We figure out how to make stuff you can see, hear, touch, feel and understand.

Information is core to the human experience.

In a sense, through our perceptions, we live in a synthetic or virtual reality, interpreted from the raw sensory information we receive, making sense of our surroundings.

Our work is primarily focused on design as the presentation of some sort of information – whether in a branding sense how a company communicates with its customers and staff or in a functional sense applying labels to the operating interface of a designed device or the blueprints for a piece of machinery – the potential utility of any process or device is defined by its presentation and clarity to the perceptions of the user. Design is the expression of expectation of reliable results.

Everybody understands design and planning, they are fundamental to human intention. We don't believe that designers are different to normal people, people everywhere from the stone age were routinely understanding, communicating and employing sophisticated design strategies. Today design is an industrial concern, with many differing conceptions and value systems. Some understand formality or technicality better than others, others know more poetry and undesrtand what people experience, other conceptions focus on tradition. Formal design is different to planning or design-thinking, it involves exact, precise specifications.

We do not use computers exclusively in our design process, but we do use them extensively because they are general-purpose in design and application – information can be captured and encoded about anything.

In 1948 Claude Shannon published a set of electronic circuit diagrams which exhibited the capacity for general purpose computation. In theory given enough scale using these basic circuits presented with data in a binary electronic format, any mathematical statement or data can be represented and processed automatically.

Information technology is often misunderstood as a format, it has had a significant history before the computer.

Type, linguistically is the analysis of difference or similarity, the ability to collect and summarise objects and phenomena by categorisation. Type is the origin of number and quantitative mathematical analysis. 

The representation of information in a collected and objective type-driven format originates from language – formalised transmissible thought.

Typography is the art and technique of formally creating and arranging characters or forms, design is a form of planning or plan-making based on a foundation of observation, understanding and estimation.

Before Gutenberg and there was little formal mass typography beyond the vernacular of graphical signs, symbols and landmarks. Literacy has traditionally been the province of the social elites of historic empires. There are many forgotten formats whose symbolic phantoms persist to this day.

Until the computer, formal typography was a specialised occupation. Even mass-literacy is still in its infancy. Digitisation opens up functional, flexible, digital typography to new generations of professionals and lay users. This digital language is a language that can do physical or information work on its own.

Digital typographic encoding is fundamentally different to carved wooden blocks. Software is made from type. Characters lock together to form higher level objects, and compile down into lower level machine instructions.

Software requires far more underlying structural design than the organic process and loose measures of language, it requires the definition of a mathematically formalised linguistic or symbolic framework for both the machine and the user.

Printing is more valid for the transmission of information than ever before – Printing is how to make a circuit, more resolution = more circuitry.

The advantage of software is that you can mass produce a generic electrically engineered piece of hardware, printed out at low cost – the hardware is a generic commodity - design can be expressed in the abstract and expressed by the user.

A design or application is rendered in terms of information rather than material to produce the mechanism you desire. The map can be the territory.

These customisable electronic structures today connect via a global network, in many ways the chief hinderance to rapid technological transformation is the (often designed-in) incapacity of the users to customise and employ the potentially infinite potential of machines with moving parts made primarily from information.

Language is not a product, it's a tool. The plasticity of the abstraction layer between actual and symbolic is what gives language its power.

The discipline of type has expanded to functional symbology, but the concept is the same: getting people on the same page, creating an objective but abstracted/symbolic/interpretable environment to facilitate co-operation.

Style is as important as utility in typography.

When you start to give such a process muscles & senses (motors & sensors) then it becomes a self-referential, self-authoring process, accelerated convolution or evolution. A system or layout can easily become a knotted, chaotic mess as something elegant and flexible, as ignorantly-designed processes are iterated degradations and failures accumulate exponentially.

Typography is the juggling of glyphs or types. Glyphs can just as easily be the mental iconography and function of a chair or a coin as they can be a symbol for a phonetic sound, words without associated meanings are incomprehensible: non-sense. Functional symbology allows one to orchestrate and configure any task type-o-graphically.

Configuration of types is the statement of language, portraying reliable inter-relations of objects and processes.

The focus of the studio's work is on designing formalised processes bound together by the ongoing evolution of typographic codes and representational methods of encoding and processing information and data.

F&CP conceives a contemporary design solution as the production of material and informational tools for experience, interaction, function and expression for all participants: The studio employs and produces electronic information technology tools rather than finished, static products facilitated by paper document communications.