INTERVIEW
Tim Rodenbröker
I’m thrilled to welcome my friend Tim Rodenbröker as a new teacher at the School of Systems. Tim is a Creative Technologist based in Barcelona who has been exploring and teaching Creative Coding for over a decade. Alongside our design studio Coding Systems, he runs the learning platform trcc and has taught at many European design schools from ECAL to the Glasgow School of Art. Tim’s north star is “downgrade.” In a world obsessed with quick fixes and shortcuts, he believes in the value of learning hard things. In this conversation, we talk about his upcoming live online course, Creative Coding Essentials, why avoiding the shortcut is essential, and why code is ultimately an invitation to slow down.
Martin: Hi Tim, it’s an honor to welcome you as a new School of Systems teacher. Your course looks absolutely brilliant. I am especially proud to have you because this is an exclusive. You have taught live workshops at HEAD, the Glasgow School of Design and ECAL and you have your recorded lessons at TRCC, but it is the first time you will teach the “Creative Coding Essentials” as a live online course to an international crowd. People will be excited to get the chance to spend six weeks with you, learning to code.
Tim: Hi Martin, thanks so much for inviting me to the School of Systems, that’s indeed super exciting. I am thrilled to conduct this live version of my foundational course “Creative Coding Essentials”. It’s great to teach the basics!
Martin: Let’s address the elephant in the room. Big corporations are working hard to make design as easy as possible. Learning Creative Coding can be hard. Why is it necessary, as Mitch Paone would have said, to avoid the shortcut?
Tim: In 2026, we are surrounded by shortcuts that are all coming with hidden costs. We do not just create a ridiculous amount of unnecessary dependencies, it goes much deeper: Shortcuts undermine our ability to learn hard things in general. How do you want to conduct an orchestra if you have never touched an instrument? Hitting the Play-button on Spotify can’t be the answer. I deeply resonate with the idea of building foundational knowledge that can be transferred across many different fields. I’ve found my school of thought in Creative Coding. It still challenges and excites me and I hope to stay a student in it forever. My job is to help other people to climb up the wall, the initial threshold. And along the way we craft expressive, beautiful, generative visuals together. That’s why I am excited to conduct this course at the School of Systems.
Martin: I share that prediction: To be able to focus and learn something that takes more time than a Youtube tutorial will be a superpower in the future. What I liked about your classes, having had some personal lessons from you, you don’t make it feel hard. You are going step by step. Making sure that the student keeps having fun and is staying motivated. My favorite part was always when you made me aware, that we actually touched a lot of subjects. Sometimes you forget how much you have achieved because you have this big goal in your head.
Tim: Thank you Martin, that’s really nice! I love Creative Coding so much because it is multi-dimensional. It’s not (only) about learning technical and logical ways of thinking – we connect it with something deeply human, creativity, feeling, reflection. It tells us something about us, about the times that we live in, about technology and our relationship towards it. Through focussing strictly on the very fundamental concepts in Creative Coding, something incredible happens. It’s like a magnifying glass that converges heat; the smaller the spot, the hotter it gets. The whole teaching stays quite generalistic and universal and can be applied to a broad spectrum of other topics. We are touching the essential fabric of the digital structures we are surrounded by. And by doing so, we are touching this world, at this very moment in time. This is where I get my energy from. And this is the energy I want to share with my students. Creative Coding is never finished, because it is a journey. I am as much a learner as my students are. Creative Coding steers our creativity to the process and unveils the enormous potential of system-based creativity and self-imposed constraints. This universe is infinite. And within an infinite universe, rushing does not lead anywhere. Creative Coding is an invitation to go slow.
Martin: This is exactly why we are not offering a workshop, but a course of six sessions at the School of Systems. You need time to appreciate the learnings of Creative Coding. Let’s imagine for a moment it’s December and your course has ended. Which feedback from your students would make you most happy?
Tim: In every class I describe the early learning process in Creative Coding as climbing up a wall. It takes energy to get up there and the students have to do it themselves. I am just playing the human ladder for them. If they reach the top and see the new land of possibilities, that’s the greatest moment for me as a teacher. If my students report that they reached this point, that’s the greatest feedback I can imagine.