The IdeaLists

Folkert Gorter spends his days looking at the most beautiful things the web has to offer. He and business partners Josh Pangell and Rene Daalder run Cargo, a publishing platform that attracts the world's top design and artistic talent. Gorter is hard at work expanding Cargo’s collaborative potential, letting members design their own networks, disassociated from any template or brand name. Meanwhile he and his team of artist-engineers nurture the enormous creative community that thrives on their publishing tools.

How did you start the early web community SpaceCollective and later Cargo?

When I met Rene, he was working on a project he referred to as a 'fictional documentary.' Half the budgets of Hollywood movies are spent on advertising, so Rene, always having been a tech pioneer, had this idea to create cult followings on the internet before the movie was even made. We went way overboard and created SpaceCollective, sort of a collaborative creative think tank focusing on technology, the future, the internet, 60s counter culture, space travel, and so on.

At the time it was a whole new approach to creating an audience. I had come out of these creative web communities that started with link-sharing, inspiration portals, and designers discovering the web. I guess I was kind of a webdesign journalist, trying to rally people around a subject. We created a whole bunch of publishing interfaces that aimed to lower the threshold between an idea in your head and its representation on the internet. And we wanted people to be able to exchange ideas using rich multimedia instead of just written words. Cargo evolved out of these interfaces.

Recently you added Cargo Comments, the ability to discuss work on the Cargo network. Why did you add this element and where does it go from here?

From the beginning we wanted to build a networked situation that would support dialogue between creative people, not just using words but using the full media spectrum; images, sound, video, etc. We had to focus all our attention on the publishing tools at first because the demand for Cargo accounts kind of exploded. But we’ve always wanted to expand the platform towards these kinds of collaborative environments. We’re starting with art schools and creative institutions by providing them with tools for students to collaborate across traditional departmental barriers and share their work.

So what’s next after this first social layer? How does it differentiate from other networks?

If you want to start a group or community online, Facebook is really one of your only options unless you’re prepared to do some extensive web development. There’s hardly any tools to customize the design and functionality of these groups, which means that your project is branded by the platform it runs on. So what we’re trying to do is let people design communities themselves. From the beginning we’ve provided members with design tools that let them fully disassociate themselves from the Cargo platform, and we’re going to do the same with these custom communities. The recently launched Personal Network is sort of a sneak peek at that. Your own website remains your 'vessel,' traversing the infoscape.

Now that you’ve introduced this aspect where users can be vocal about other peoples’ work, what tone will you have to set?

It’s a bit of a challenge. If someone starts a community about web typography and people share their work or finds, the discourse can be very pointed. With spaceCollective, we framed the subject matter very carefully, and it worked. But with these Personal Networks, it’s essentially a universal system without a curriculum. The next phase of this part of the platform will provide ways to frame conversations better.

What goes into the architecture to frame this sort of community and curate it?

In your Vimeo interview [Blake Whitman] mentions the only way they’ve been able to maintain a sense of a curated community is that they’ve started out like that. To inject that type of thing into something that is already huge like YouTube is impossible. We’ve gone about it in a similar way, creating a destination for our existing creative community and providing curated channels with great work like But Does It Float, the Cargo Showcase, the SpaceCollective Gallery, and the Cargo Featured sites. The architecture underneath this is all based around our unofficial motto, ‘the content is the cargo,’ referring to the fact that on Cargo there's a super close relationship between interface and content, and sometimes they are even one and the same thing.

How do you see the design of the internet changing?

It’s a very exciting time for design on the web because it’s beginning to attract a critical mass of ‘real’ designers; not just technical people copying design styles set by Apple and those guys. The emergence of web typography for example has been very important, because it brings with it a community of super talented designers. Also, because when something new is released, everyone immediately finds out about it, so the bar keeps getting raised at breakneck speed, which is fantastic, and will be really interesting to see develop.

I look at a lot of portfolios and see certain designs spreading all over the place. Right now it's trendy to take an American West aesthetic and make it really quirky.

Exactly. Like Urban Outfitters. It’s mixed with a revival that may have started at Yale Design a few years ago: quirky geometric or grotesque typography, symmetrical, centered layouts, items in all corners. So hot right now. That’s what fashion is of course. But now on the web, with its self-accelerating properties, maybe it will help fashion not be so compulsive. Everyone sees it, so you can’t stick around for too long without getting stale.

Do you think ideas and platforms spread and grow so fast to where there’s a breaking point and things need to slow down?

I'm not sure, it’s funny; they say cities can keep growing indefinitely, unlike corporations and humans, which stop growing at a certain point (according to the same biological laws apparently). The internet is maybe more of a city. It becomes more and more efficient as it gets bigger. Systems get better and are optimized. This seems like it could be a good thing just like people moving to cities is a good thing for all sorts of reasons like efficiency and optimization of energy, resources, intelligence, culture, infrastructure, and so on.

Back in the day when people would ask, ‘Are you a print designer or a web designer?’ When for a brief couple of years there was a choice, I was always completely dedicated to the internet. Let’s get as much activity into the virtual domain so we don’t need to use actual physical space and resources like highways and buildings. It’s an unstoppable thing, and this efficiency will self-perpetuate like natural system do. But maybe things will not keep on growing; no one knows, we’ve never done this before!

You don’t take a purely chronological approach on Cargo when things are published. How do you make important, not just recent, content rise to the top?

The problem with blogs, and your Facebook or Twitter feed are blogs in a way, is the chronological nature of the feed—when you add something it bumps something else down, implying that what’s on top is the most important. We’ve always tried to get away from this linearity, for example, on Cargo if someone adds a comment to an old post, it gets bumped to the top. It wants to be more of an ongoing conversation that is constantly being regurgitated.

What excites you that you see trending on Cargo and in the art and design world?

I’m always excited about generative art, where the artist's material is the input, or data. Designing algorithms and evolutionary systems, and making art of what happens. It helps people expand what they can appreciate and understand. I see it as a metaphor for designing our collaborative tools as well: taking the generative approach to processes and trying to incorporate it into how the platform grows. Some of this work is inspiring large scale data visualization research—even though data visualization now is a kind of meme on the web. As you said, it’s like the American West trend in design. How often do you really see an infographic that makes your mind expand to another level?

Cargo has historically worked with academic institutions and young developers. How do you see academia becoming partially irrelevant?

Universities are being disrupted in the same way the music industry, the publishing industry and a whole lot of other industries are being disrupted. For Millenials the internet is like running water; it’s a utility, there’s no novelty. They just swim in the ocean of the connected world. For me everything changed when the internet happened and I still have to make mental translations all the time; it’s not my native language.

What is the most important creative talent you see right now in the marketplace?

Artist-engineers. That’s the job description. Or whatever you want to call them: interaction designers, creative coders, hybrid designers. On the web we become generalists.