Published in Fast Company: Design, Evid3nce: What the science has to say about design, creativity, innovation, and visual culture.

Ask a designer or artist if any aspect of their process is random. The answer will likely reveal a complex relationship between human cognition, digital media, authorship, and even conceptions of reality and the divine. For those of us who work in computational media to make art, the question can be even more focused: When and why do you use a "random()" function when you write code? Even in pre-Newtonian 17th-century discourse relating chance, cause, and necessity, a distinction was made between events which appeared to be random—but were merely unpredictable—and events which were truly random.