Silvio Lorusso – Coding to Learn

Hi Silvio! So great to have this opportunity to “speak” to you, I feel very honored! How are you today? How do you like Lisbon?

Hi Tim, thanks for this chance to chat asynchronously. I’m good. Lisbon is a great city and it has been very welcoming to me. There is something about it that reminds me of the South of Italy, where I come from (Puglia specifically), perhaps the olive trees… So, I feel at home while also feeling not at home, which I think it’s a good spot to be.

You have such an interesting and broad spectrum of themes and projects you work on. When I read your essay, I just learned that you also have one foot in the world of Creative Coding. 

Yes, I taught creative coding at the graphic design department of KABK for around five years, for the most part together with Thomas Buxó. I took over from Eric Schrijver who set up an assignment involving the design of an online version of the student’s thesis that could be also directly printed from the browser during a dedicated print party. I believe the idea came out of Eric’s work with the Open Source Publishing collective, from Brussels. You can browse every thesis online. Here’s the year 2021, for example. I see now that the assignment still goes on!

Wow, this is amazing. So the students are submitting their theses as a website, right? (I did that as well with my master thesis in 2021) That’s awesome, especially because they are all compiled in that archive. Such a valuable resource! And obviously I love the Open Source approach. Shoutout to OSP Kitchen (even though I’ve never met them)!

Correct, the students are submitting the thesis as a website that includes a print style too. Truth be told, this always led to a certain frustration, since CSS for print is not very powerful, so many students felt the tool was too limiting for their graphic design concepts. Sometimes, limits are just too limiting.

Let’s zoom into your very inspiring essay. The “learning to code” paradigm has shifted since the emergence of AI. Coding agents and “vibe-coding”. I remember when NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang predicted the end of programming. When we look at his statement through the lens of your essay from 2022, then it gets clear that it touches the “Learning to Code” paradigm, but not the “Coding to Learn” argument, right?

I wish it were so simple…

On the one hand, when you learn to code you are also exposed to techniques that can be used heuristically in other contexts. An obvious one is generalization: you replace a fixed value with a variable so that your code can be applied to similar situations. Generalization is applicable to theoretical problems, material ones, etc. It is, in fact, one of the heuristics suggested by George Pólya in his little manual on mathematical problem-solving. This realization is relatively mindblowing.

Coding leads to many of these little revelations. I mean, recursion!

On the other hand, the advent of vibe coding deeply curtails the incentive to acquire these techniques and, therefore, tends to cut access to the revelation. In a sense, vibe coding is itself a pseudo-generalization engine: within it, everything becomes a variable, expressed no longer through suitable notation but through natural language. So the user does not even know what in their prompt is understood as a variable.

In this context, how do you get someone to attentively read five lines of code when pages of it have been output? It is a bit like asking someone to read compiled text. This feeling is captured by a recent post from Sam Altman, a downright slap in the face of programmers: 

“I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point”.

Sam Altman

Many people were rightly offended by this declaration, but there is truth to it: the effort is indeed being forgotten and, with the effort, its added value.

One side note on Sam Altman’s rhetoric: I think what made people mad for a good reason is that he was acting as if the world heritage of written code has been generously gifted to Open AI to feed their AI trainings. So cheeky! 

Very…

If I try to focus on the positive aspects of all these developments, I also see a liberation of Creative Coding from the forces of the economy. In my university courses where I taught Creative Coding to Graphic Designers, there was mostly a distribution of maybe 80% students driven by the “learning to code” paradigm, while only 20% of the students were embracing the “coding to learn”-perspective. But lately I gave a workshop at HEAD Geneve (Master: Media Design) where I was surprised and enchanted that in this group all of the students actually wanted to code, to learn. They were intrinsically interested. 

My impression is that design education as a whole is positioning itself as a broad reaction to an asphyxiating economic pragmatism. Some time ago I came across an article noting that in New York City, applications for “analog” fine art courses like sculpture and painting were booming. Why? Because the so-called real world has become inescapably “platformed”, and people want to step away from it. Touch grass, as they say. Design is increasingly seen as said grass, that is, a tentative exit from the imperative to get a job. In this context, creative coding – understood as handmade, slow, not overly automated, and sometimes even infused with the “netstalgia” of Web 1.0 – starts to resemble something like crochet. If ten years ago, the antidote to the Digital Cage was the smell of books, today it is Neocities.

Is this good news or bad news? I can’t really say. What I do know is that the creative coding/poetic web scene is full of people with amazing practices. So, at least they add some beauty to the world, which is not nothing. Besides, I think that going to design school to become a labor-ready coder was, in most cases, an illusion. Since coding usually appears as just a small module within the broader structure of graphic design programs, you wouldn’t automatically graduate as a full-stack developer unless you were very dedicated.

I love this quote and it keeps on inspiring me. What comes to your mind when you read this?

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. […] Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: “design for life”.

László Moholy-Nagy, 1947

This quote is central to my thinking about design. The general validity Moholy-Nagy was prospecting not only needed yet to be proven, but needs to be demonstrated over and over again. The disillusionment I discuss in my book What Design Can’t Do comes precisely from the sense, shared by many designers, that, rather than being general, the value of their attitude is generic, and therefore vague, ineffective. As I wrote,

“Today, design is an attitude that wants to be considered a profession, but this attitude is perturbed by individual and social turmoil.”

That said, there is another quote from the same Moholy-Nagy book that really resonates with me:

“To reach this goal – to feel what we know and know what we feel – is one of the tasks of our generation.” 

This metaphor just comes to my mind: The vision of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy is the north star. That’s what Design should be. But the needle of the compass is pointing through the roughest terrains. We are living in times of turmoil and change in hyperspeed. These days it feels like designers are exhausted wanderers, trying to cross another mountain. It’s cold out here, someone stole the signage, the sky is cloudy and the needle points into various directions, not just one. 

As Design educators we are trying to manage the impossible: To teach the next generations how to cross mountains, deserts and rivers. But it’s not just rough terrain we are trying to simulate, it’s a totally uncertain future. Krishnamurti once said that “teacher” is the most difficult job in the world. Isn’t this especially true today where the students premises are fundamentally mixed up?

Quick fix for everyone: The Autobahn nearby. It does not lead to the north star, but it promises comfort.

I’d say the teacher’s role, before that of teaching how to climb a mountain, is to find – that is, to invent – the mountain to climb, a bit like in René Daumal’s Mount Analogue.

Beautiful! I love that picture <3 ! The teacher invents the mountain!

Frieder Nake once said that computational art consists of two main components and he called these components the “surface” and the “subface”. The surface is the visible, the frontend. The subface is the thing that generates the surface, it’s the system behind, the invisible, the algorithm.

Thinking about how the mount analogue of my teaching could look like, I think it would be  more an iceberg than a mountain. The tip of the iceberg is the visible part, the computational aesthetics, the frontend. The part under water is invisible, but actually the thing that most of my teaching circles around: the system, the algorithm, the program, functions, variables, conditionals and loops. 

This makes me think… Let’s imagine you could build an utopian design school. How would you describe the “mount analogue” of your utopian vision? 

(What would be the equipment, the camps between the daily stages? Maybe what would the view from the top look like? )

Beautifully difficult question. Of one thing I’m sure: such a school wouldn’t be utopian. Instead, it would be about the here and now, the hic et nunc if you will, which could even be a fitting name. It would likely be structured around a series of shared concerns, the primary one being the problem of organization, which, philosophically speaking, could be understood as the tension between structure and autonomy, rules and freedom. Even something like an Excel sheet for scheduling would be taken seriously, not just as a functional artifact, but as a political one.

There would be a strong emphasis on tools, both practical and conceptual. Since interfaces remain one of the most visible organizing dimensions where designers still retain some agency, interface design would play a central role. Another crucial aspect would be the publication of knowledge produced within the school. I’m particularly drawn to the memo as a format because it’s concise and largely free of jargon, unlike most academic writing. So I imagine a school where both teachers and students regularly publish memos to articulate their insights.

Meet Silvio on the Internet

• Silvio’s Website
• Wikipedia
• Book: What Design can’t do
• Monoskop
• Instagram
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