Digital Tools: An Interview with Slanted Magazine

An interview with Slanted Magazine for their issue about “Digital Tools”, Autumn 2025

Hey, thanks for inviting me to this interview. My name is Tim and I explore, practice and teach Creative Coding. I run an online learning platform for this subject and until today thousands of people have used my courses in their own learning journeys. Most of my students are related to the wide field of Design. Building custom tools is a focal point of my work and my teaching.

Trace your personal journey through tools — from your first experiments to now. Which one first made you feel truly powerful, and which one later betrayed you?

My father owned a design agency for more than 30 years. He had studied graphic design in the early eighties, was (and still is) a brilliant illustrator. When he started his business in 1985 (the year when I have been born), all he needed was a bit of ink, paper and a pen. His speciality was to draw carpets in all their details – the local carpet store hired him to design newspaper ads for their latest special offerings. Within the thirty years of his career as an agency owner and creative director, the design industry has been undergoing a series revolutions and disruptions – from the emergence of the Computer to the early internet, from ink to pixels to network nodes, from craft to system architecture. Nothing ever had a greater impact on the field of design than computation. That’s what made me marvel while observing the evolution of the agency of my father. And so I ended up in teaching Creative Coding within the Design field.

As a designer myself, I have always been resonating with tight limitations in the toolset used. I find it incredibly interesting when the tool tells a story. In a way it all started when I was 18 and I did my first travel by bike, with just a tent and a sleeping bag on the rack. I wanted to ride to Amsterdam. The setting of parameters and limits led me through an amazing and highly influential adventure. Later on I’ve designed music videos with broken digital photo cameras, I’ve designed computerless electronic music or I’ve forced myself to draw an abstract graphic in black and white for several years, every day.

At some point I’ve realized: In my creative work I’ve always created systems of constants and variables. Systems and Tools, both overlap and both determine the process in design. That’s what continues to make me curious and excited for my work. In the end I’ve explored and decided to dedicate my work to Creative Coding. Code is a meta tool, a tool to design tools.

Access is never neutral. Access can mean owning hardware or understanding systems. Open-source promises inclusion, yet depends on unpaid labor and Western infrastructures. Is “access” itself a tool of soft domination? What does access mean for you — and whom does it exclude?

Design has been colonized by extremely powerful companies. They have hijacked the term Design to narrow it down to decoration and production for the extractive economy. I think it is true, access to the latest hardware and software is the ticket to the glossy world of „Design as Decoration“ in the sense of companies Adobe and Apple. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) are powerful counterforces in the current landscape. If we would broaden the term Design again to a more progressive understanding, we could use the enourmous potencial of Design to focus in common infrastructures rather than the packaging and sales-material for products. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy wrote in 1947:

„The idea of Design and the profession of the designer has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness which allows projects to be seen not in isolation but in relationship with the need of the individual and the community. […] Ultimate all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”. (source)

I deeply resonate with that quote. This is where Coding comes into play. Coding unlocks Design beyond the surface.

And yes, it is true, Open Source projects very often lack funding, but also acceptance as real alternatives to proprietary software, as well as education and volunteers. I try to push against that: Within the last years I committed to use Open Source software wherever I can, I stopped using Apple, went all in for Linux and I am researching the possibilities and boundaries of Design with Open Source. I am often surprised why so few people know about this. So I guess the question of access is also a question of marketing: Since Open Source software mostly has zero budget for marketing, people don’t know about it. There is a gap and I think it is important to fill it! Design students could do that – they have the required time and still the unconstrained imagination. I would like to see the design universities and schools creating awareness for this subject and creating inscentives for research in this field. Projects like „Open Works“ by Monica Losada and Josu Larrea demonstrate how the outcome of such processes could look like. (link)

How do you imagine the role of coding in the next decade of design education?

(Creative) Coding belongs into the core of the curriculum of any design school, at an eye level with Typography an other basic courses. Teaching coding as an optional workshop for one semester does not work, and is often followed with quite some frustration, because gaining the skills to work with code effectively takes more than just a few months. Many students get the feeling of a pointless investment when this path leads to a dead end.

Also, creating new programs and siloing „Media Design“ and „Graphic Design“ and „Interaction Design“ is also not a good idea, from my current point of view this supports the „tech design gap“ instead of dissolving it. To me, Coding is Design in a very pure sense. It’s the design of systems. Coding within Design education is an act of taking responsibility.

Tools are never neutral; they carry ideologies of convenience, control, and access. When you choose your tools, do you also choose a worldview?

Not necessarily. The question is if you are aware of the worldview that’s woven into the tool. Furthermore: If you are willing to think about it critically. The tools we use in Design are so prevailent and normal, it feels counterintuitive to question them, especially if the to-do list is overflowing. Most designers are working in a mode of efficiency. It holds them back from critical thinking. It’s very complex and hard to untangle. Also it’s incredibly difficult to get a birds eye view of the whole landscape and understand the complex, often political implications of the software they use.

For the worse: The software keeps on smiling at us, selling us the newest feature as an efficiency boost, so we can be faster in this race. A vicious circle, fostering inhumane ethics. The design industry is locked into a toxic economy. That’s tragic, but it’s the reality of the field.

Automation erodes authorship. When a system “helps” you design, who is really designing — you, the dataset, or the interface designer behind the algorithm?

The tool determines the output. The more we outsource our work to the funnels of design software and algorithms, the less we are the authors of our work. Proprietary design software are more machines than tools. They do the work while pretending it is us. This still gives us a fake feeling of agency.

I try to be a demonstrator rather than a protester. A demonstrator explores and exposes alternatives instead of just yelling out the frustration on social media, for example. The economy is a beast that will always be cruel when it comes to the „creative industry“. I want to explore and discover alternative pathways and teach design beyond the battlefields of the american software giants.

Convenience kills curiosity. “Generative AI isn’t dangerous because it’s too powerful. It’s dangerous because it’s too easy.” (Stephen King). Have design tools become too frictionless — too easy to use — to still produce meaningful invention?

Friction creates warmth. That’s where the great ideas come to life. I like the word „Invention“ and I already mentioned it in the quote of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy above. I prefer invention over decoration.

Every interface hides its politics. Every interface edits perception. What do tools allow you not to see?

Compared to proprietary and commercial design software, both the raw code and open source tools are honest, open and sometimes ugly. But this ugliness also brings something beautiful into the mix: There are interesting connections of the Open Source world with ancient philosophy: The old masters lived in rejection of fame, of loudness, of false recognition and (mostly) wealth. They strived to embody courage, transparency and integrity. And they lived for their communities, not just for their own well-being. The best of them were unshakable and incorruptible.

Proprietary software (and hardware) often feels like the opposite, especially when it is embedded in a highly competitive enviroment. It’s intransparent and often pervaded by so-called dark patterns (unethical design decisions that trick users into doing things that go against their interests). You asked what these tools are hiding from us. I would rephrase the question: To what extent are these tools tricking us?

What I love about open source tools is that they somtimes give us the cold shoulder and don’t lure us in with false promises and sweets. Open Source is not trying to tempt or persuade. That’s why even a crudely designed interface can warm my heart. I prefer honesty over beauty.

Code as literacy or dogma? In a culture obsessed with “learning to code,” has code itself become the new ideology of design competence?     

This thought is very unfamiliar to me. I do not see our culture as „obsessed with learning to code“, in the opposite. I still see a strong rejection to dive into code, to understand it as the driving force of our world at this point in history. I am not speaking about using ChatGPT to generate a tool or a website. I mean deep and brave investigations into the systems and infrastructures that form our infosphere – a gigantic field with countless blind spots. Code as philosophy. That’s where the magic happens.

Design without tools. Imagine you had to create using only your body, your memory, and language — what remains of design then?

Maybe a poem? Honestly: Coding as a solely technical practice does interest me less than you could think. I am interested in humans and in the world we live in. Two thousand years ago I could be as happy as today I guess.