Project Schedule
W1 Thursday 8 April
11:00 Introduction to the project
Intro in A Decade of Webdesign and going through various examples of timelines; introduction of a weblog as container to hold notes and first experiments plus documenting the workingprocess. Hand out reading.
17:00 A decade of webdesign: guestlecture
[Max Bruinsma / Geert Lovink]
W2 Thursday 15 April
11:00 Histories
Discuss assigned readings / discuss oral history; hand out one-week-blog assignment plus reading
17:00 A decade of webdesign: guest lecture
[Gerard Albers / Mieke Gerritzen]
W3 Thursday 22 April
11:00 Sticky Day
Discuss blog experiment + reading. Look at various examples of Content Management Systems, if possible discuss their different forms of use. Produce a timeline together based on notes from lectures, readings and memory.
W4 Thursday 29 April
11:00 Re-brief
Discuss possible approaches to the project and form workgroups. At the end of the day the workgroups present initial ideas to each other in 5 minute presentations
W5 May Holiday
W6 Tuesday 11 May
10:00 Workplans posted
Each workplan should include a description of the nature of the experiment, a set of questions it wants to address, a technical plan, the distribution of roles within the workgroup plus some examples of prior work [rephrase]
W6 Thursday 13 May
14:00 Discussion of workplans
Workplans are adjusted on the weblog and we’ll get on with making popcorn
20:00 Open History Timeline Movienight
W7 Tuesday 18 May
11:00 Workgroup tutorials [scheduled]
W7 Thursday 27 May
11:00 Design review
Workgroups each present a first sketch plus plan for the last three weeks. Workplans are adjusted according to changes in ideas and production on the weblog.
W8 Thursday 3 June
11:00 Development of prototypes
W9 Thursday 10 June
11:00 Development of prototypes
W10 Thursday 17 June
11:00 Presentation of prototypes. Last preparatory work for the presentation in conjunction with final show
W10 Friday 18 June – 21 June
Prototypes presented at Final Show
W11 Thursday 24 June
11:00 Handover Day
Planning the transition to production phase
Project Description
Thematic project
MA Media Design, Piet Zwart Institute
A Decade of Webdesign: 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 we are planning early 2005 in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam.
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 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.
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 to celebrate this and to use a consideration and testing of the recent past to provide a platform for thinking about what is to come.
The conference will involve a range of international speakers and include panels on threads such as standards vs. unique experiences, issues in education, sociology of webdesign and histories of design theories.
Open History Timeline
Beginning before and continuing after the conference we would like to initiate an ‘open research’ into the first decade of web design. We are interested in researching what you could call the ‘oral history’ of this recent past, through the collaborative production of a visual and textual timeline. The timeline might include collections of first homepages; the first use of a specific technology; original html code; interviews with key designers, innovators, critics and technologists and much more.
Ideally the Open History Timeline will function as a survey amongst web designers themselves about business and working conditions, education, design taste, approaches towards usability and different applications, allowing for a complex and dynamic knowledge map of the history of the web, and the influence of design within that history.
The website/list/weblog will be launched five months before the conference and continue for six months afterwards, at which point it will be archived.
This thematic project aims at developing a set of working prototypes for the Open History Timeline. During the third trimester we will look at forms of oral history and how these can be represented on-line, the visualisation of time on interactive platforms and the history of webdesign in particular.
Thinking through questions such as: Which data should be collected? How to represent ten years of webdesign? What filtering systems could be useful? Which tool can be developed to include different voices and perspectives? We will develop a customised content management system allowing for:
* users to add images, comments and links to make a collective history of the web as it developed
* collaborative moderating, filtering and ranking of elements
* viewing of elements according to different filters such as date, keyword
* viewing in different perspectives / levels / zoom in and out
* moderated commenting on posts by others
To enforce our workpower selected students from the University of Amsterdam (department?), Communication and Multi Media Design (WdKA) and Interactive Multi Media (WdKa) will collaborate with us on the project.
Schedule 0.2
W1 (8 April)
Intro + guest lectures + discussion
PART 1: Introductions / What are we doing?
different tools
collecting notes
empty containers, feed in information
W2 (15 April)
Guest lectures + discussion
Assigned readings / Look at examples
W3 (22 April)
In class assignment: STICKIES
Work on a timeline together physically
Based on each students notes from lectures & readings
For the following week, assignment: BLOG
W4 (29 April)
Look at BLOGs, form groups
W5 holiday
W6 (13 ay)
PART 3: How do you tell a story?
[TIMELINE MOVIE NIGHT]
... Present a work plan
W7 (20 -> 19 May meet on Wednesday this week?)
Present a rough idea, present your group work plan, individual roles defined
W7 (27 May)
Present first sketch / design review
W8 (3 June)
W9 (10 June)
W10 (17 June)
Presentation in conjunction with final show
W11 (24 June)
Final Meeting, Planning Transition/Handover to production phase
Project Handbook 0.1
April:
re-formulating brief
collect
compare, analyse, test
With a programme of only a few lectures we can spark off the thinking about different perspectives on the history of webdesign. Not that our students need to fill the timeline themselves, but they need to have a sense of what it could involve. Some data samples... to see what the collective timeline could give and what they might loose.
We can announce the programme seperately and make it semi-public; I think also very good to open up these lectures for undergraduate students.
Geert Lovink
Mieke Gerritzen
Max Bruinsma
...
Finalize this stage with a self-formulated brief plus technical plan
Divide in 2/3 workgroups
May:
sketch
produce
end this stage with a project presentation
June:
test
publish
publicity?
presentation [final show]
Finalize this stage with 2/3 working prototypes
reading/writing?
connect to tech days