The term “output” has the meaning of “publishing or announcing something publicly “. It is the opposite of “input”.
When I think of the words “output”, here are some specific images that come into my mind…
Perhaps it is “writing and publishing a travel journal”, “a painter exhibiting a painting at a gallery”, or “a musician releasing a new song”…
However, are these things that are produced at the end of a creating process the only real output? In other words, can we publish the things like field notes that are written during the journey as a form of input as one kind of output?
For example, when an artist make a new piece of work, they might make a new website during the planning stages where the artist or the staffs might update and blogs about the production process. This is especially common for stage performances or events where a lot of the times information about the process itself is opened to the public. Since this is also a form of “disclosing information to the public”, this can be seen as a form of “output” too.
In the case of “writing a travel journal”, the author might travel on multiple journeys, take photographs and write essays, and repeat this procedure to make a book. They might begin publishing these things online or in a magazine, and compile everything together in the end to make a book. (In other words, the essays that might be published in a magazine would be an intermediate output, and the final output is not made by simply re-publishing the intermediate output but to re-edit that material in order to make the final output.) Followers who are interested in the trip will increase if details of the journey is uploaded onto a blog, and it might also be easier to share the real thoughts and emotions with the reader, which might be otherwise eliminated during the editing process.
It is actually common for the production of the output to begin during the preparation stages or during sometime in the middle of the journey. We can also probably expect a multiple effect depending on the combination of different stages and working spaces, and the final output. Moreover, a “work-in-progress” method allows the work to be continuously altered even after the work is displayed, as if it is still under construction, allowing the work to constantly change even after it is made public.
If we think about it in this way, the output is not just a product in the end, but all our planning, making and presentation processes also have the potential to be made open to the public. The meaning of this is to acknowledge that the “process” itself is as important to the work or activity itself, and people who are interested in our presentations could become our partners-in-crime and be part of the work.
In the case of architecture, the building process is forced to be shown to the public. Take the Tokyo Skytree as an example, we somehow feel some kind of hope seeing it “grow”, reaching up into the sky. Just like the Sagrada Familia, it’s extremely interesting to see how it is constantly evolving as a kind of output that is forever under construction, while we keep on imagining the completed version of it in the future.
During our trip to Hokkaido in 2016, we tried to make recordings and upload our podcasts spontaneously on YouTube every night. I myself thought it was an extremely good idea, but the play count wasn’t great, possibly because the topics were quite exclusive only to the group.
