For my final project I have chosen the topic associated with Conditional Design. It appealed to me from the first workshop and I'm happy to be able to research it further. There is something entrancing in the idea of 'process is the product'. As it mainly involves outside people to help with the fulfilment of the design you never know how it gonna come out. You can speculate, but you won't know until it's done. You design the experience, not the outcome.

I've started my research looking closer at the Conditional Design group (Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey and Roel Wouters) and their manifesto and I found out that in 2012 they also founded another Graphic Design Studio, also based in Amsterdam, called Moniker. Not all of them transferred, looks like sound artist Edo Paulus had different plans for future. Nevertheless all 4 of them still continue the Conditional Design project meeting each other every Tuesday to stretch the boundaries of this ideology.

While looking at Moniker's commissions I was surprised to realise that I was already familiar to some of their works. In November 2014 I've attended Roel's talk in Camberwell College of Arts. He showed us examples like 'Running with the Beast - zZz Project' where they been commissioned to create an artwork for the album. As a tool two fighting chickens painted in blue and magenta. One might argue that it's more or the Participatory Design because it doesn't meet too many conditions but I believe that some conditions still apply and the idea itself is very innovative so it's still worth mentioning.

Another project which Roel mentioned was titled 'One Frame of Fame'. It's a music video for the Dutch formation C-Mon & Kypski. First they shoot and edited a blueprint video to then break it apart into thousands of frames. Those frames are available for fans to copy and upload on oneframeoffame.com from where then they end up on the original music video itself. It's a ongoing project where 40508 frames been added by the participants already. This project shows an interactive relationship between artists and their fans.

Last but not least, there is 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' which was shown to me even earlier in my Graphic Design education. I truly believe that our likeness towards certain things subconsciously grows within every another time we come across it. Life fashion for example. I remember the times when skinny jeans suddenly became incredibly popular and I hated them to bits. I thought there couldn't be anything uglier. And now, around 10 years later, I'm finding myself owning no other jeans than the skinny ones. Interesting thing this subconsciousness.

With this video it's quite similar. It was shown to me over 2 years ago, when my view on Graphic Design was still completely limited, and already then I was stunned by the visual expression which it represented.

It's a video directed by Roel, which captures his twin brother Job Wouters and little Gradus W. Wouters drawing letters. Job, with a confident hand of a professional, is lettering all the letters from the alphabet one by one and Gradus tries to repeat after him. One can imagine that around 8 year old boy will end up with rather different result than his experienced relative.

Only recently, after coming across this video for another time, I realised that this exercise have been used to create a typeface representing each of the participants. Knowing that there is a higher reason behind it than just 'prettiness' made me appreciate it even more.

Here again one could argue that it's not really Conditional Design. But isn't it very closely reminding of one of the Conditional Design experimentations called "Kaleidoscope"? There also was one 'leading' person drawing shapes and three others had to repeat them in the mirror image. So the amounts of participants vary, the direction of the repetitions and the general shape, where one of them is made of lines and the other one contains letterforms (but aren't letters made up of lines as well?). The complexity between those two projects varies, but there is no mention in the Manifesto that it have to be very complex to apply.

That last thought make me believe that there is very dim barrier between what's generally accepted as Conditional Design and what's not. That's actually also an interesting thing to say, as I believe the 'process is the product' ideology is so new that most of the public doesn't even recognise it as a 'thing'. So there is no 'general acceptance' so far whatsoever. This topic can be pushed and stretched into so many directions, the possibilities are endless.