Joe Bowers – Computational Designer & Creative Technologist“After 10 years of taking on Industrial Design projects from companies like Nike, Google, Duracell, The US military, and Levi’s, Joe felt unchallenged, unsatisfied, and was not having any fun at all. So, at the height of his career, he did something rather odd… he quit.Trading his luxury hotels and first-class flights for a School Bus, he converted into a roaming design lab (complete with 3D print, CNC, laser etcher, and sewing machines). He spent two years traveling free of the demands of rent, a job, or clients. As such, he was allowed to fully devote himself to his own curiosity as a guide and decision-maker. In the deepest, most remote corners of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, he found himself going deep into studying philosophy, metaphysics, and Tarot to discover key secrets in the history of human creativity.The result was discovering a new obsession with the creative process and the unnecessary friction of modern digital tools. Instead of amplifying human creativity with their raw computational power, they get in the way with rigid, vibe-less programs or try to replace or imitate human talent with AI.The results are not surprising;work that is as uninspiring and as unfun as the processes used to create it.Joe became obsessed with creating tools and processes that facilitate a better collaborative relationship between the designer and machine, one that allows both parties to lean into their unique strengths. Human intuition and computational power working together.He now focuses on methods of computational design to “make things that make things,” which allows him to create Petri dishes of design principles and constraints that then grow design objects in a way that closely mimics nature and human traditions. Iterating in minutes instead of millennia. In a process he describes as “absurd, overpowered, and fun as hell.”In the age of AI, the audience has responded well to something so refreshing, algorithmic, and new, yet still hand-crafted and human-made.He used to take inspiration from Rams and Loewy, now he looks to Jung, Bosch, AF Klint, Plato and the Tarot.This may be why his work is a mix of the cerebral and the absurd. The old and the new. That's why they call him The Caveman Creative or The Well Tarot. “
