17 – Experiment 2 – desres23.designandcommunication.net

For my second experiment I wanted to find out if it really matters that an artwork is made by hand or if it is enough for it to just have a handmade aesthetic. This idea came to me after I stumbled upon a video of a designer who explained how he fakes a handmade look.

In order to investigate this, I created a quiz with different artworks, some of which are actually handmade or produced in an analog way and some of which are digital creations that have a handmade look added to them. I asked my participants to click on the pictures they believe are handmade/analog.

For the handmade/analog works I chose some that I came across during my research the past two semesters. A collage I wrote about in my las blogpost, a letterpress print I saw at DruckZeug, and an analog picture I took. The digital fakes I all took from online tutorials on faking the analog aesthetic. I chose a collage, an illustration and a photograph, to get a wide variety of different techniques.

I am really interested in the outcome of this survey. Since I have been working on this topic for a while now, I find it a bit easier to tell the difference, but I am not sure how obvious it is to others. To get an even more realistic answer I sent this survey not only to designers but also Students from other fields, that have never produced a design neither digitally nor analog.