration and infrastructural critique, with focus on the meeting between late capitalism and the algorithmic potential of internet and computers everywhere.
Remin is part of the Danish Composers Society and Danish Visual Artists. He holds a BA in Design Engineering from DTU and an MA in Interaction Design from CIID.
Jacob Remin lives and works in Copenhagen.
