Unlimited - Jack of all trades

Karsten Schmidt may be a talented software developer and computational designer, but he wasn’t exactly born with a computer mouse in his hand. In fact, he was a late bloomer, being the ripe old age of 13 when his mother enrolled him in an afternoon computing course in his native East Germany in 1988. With no games available for their computers, the tutors urged students to write their own.
Having convinced his parents to sacrifice their savings on a wondrous creation known as the Atari 800XL, Schmidt became an eager disciple in the heady early days of the demo scene. He helped organise two of the largest events in the history of the eight-bit Atari revolution before nearly destroying his high school Advanced-level examinations in 1993 by writing a commercial Lemmings clone.

Studying a mixed course of computer science and media studies gave Schmidt his introduction to the web in 1995. Three years later, he arrived in London for a three-month internship and has yet to leave. Following a seven-year stint with various ad agencies, Schmidt, now using the nom de plume Toxi, joined Moving Brands in 2005 as a design director. He recently founded PostSpectacular, a design studio and consultancy.

Among the clients he has designed projects for are Nokia, Lexus, Nike, Audi TT, Virgin Atlantic, Microsoft, Faber and Faber Swisscom, and England’s Channel 4.

What’s behind your pseudonym Toxi?
When I was still in Germany, I’d had enough of coding and so set up a home music studio and started playing live gigs at raves for two years. I naively called my act inTOXIcated, without being aware what it really meant, because it was common to not use your real name. All my friends started calling me Toxi and later I really liked having a short domain name online.

What inspires your work?
Mostly natural phenomena — biology, physics, science — but also craft. I’m fascinated by the complexity and interactions of all these non man-made things around us and the fact that, on a basic level, many of them rely on quite simple rules and mechanisms. Once these are combined, they form unexpected emergent behaviours. I think from a design point of view this is super-interesting.

I’m also very interested in architecture, history, philosophy, psychology and language/linguistics. A lot of these interests are down to my work as a computational designer. Realising design ideas through code requires me to first form an abstraction of these vague initial brain sparks. I have to slowly peel back the various layers of the idea, almost like an onion’s skin, and try to make sense of how they all relate to each other and on what level. There’s a lot of self-analysis involved, and questioning decisions others and I often make automatically or unconsciously elsewhere. All those disciplines I’ve mentioned are doing similar things in their own domain – exposing myself to them also informs my own work and approach.

You’ve been labelled at various times as a software developer, computational designer, researcher, artist. How do you describe your job?
I’m not quite sure. I don’t really feel at home in any of the established branches of the creative industry or art world. A lot of that creative industry is clustered into groups of “experts” and big egos, around certain popular tools and/or outputs or schools. When it comes to digital, agency structures are still largely divided into creatives and techies. I’ve always liked to approach creativity in a more holistic way, in the classic sense of a Renaissance man, to see what I can do with different things, combine them and also collaborate with different people.

I’ve attempted to avoid any pigeonholing for myself. I’m well aware of the paradox that by trying to do many different things over time (game design and programming, CD-ROMs, web design, Flash development, server-side development, music production, video jockey performances, motion graphics, interactive installations, electronics, branding, generative design tools), I’ve ended up being in a niche unto myself.

What was the idea behind setting up your own studio, PostSpectacular, and what can we expect out of it?
The studio idea was born out of my desire to work with fewer constraints and to shift more easily between (or combine) commercial and artistic projects. I’d like to work with people on projects that require and approach design from a multi-disciplinary angle. I often describe my activity as focused on the intersection of interaction design, generative design, service design and software development.

Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of consulting work in addition to new collaborations with Universal Everything, United Visual Artists and Moving Brands. I’ve also just finished creating the cover design for the August issue of Print magazine [American graphic design magazine].

Is there one project you’ve worked on that stands out as the most challenging or interesting?
The Audi TT piece, on which I collaborated with Matt Pyke of Universal Everything, is in my personal top three. Matt had such a clear, undiluted and perfect idea for the piece as a seed for my way of working, it’ll be hard to match this situation again for a commercial project. I also like it for the journey we went through to arrive at the end result. I had a lot of freedom to push things and then it was a great dialogue in the final stages to polish things off. Of course it always helps to work with like-minded people.

Tell us about your current projects.
Those I can talk about include interactive architectural visualisations for a building at Shanghai WorldExpo 2010, and generative character animations for Nokia flagship stores and their large-scale LED screens at the new Heathrow Terminal 5.

I’ve been working lately with Moving Brands on a recreation of the D&AD nominated graduate exhibition for the London College of Fashion. This time we’ll have six interactive tables and show the work of more than 650 students.

I also urgently need to work on my website, postspectacular.com. Part of the idea of PostSpectacular was that everything becomes more flow-oriented and is present in the here and now. I’d like to end up talking about a continuum of activity rather than individual projects. Unfortunately, apart from my Flickr stream, I haven’t quite managed to live up to this promise yet, but I’m working hard on it.

How do you see computational design evolving?
I’m not good with prophecies, but I think it’s safe to say the discipline is currently still in its infancy/Stone Age, and yet we can already see how that approach to design has had a huge influence on architecture, product design and, of course, interaction design.
I think the growth and importance of the latter is the most important of all, as we start to become more aware of and accept that interactions (between human-human, human-thing and thing-thing) are the invisible strings holding together and forming so many parts of our culture and society.

In order to properly design new things in the future, we need to pay more attention to these interactions and approach them from all possible sides. Even though most people active in the computational design field currently only explore the visual possibilities, I believe, in the long term, computational literacy as a skill can help.

What would your tombstone read?
Jack-of-all-trades, master of none.