Have Ideas, Will Travel by Scott Morrison

The breakneck pace of technological developments has spurred the rise of a middle class of collaborative, independent creatives.

The art industry has a long history of supporting travelling artists and artists in residence. The touring show Mobile Studios introduces a new level to this tradition, as artists perform and interact with audiences within small mobile studios. One studio is set aside for performance, another for interaction and then there’s the Editorial studio, twice the size of the others. Here, multimedia equipment, scanners, streaming servers and internet access allows artists to document, package and distribute their artistic content.

The zeitgeist of all creative industries is well illustrated by the Mobile Studio. The main attraction is not the art being created or performed in the studios, but the mobility of the production and the ability to package and broadcast it instantly. It is an elegant demonstration of McLuhan's famous position that the medium is the message. In contemporary art, design, advertising, music, and writing, technological access, ease of adoption and the modes of distribution have become the messages.

The Mobile Studio’s comment on communication and collaborative technology within art reflects its adoption among everyone else. This is evidenced by the mass exodus of creatives from advertising agencies and studios into coffee shops and shared spaces. Five years ago, independents may have been restricted to home offices, where they could connect into high-speed cable networks and use machines capable of holding a multitude of heavy-burden desktop applications. Fifteen years ago, independents needed access to telephone lines, couriers, printers and presentation spaces for client meetings.

A number of things worked to change this, led by the transition of computing functionality from the desktop to the web. Freeing up hard drive space and cutting the overhead of expensive office applications like Microsoft Word and replacing them with apps like Google Docs means that a laptop is sufficient for 90 per cent of the technological capacity needed to run a successful freelance business. Moreover, the freemium model of web applications (free with the offer of advanced functionality for a premium price) makes it cheaper — the price of lattes notwithstanding. The increasing availability and quality of shared public Wi-Fi networks also allows independents to remain reliably connected while mobile.

The emergence of PDF as a standard file format has eliminated the need to print and courier files to clients. Skype and Google Wave let you meet face to face with a client and collaborate with other designers without sitting down in an office. Dropbox and Yousendit allow you to transfer large files quickly — without connecting to an FTP site — and access files with an email address alone.

In the next few years, the widespread adoption of cloud computing for increased access to information, fibre-optic cables for faster connection speeds and increasingly robust functionality of web applications will further support independent creatives. Integration between tools will make collaborative and independent work nearly seamless. All this will serve to eliminate overhead costs and make working independently easier and more affordable.

There is a point, though, where art and design strongly diverge in terms of their adoption of technology. On the one hand, as the Mobile Studio demonstrates, artists can present their work to a local audience and then broadcast it to an online audience, expanding the reach of their work and connecting them to more people.

However, independent designers face the challenge of remaining connected to a community of professionals, remaining current and remaining stimulated. In the future there will be a need for communication and collaboration technologies to form networks of practice that replace those that a freelancer loses when they choose to work independently. This means bridging various disciplines within the creative industry and making room for self-starters in the realms of writing, account planning and marketing to collaborate with graphic designers and creative consultants. Moreover, it means allowing online collaboration tools to not only efficiently connect designers to clients but also foster relationships and creative output between independents.

The intersection of technology and design requires ever stronger networks of creative professionals and collaborative tools to guarantee work freedom. As we trim the fat on overheads and redundant processes, we want to be left with strong relationships, satisfied clients and great work. We will use the tools that help us do just that.

Scott Morrison is the founder of the Bauhub, a global collective of senior creatives that collaborate from their respective studio spaces. Their combined industry experience affords them insight into new and smarter ways to work seamlessly as a team as needed on each project.