A Decade of WebDesign
A Decade of Web DesignInternational two day conference
Plus: Online Open History Timeline
January 21/22, 2005, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Organizers: Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/) & HvA/Institute for Network Cultures, Amsterdam (www.networkcultures.org), in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (http://www.stedelijk.nl/).
In 1994 the world wide web crept out of its scientific and academic egg and entered the first phases of popular consciousness. At this point the web design explosion began. Ten years later, we would like to stand back and attempt to map something of these years of frenetic and inventive interdisciplinary work.
What do we mean by web design? At the most obvious level, web design is about bringing visual organisation and power to computational and networked processes. It means organising sites by means of graphic elements and structuring devices. But increasingly it means more than this. Digital media designers also work in the area of what used to be walled off as ‘technology’. Designing is now as much about formal language, that is to say, code, as much as it is about more subjective, free-form or ‘natural’ and visual languages. Designers make and link digital processes which are then taken up by social processes. They do this with a sensibility that is as much in dialogue with technicity as with a visual aesthetic or a model of communication.
Until recently web design discourses have been dominated by a frantic, market driven search for the latest and coolest. The ongoing media buzz around ‘demo design’ has prevented serious scholarship from happening. Technical innovations such as frames, shockwave, flash, WAP and 3G have dominated the field. Until 2001 a substantial part of the sector’s activities was geared towards instruction and consultancy. The dotcom crash and IT slump have cleared the field — but not necessary in positive ways. Due to budget cuts some firms now believe they can do without design altogether. Instead of asking ourselves what the Next Big Thing will be, we firmly believe that future design can be found in the understanding of a recent past that offers a rich mix of utopian concepts and undigested controversies.
After the introduction of the personal computer in the eighties brought desk-top publishing, the introduction of networking in the nineties has proved a fundamental change in the field. Graphic design, only one area of the design we are talking about, as a practice has fundamentally changed, at once becoming empowered, but also strangely useless in its vocabulary and concepts.
Alongside this, we see the web as being a unique and massively distributed laboratory for vernacular and emergent designs. The Internet has been the biggest ever Rorschach test for media culture. Some of the key figures and sites over the last decade have developed outside of
traditional computing or design sectors, or have been adapted from them by popular currents or idiosyncratic users in novel and inventive ways. Turning a media technology loose to work almost as a generative algorithm reiteratively developing through the hands and ideas of millions of users is an unprecedented experience in design.
In short, this ten years of web design has seen design change as much as it has seen the impact of a new form of global media. We want tocelebrate this and to use a consideration and testing of the recent pastto provide a platform for thinking about what is to come. In this, the conference will be unprecedented, the first event of its kind.
Sessions for the event will be:
-Histories of Web Design. What do social, technical and cultural
historians propose as ways to make an account of the last decade?
-Meaning Structures. As automated site-design becomes increasingly
important the history of the interweaving of technology and culture up
to the point of semantic engineering is mapped out.
-Modeling the User. Creativity and usability have often been set up as
the two key poles of webdesign. This panel asks instead for a more
sophisticated narrative about the change in understanding of user needs
and desires over the last ten years
- Digital Work. Following on from the Digital Work seminar this panel
brings together key observers and critics of the changing patterns of
work in webdesign along with designers.
- Distributed Design. The web amplified an explosion on non-professional
design. This panel will ask what happens to design once it becomes a
non-specialist network process.
Location:
The event will be held at Club 11, the new temporary location of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, a key archive of Design and locus of design debate in the Netherlands.
Confirmed Speakers:
Rosalind Gill
Lecturer at the London School of Economics and specialist in gender and the media. Rosalind will present research into the ways women work in new media and webdesign industries. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/genderInstitute/whosWho/profiles/gill.htm
Michael Indergaard
Professor of sociology at St. John’s University, New
York. He is the author of a key study, from a socio-economic
perspective, of work in the web-design industry, Silicon Alley: The Rise
and Fall of a New Media District.
John Chris Jones
One of the leading figures in design theory and author
of several key books. More recently he has established a unique web
presence via a peripatetic and mobile blog. He is the author of The
Internet and Everyone, Ellipsis, London, 2000.
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/
Olia Lialina
Author of First Real Net Art Gallery, Last Real Net Art Museum, The Most Beautiful Web Page. Co-author of Zombie&Mummy episodes. Net Art pioneer and antrepreneur. Animated GIF model. Wife of rockstar. Since 1999 Professor of Merz Akademie (New Media Pathway), Stuttgart. http://will.teleportacia.org
Peter Luining
Amsterdam based artist and designer with a long history
both in digital art, on and off the net and in VJ activity. He will
provide a ‘History of Flash’. http://www.ctrlaltdel.org/
Peter Lunenfeld
Director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics
(ITA), founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working
Group, and a coordinator of the graduate program in Communication and
New Media Design at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He is
the editor of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (MIT Press,
1999) and of Snap to Grid, a user’s guide to digital arts, media and
culture (MIT Press, 2000)
Adrian Mackenzie
Member of the Institute for Cultural Research,
Lancaster University and author of Transductions, bodies and machines at
speed (Continuum, 2002). Currently working on a cultural and
ethnographic study of programming, including Java, he asks how new media
infrastructural objects such as databases, protocols, image codings and
frameworks can be read as collectively embodied imaginings.
Franziska Nori
Director of digitalcraft.org the Franfurt Museum of
Applied Arts’ groundbreaking digital agency whose activities include
creating a collection of key sites from various perspectives in
webdesign.
Danny O’Brien, NTK
Editor of Need To Know, ntk.net the satirical web-weekly that has tracked, fed and parodied internet culture and web-design for over seven years. http://www.ntk.net/
Steven Pemberton
Member of the Centrum for Wiskunde and Informatica, Amsterdam; Editor of ACM Interactions, the journal of ‘new visions of human computer interaction’; and chair of W3C working groups on XHTML and Forms for the Web. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/
Helen Petrie
Professor of Human Computer Interface at City University,
London. a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British
Psychological Society, she is a leading figure in the design of web
sites for maximum accessibility and the author of the UK Government’s
Disability Rights Commission’s recent landmark report, The Web, Access
and Inclusion for Disabled People.
Schoenerwissen/OfCD Office for Computational Design
A Berlin based design partnership that have proven themselves one of the most
significant developers of the interrelation between the ‘traditional’
domains of design and the changed context of computer networks.
http://www.sw.ofcd.com/
Hayo Wagenaar
Artdirector for Ijsfontein, an Amsterdam based interactive design company. Since 1997 Ijsfontein worked on numerous interactive websites, cd-roms and installations. Specialised in interactivity for children, Ijsfontein developed innovative programmes such as TypoToons, merging web and television interaction.
http://www.ijsfontein.nl/
Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales
Co-founder of Wikipedia.org. Generated by collaborative authorship Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most frequently updated encyclopedia and a landmark in the design of working and creating structures on the web.
Geke van der Wal
Geke van Dijk, Department of Computing of the Open University in Milton Keynes (UK). The focus of her work is investigating the ways in which consumers move between online and offline channels while searching for information and deliberating a purchase. From the early nineties until 2002 Geke worked in the internet industry in The Netherlands. As managing director of Lost Boys content & usability she was responsible for research and consultancy on user experiences and online communication strategies. Geke combines her current academic work with being co-director of STBY, an new media research company based in Amsterdam and London.
To register for conference, please write to info@networkcultures.org. The entrance fee for two days amounts 50 Euros. Students get a discount and pay 30 Euros.
http://www.decadeofwebdesign.org/
Parallel initiative: Open History Timeline
As a core part of the project, beginning before and continuing after the conference we will initiate an open research website/database into the first decade of web design. The online forum will take the form of a visual and textual timeline generated out of a self-customisable questionnaire. Using a custom content management system the site will allow for users to add images, comments and links to make a collective history of the web as it developed. Such elements might include histories of their own first homepage; the first use of a technology; original html code; reminiscences of key designers, innovators, critics and technologists.
Using a question based interface users can write their own questions and respond to those of others. All questions entered will then be available, ensuring that no one set of views or way of writing predominates.
The site is designed for use both by the general public and as a simple structured tool which can be used for research and teaching.
The site will start on October 1, 2004. It will continue for six months after the conference, at which point it will be archived and remain publicly available. The Timeline will be on show at the Stedelijk Museum during the conference and for some time thereafter.
URL: www.designtimeline.org