Peter Saville is a designer whose twenty-five year practice spans the fields of graphics, creative direction and art. He was a founding partner of the landmark independent record label Factory Records where he created some of the most recognizable album covers for Joy Division and New Order. Saville’s many clients have included Roxy Music, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Pulp, The Pompidou Centre, Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and Mandarina Duck. He has exhibited internationally, with a recent major retrospective staged at London’s Design Museum and a first show in a contemporary art museum scheduled for November 2005 at the Migros Museum, Zurich. We talked to him about ambient...

ML: What is ambient?

PS: I used the term ‘atmosphere’ in my Colorcalm statement and I think that one way to quantify ambience, as one’s immediate atmosphere - whether it’s in a room or in a car or on a beach, it’s a quality of the space that you create around yourself.

ML: How will it evolve?

PS: I think it’s one of those things that have to be idiosyncratic, in that it’s very personal to each individual. For example I have a favorite piece of ambient sound that I love, but I don’t necessarily expect everyone else to love it. I think ambience is a selective issue - one of those things that appeal to one and not the other. So ambient has to go towards personal idiosyncrasy - it can only go where individuals want it to go. It’s something that has potential for customization and that’s perhaps an interesting way for it to develop. A product might provide some basic elements that an individual can then customize to their own peace of mind.

ML: Atmosphere, personal to each individual... explain your inspiration for the Renaissance colors on By Design

PS: It’s about colors that are different to those that we immediately associate with television. There is a kind of hard richness with television and we very rarely see a simple field of color. We always experience color on television as part of a composition and it was interesting to imagine what would happen when you had only color on the screen and then, what colors would be unusual to experience in the medium. There are certain colors that we are very familiar with on television and we were hoping to find a less media familiar palette. Our Renaissance palette is what we could call a pre-media palette and this seemed an interesting idea to explore.

ML: You’re a judge of the International Design contest. What will you be looking for?

PS: Sensitivity to the medium, in that there are so may things that aren’t appropriate to screens. Thinking within the realities and context of the medium, but in this instance not about narrative – more about an abstract exploration of the medium which is the screen. It’s important to work within the medium of the screen rather than the medium of film or video.

ML: What do you think the challenges are for design for the screen?

PS: The biggest challenge is that whenever someone sits down in front of a screen they instinctively expect narrative. We’ve been in a way conditioned to expect a narrative engagement when things move or happen on screen. In fact just the presence of a screen alone suggests narrative engagement unlike a piece of paper for example where we expect the piece of paper to stay the same as it was five minutes ago. When we sit in front of a screen, we expect something to happen and when something happens we intuitively expect a narrative engagement and the interesting challenge is how can you make the medium work without entering into that narrative engagement.

Part II tomorrow.