"unstable media" - the name is program with fork.de, who started out as a small team of three young designers in 1996 to destabilize existing conventions in media and society. Quickly their team developed into a company today running offices in Hamburg, Berlin and New York City, but did not loose a strong experimental streak in their work, that helped create their success. Their creative profile spans experimental interfaces - experimental navigation of websites that is - together with oftentimes provocative online games and cut-up aesthetics based on advanced programming solutions that sample sounds and images.

What on their constantly changing website [www.fork.de] presently lists under FORKUNST4BLEM3DIA - characterized there as the "fork overdope version" - seems to be clearly separated but habitating well together with what they call FORKBUS1NESSCLA$$ and describe as the "straight laced version". Those two "versions" seem also to be two versions of the same company that does not consider their corporate clients as "corporate evil", while still having a keen eye on cleverly selecting the best clients, with whom they get the chance to to the interesting stuff.

Fork have been successful in being trusted with big corporate jobs almost from the very beginning for clients like Nivea or Lufthansa and are now also often asked to change brands and corporate cultures, which seems to match their approach at "re-telling a client's story" and also having their designers directly re-work the content.

In his interview the founding creative partner of fork unstable media, the US-born David Linderman talks about interfaces becoming content themselves, questions of finding the right size for teams and a fast growing company and his interest in interactive architectural environments.

Interview with David Linderman

The use of the computer for creative purposes in the last ten years has changed. You have stated before, that we are now starting to use it for what it originally was for: using it as a programmable tool, less as a simple imaging tool.

Linderman: Exactly. You see the direction really extreme right now. More and more designers - especially after Flash and Director with action scripting and java scripting - started first experimenting with it, hacking it. You have to put things together in your head differently. After a lot of hard work, you start to understand things. Basically it comes down to being able to interpret your ideas into a simple logic. In a way it's much easier than what we are trying to do with communication, because with communication things can be interpreted different ways.

Design is becoming more and more not images - which I find recently quite boring - but you ask: what can we do with it? How can we animate it based on external values? Can we control it live, or - if it is on the Net - can we take data that is coming in and change it as quickly as possible, so that we get close to realtime interaction, and not something where you click and wait for something to happen, which is what we grew up with.

The role of interaction has been given a lot of attention in the last few years, also in the context of business applications. Your work with fork moves along a "tricky line"; between doing things where certain people claim there's a lack of usability on the one side and on the other side the interface becomes more interesting ...

Linderman: ... becomes content itself. As far as interface and usability are concerned it is also a hard thing to define. There are definitely things that we've made that are hard to use. The question is, whether people enjoy that experience of something unusual more than they enjoy the experience of coming to another website that is based on the same navigation, etc. Most important is to decide what your goal is with that project and to also not maybe dive into a deep end of something. To give people the chance to access information two ways and to also tease them with the option of an experience that they might enjoy longer, where they get more out of it and where you add your own content. It works really well for promotions; for things that are not about hard information: for a news site - like CNN - it would be silly to take that site and do a funky navigation for it. It is different for Nivea, BMW or Daimler Chrysler where you are taking information as relatively soft, as basically advertising information.

Designers should always edit what they're doing. We never just take stuff from our client and put it back on the web. We typically look at it and try to work with it, shorten it or rewrite parts of it. Even when you do that, that information is meant to be emotional, it is meant to trigger people's interest or associations and you can do that really well with animation or navigation. So we try to couple the two of those when doing promotion sites, or sites where the client really wants to experiment, where they say: hey, we really don't have that much information and we want you to work with what we have and make it fun. The audience wins, because they get something they enjoy figuring out, the client wins, because they have something that is innovative and they put themselves in a nice spotlight. And we have a great time building it.

It seems to be part of the success story of fork, that from the very beginning you have been able to establish a certain relationship with your clients that allowed you to do the more interesting things. Something that took others many years until they reached a certain standing where they could tell clients, that they would do things not they way they wanted it but quite differently.

Linderman: It is really hard once you created a reputation one way, to change that in a different direction. It is probably easier to destroy your reputation than to build one in the middle. When talking with other designers it is a quite common model to start out with experimentation as your image for yourselves. Not trying to cover all bases, not being a one-stop-shop for all needs. In the end we really want to be able to do everything ourselves because it is our goal to be able to do it inhouse and not have to use other people, which is difficult with quality control. But we don't promote ourselves as being able to cover everything. We have to concentrate on the things we do best.

Being able to do a lot of functions inhouse and also being able to handle larger projects demands a certain amount of growth. You started out as three people.

Linderman: We started to grow after the first few months, we didn't have to look for people, people came to us. But working in small groups is definitely more interesting, so our goal is to keep an office under 20 - 25 people. If we think: "Hey we have too much work." then we rather think of building a new office somewhere else. If we have an overload, we can share the work. But the most important thing is to keep the groups small enough, so that we don't have to have extra people who are just managing the people inside.

You have this rule about teams being the size of three or two times three people.

Linderman: I don't think it is a magic number, but if you look at our people: one third designers, one third programmers and one third project managers.

The people are shifting between the teams?

Linderman: It is good to work with the same people often, because you get to understand them. But we really mix them up a lot. What we find more difficult and are trying to figure out how to do it right now, is working between offices. Although people are pretty vernetzt, it is hard to work with someone without meeting face to face.

There are many creative personalities shifting between the fields that you seem to keep separate in your organisation: designers and programmers for instance.

Linderman: I am less of a programmer, for sure. I would never brag about my coding skills. I do it though and I enjoy it, although it's the toughest thing that I ever put my brain to. I am more of a visual person. What is common in all younger designers, that they master both code and visual aspects. When you are young it is also a question of how much time you had to work out ideas and how much experience you have. It is really hard to make really good projects when you don't have much experience yourself.
It is just like a writer: you can't really write unless you had a lot of experience in your life. The same it true with designers, this is also why we let them work in teams, so that they can pool their ideas and hopefully there is an older designer, who has the ability to say: hey, we've done this before.

People often have mindsets that come from the hierarchical structures, that genius myth in people's heads and overblown egos that don't work well in teams. Did you encounter such problems?

Linderman: It occurs for sure. But I think we have less a problem with egos and people work well together. What really shocks me is how many young people really want to work in the same hierarchical system as their parents did, because I never could enjoy that and I really don't want to have an office like that. On the other hand I heard over and over again from younger people - especially when they have problems getting a project done well and get criticism for it -, that they want some clear responsibility and Rollenverteilung. It's going to take awhile for people to get used to a non-hierarchical system and it shocks me that there's so many young people that think in really conservative terms of what a boss is supposed to do. But you can change the business model - especially with web start-ups you had a really radical shift on how people think work could be done. We're going to see a lot less skateboards in offices in the next few years, but I hope we're not going back to the way it used to be. There's a lot of good things: Having fun at work and having an atmosphere where you don't dress in ties and are going to the client dressed basically the way you are and they respect you for it.

What kind of a business model was there at the start of fork or shortly after you began?

Linderman: After a few weeks as freelance collective that changed very quickly into a model where we would stay together and get more people on it. That was in spring of 96. In Germany in 96 that was long before the whole Internet hype. At the time we started it basically there were no other interesting agencies we wanted to work for. It had nothing to do with start-up atmosphere, we never really planned to compete against the bigger agencies and it was a nice surprise that people took us just as seriously as the some of the bigger ones. Some of the bigger ones were actually positioning us as obstacles or threats, which is really fun.

When business clients come to you, you could also say that they simply want to buy your style. Would you agree?

Linderman: The most common example is an insurance company coming to us, because they want to look younger. This happened so many times, we haven't done one yet, basically because we don't believe them. I have personally nothing against them, but I really don't believe their motive and I don't believe they really want to look younger. For them it is something like a skin that they can put on and they will instantly change. Sometimes when we are working on a client, we subtly changing their internal structure or they way they think about themselves. Some companies are interested in that: how can they be positioned and still retain the brand that they have.

Previously the larger consulting firms were called in or the larger firms doing corporate identity programs, to re-engineer the company. Now this partly happens with companies like yours.

Linderman: What is interesting now: We got several jobs that weren't about making graphics or so, but more about looking at what they wanted to do and giving them ideas about how they should organize it, how it should be designed. I don't want to make that a major part of our business, because I like to build and our people like to build things. On the other hand it is really interesting that people can take a design agency seriously as far as their internal structure or what their culture is like. You start to realize that some corporations are interested in looking at themselves from the ground up and they are also interested in changing in an intelligent way.

You have concepts of bringing into your work environmental variables like sound, temperature, etc. These are factors that are normally not brought into media design, unless in certain digital arts contexts.

Linderman: I would love to work with an environment. How can you change a room with projections as well as separations? Or experience with music or sounds? I would love to do that for a corporate sponsor. I'm sure that is something we could turn into an art experience that is in the end also a corporate event. That is a major challenge. I think we can pull that off, when it not only becomes a new experience for people, but also is promoting a company the same way we are doing with design. We have already been doing some purely art experiments, like a commission to put up an installation at Sonar. I think that is going to happen a lot more, it is done for corporate sponsors, for clubs and for art installations.

What it comes down to is that face to face value: people coming together and you create a great event, where people are really happy that they came, they are really excited, when they walk out. That can do more than a website. It is temporary, but people are immersed in a situation. It is also worth the effort, you have a chance to really affect people. I'm really interested in affecting people as aggressively as possible, so that when they stay too long they really start to suffer from psychological or neurological problems. Then you get to see how simply sound and visuals can act as a drug for your brain.

This expresses some kind of fatigue with what is currently happening on the Web.

Linderman: Just a little bit of frustration. I see the next six months as "back to the basics", a little more conservative routine, which I'm not interested in doing after basically six years of experimenting with something and then all of a sudden everyone is scared with it. But I don't think this is going to last long. The Web is better now than it has ever been. A lot of our work has always been about playing with new technology or playing with old technology and doing something different with it. It think it is a really good practice for us to work with installations, websites, print - we don't have to focus on just one thing as long as we think of ourselves as a design-agency.

You spoke about reaching people. At the core of most design work lies the task of getting to the core of a design problem, find an idea or a story behind it.

Linderman: Maybe less stories but associations. You can definitely work with strong associations thematically, this will definitely happen. It takes more time and more careful thinking, but ideas are always important, because otherwise it becomes ornament. Which is nice for designers and for people to walk through, but if you want to keep somebody there for a long time, they have to understand something deeper or they have to be teased with looking into the subliminal messages that are getting shot through something and maybe starting to understand that there is something much deeper and figuring it out.

There seems to me also an element of political statements in your work.

Linderman: I would not necessarily call it political, but a lot of my personal ideas have to do with religion, because I grew up in a religious sect in a small town in America. Ideas of propaganda and subversion are really close at heart, I felt them myself because I was a kid growing up and basically all of a sudden understanding there is a whole world out there, outside of this really small system. But you can apply that to everything. Talking with friends, who have grown up in a catholic household or with friends in Israel, who had this whole experience of being in a police state, being controlled or confronted with propaganda through media, advertising or government or in school - it is all the same in the end. Basically at lot of that comes into our work. Even if we are showing our own projects - which have very little to do with politics, we a lot of times make cynical associations with America or with war.

There are lots of war themes in the material I saw.

Linderman: This is just a reaction to the news right now. But it also fits in with a three-tier scheme of "earth, sky and heaven". Also this idea of destruction and creation, that's what a lot of our work functions on. Creating something, destroying it, creating it again, and destroying it again. It is kind of a cynical way of looking at it - with soldiers it is of course very extreme, but it is more or less like in a revolution, with people changing sides.

David Linderman was interviewed by Andreas Hirsch in April 2001 on the occasion of his being invited to Austria by stealing eyeballs.