A Decade of Web Design: Open History Timeline. Call for Participation
Context
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’ 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. At the same time, web design, thought about the structuring and inter-relation of elements is done by anyone who makes a website.
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.
- Multi-lingual use
Teaching and Research
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. This project is intended to be of interest to a broad range of disciplines from design to computer science and from history to sociology. If you are a teacher we would like to invite you to consider integrating this site into your curriculum, as a piece of independent research for students, as a set workshop, or as the basis of a sustained project.
Schedule
The site will start on the 1st October 2004. It will continue for six months after the conference, at which point it will be archived and remain publicly available.
This project is part of: "Web Design: The First Decade" an International, two day conference, 21/22 January 2005, Amsterdam the Netherlands. The Timeline will be on show at the Stedelijk Museum during the conference.
From October 1st 2004 the site will be running at:
www.designtimeline.org
Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
Institute for Network Cultures, University / Hogeschool of Amsterdam
With, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
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