Project Schedule (updated)
1. Thursday 8 April
11:00 Introduction to the project
Introduction in Webdesign: the first decade and Open history Timeline project. Discussion of various timeline examples; experiment with decade-weblog; hand out reader plus one-week-blog assignment.
Mathematica Timeline
Another work by husband and wife team Charles & Ray Eames. In 1961, they completed an exhibition on mathematics for IBM. Prominently featured along one side of the exhibition space was a large timeline.
Here you can find other pictures from the exhibition. Notice how the labels go "off the page" at one point. The Eames seem to be masters making a system that's both strict yet still doesn't lose the "living" quality of a bulletin board.
10 Years of Wired Covers
In celebration of it's 10th anniversary, Wired magazine published a poster showing 10 years of covers.
Franklin & Jefferson Exhibition
Franklin & Jefferson exhibition
Designed by Charles & Ray Eames
GUIdebook
GUIdebook is a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing as many Graphical User Interfaces as possible.
Check out their excellent collection of historical icons and components and make time stand still, or at least on your desktop.
Project Description
Thematic project
MA Media Design, Piet Zwart Institute
Open History Timeline
8 April – 24 June 2004
Project leaders: Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting
A decade of Webdesign
Webdesign: the first decade is the title of an international conference PZI Media Design Research is planning for early 2005 in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam.
In preparation of the conference, we attempt building a visual and textual timeline mapping out ten years of webdesign. In the forthcoming thematic project we will develop a list, site or weblog for collecting and organising stories, experiences and first-time anecdotes documenting ten years of use.
The Way We Were
Wired's story about their 10th anniversary starts as follows:
"What a dull, distressing decade it promised to be. San Francisco was taking the early '90s hard. The city had always been a boomtown, and now, in the aftermath of recession and the Gulf War, it languished in the stale atmosphere of a boomtown in distress. There had been a drought for five years, and the sidewalks were lined with sickly trees."
Interactive history writing
SonicMemorial.org is an open archive and an online audio installation of the history of The World Trade Center.
http://sonicmemorial.org/
The archive of archives on the Net. Includes Wayback Machine, archiving webpages form the past
http://www.archive.org/
Experimental Television Center's Video History project
http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history
Time visualisation projects
The Geography of Cyberspace
http://www.cybergeography.org/geography_of_cyberspace.html
Swatch watch company re-invents time
http://www.swatch.com/itime_tools/
John Maeda's calendar experiment
http://www.maedastudio.com/cal2deliv
Open History Readings
Pavic, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel. New York: Vintage, 1988
De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, Columbia University Press, 1992
Benjamin, Walter. Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader , ed. by A. Arato & Eike Gebhardt, NY: Urizen Books, 1978, pp. 225 - 253
Steve Jones 1998 Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Sage
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962
On-line resources
Kleerebezem, Jouke. Media migrations: new design and publishing challenges, re: design answerability to new communication paradigms, 2001
http://www.idie.net/personalpublishing/personalpublishing-index.html
Blood, Rebecca. Weblogs: a history and perspective
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
SonicMemorial.org is an open archive and an online audio installation of the history of The World Trade Center.
http://sonicmemorial.org
The archive of archives on the Net. Includes Wayback Machine, archiving webpages form the past
http://www.archive.org
Decade of Webdesign Readings
Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, Harper, San Francisco,2000
Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Pearson, 1999
Bruinsma, Max. Deep Sites, intelligent innovation in contemporary webdesign, Thames & Hudson, London, New York, Paris, 2003
Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, OUP, 2001
Lessard, Bill, and Steve Baldwin. Netslaves: True Tales of Working the Web. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000
Greiman, April, Hybrid Imagery. The fusion of technology and graphic design, New York, Watson Guptill, 1990
Lovink, Geert. My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition, V2_Organisation, Rotterdam 2003
On-line resources
Lecture by Tim Berners-Lee
http://smithsonianassociates.org/programs/berners-lee/berners-lee.asp
Jakob Nielsen's Website
http://useit.com/
An oral history of Unix
http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/unixhistory
HTML protocol history (and pre-history)
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/historical
History of the World Wide Web
http://www.w3.org/History.html
A collection of Internet Histories
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/
The World Wide Web History Project is a collaborative effort to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking.
http://www.webhistory.org/
Calendar sketch by John Maeda
An interesting example from John Maeda. Applies idea of an "infinite zoom" to a timeline as the viewer can dive seamlessly into a timeline.
I find this an instructive demo into how a seamless interface, which to me promises a consistent sense of orientation and a dynamic quality, can also produce the opposite effect. The fact that looking at years, months, days, seconds in precisely the same way seems to have a "flattening effect" where all time units look the same, and what first seems quite dynamic feels at the end quite static. Also suffers from / enjoys the benefits of being a "content-free" demo; presenting a very elegant solution while avoiding any of the meatier issues that would arise if one were to try to present actual information in this model.
A non-linear approach to history
"It is the fixation on the material culture, the multitude of objects man produces, that makes things appear so different, so incomparable over time. When instead we would focus on the spiritual side of things, change is much less evident. All these material things, contraptions, constructions, consumer goods, blind us and let us think that what is now was never before. A history of basic concepts of humanity could be written that would show repeating patterns only over long stretches of linear time, far beyond human comprehension. It is in the recurrent themes of old and modern myth that, at an abstract level, such basic concepts become visible.
This non-linear approach towards history can be a fruitful way of approach for using the electronic media. Instead of an attitude that everything is newer than new and that the electronic media do not have a past and should just blindly point at the future, an attitude whereby inspiration for the electronic media both on the content and interface level is taken from the past, whereby high technology is combined with low technology. Instead of the 'effect driven multi media' with its urge to be the most modernistic and futuristic, a more content oriented multi media, that has something to communicate beyond the flashing electronic effects of modern machinery."
Tjebbe van Tijen, Virtual Museums, text for a telepresence lecture, 1998
Dynamic Timelines Thesis
Dynamic Timelines:Visualizing Historical Information in Three Dimensions is the title of a masters thesis by Robin Kullberg. Robin wrote this when she was studying under Muriel Cooper at the MIT Media Lab's old design group, the Visible Language Workshop, or VLW. What I particularly like about this work, and other work from the VLW at this time (around 1996), is it's way of using 3D. Coming from a background of print media, the group was very careful, in Robin's case skeptical, about the use of three dimensional graphics. The group placed a big emphasis on providing seamless user navigation and meaningful context while maintaining legibility and avoiding disorientation.
NEW: a very informative demo video with voice-over from the designer is available online.
Some examples of interactive timelines
www.sbrowning.com/whowhatwhen/
Very straightforward; interactivity only through selecting different parameters but funny in it's serious graphics. Obviously American.
www.bbc.co.uk/education/rocks
Nicely done educational timeline. I like the reference to the world map; space and time...
Discovery of Insulin Timeline
This one is technically not very advanced, but I find it interesting to see how a simple line-up of flatscans visualises a development in time of something that is basically quite abstract.
Sniper Time Line
Timeline of an incident. Here as well interesting linking between time and space.
Martha Stewart Timeline
And of another incident...
Memento
Memento is a simple quiz on VRT1 organised around historical facts. Candidates have to guess how these facts would line up, i.e. before or after each other. I like this 'shuffling' with facts and figures -- imagined that there could be dates which are debatable, or people could vote on where to place a certain element on the timeline