A diamond needle skitters across a platter, then drops into a groove. Dad says the needles cost the earth and forbids you to touch the turntable while it’s playing. But the record shines deliciously, like a woman’s dark hair wound around the platter. So you touch it. Pretty soon you’re touching it constantly, startling yourself with new sounds, like communiqués with gorgeous aliens. One day after school you’re caught man-handling the records shamelessly, cracking the diamond needle to bits, making a fantastic racket. Sound familiar?

Maybe not. Perhaps you were a good egg and respected the hi- fi. Then again, as a young designer your sins probably ran parallel to the baby DJ’s: snipping pictures from your mother’s magazines, repapering your bedroom walls with doodles, like curling vines. Remember the startling joy of signing your name in a new font of your own devising? Then as now, nothing beats the bang of putting two disparate images, colors, or sounds together; just a little tweak can make an image fresher or a line of music extra-hot. To some, a talent for collage and juxtaposition is a mere knack, not art. To designers and DJs, though, it’s the lifeblood of how they create new things.

Designers and DJs don’t just live overlapping lives; increasingly they’re actually the same people. In many ways, these creative disciplines share a common, decidedly post-modern personality. Their work deceives in its simplicity: How artistic is it, really, to make new sounds or images by tweaking or rearranging existing ones? Converted in a single generation from analog to digital technologies, designers and DJs have learned to shrug off disbelievers who question the artistic value of their collages, or who scoff at art forms like theirs with a more populist or applied bent. Both groups have grown and splintered into niche specialties. Design is a huge umbrella term covering graphic, type, environmental, industrial, and other subcategories. DJ music ranges from turntablism —scratching or otherwise using a turntable as an acoustic instrument—to electronic music producers, who use old- and new-school technologies to mix samples and found sounds into fresh new music. Not only do many designers moonlight as DJs, the visual jockey (VJ) trend pairs visual designers and musicians even more closely, creating live shows in which visuals and music interact and comment on each other. Like any new collaboration, the results can be mixed: at its worst, pure eye candy bopping to a beat; at its height, a gorgeously engrossing experience. Examining the dovetails and challenges common to DJs and designers holds clues to where we are heading creatively.

In the dance halls and design studios of Berlin, mixing images with sound is natural. Berliners have always pursued radical experiment in politics, music, and art. The city’s electronic DJs and VJs are pressing the limits of music forward, making video-montage and live electronic performance a positively expressive art.

“DJs react directly to the audience and pick the records as they go along. It makes total sense to hear it live,” says Heiko Hoffman, editor-in-chief of Groove, the leading international magazine for electronic music and DJ culture. “With electronic live sets, the main challenge is finding new hardware where you can more easily interact with the music,” he continues. “The keyboard and mouse are not really the best way to deal with music.” This difficulty bears a striking resemblance to designers’ struggles with their own technology, such as the frustrations of drawing freehand with a mouse.