Nami-project proposal

Why do you want to make?

As someone who has been studying Graphic design and working with it, I’ve been striving to find a way to be financially independent, not dismissing/leaving the design industry. I am pretty much convinced that I position myself as a graphic designer, especially a web publisher, and will be working in the design industry, expectedly mainstream/ major-tech industry.
It’s not hard for me to imagine most of my future tasks will be likely to embody websites with certain styles of aesthetic, formats, and functions, which are given by clients for obvious commercial purposes. From a realistic point of view, most of these works wouldn't offer me space for innovative and challenging design approaches.
But then I am, and will be, one of the designers feeling sorry about the repetitive births of all the identical websites. This is honestly a dilemma for me in terms of compromising my regrets about the lack of diversity in web pages today with the demands of the industry.
On the other hand, however, I believe I can use my recognition of the dilemma to navigate my future career with balanced attitudes. Thus I would like to investigate the background structure under my question: "Why do most websites look so identical today?", "Why don't they have more diversity?". The exploration will mainly be accompanied by researching how websites are created in the commercial design field. (In which practical process through?, Under which agenda?)
Looking into the influential factors of the industry will help me to understand the current challenges of the web context.

What and how do you want to make?

I expect the outcome of my project will be an archival website, documenting the exploratory questions:
- What is the background of the gradual absence of diversity in the web design industry, and how do designers and developers perceive this?

And I will explore these questions through desk and field research.

Desk research: Reading research papers/articles/theories

How have histories of aesthetic movements such as Flat-design and Brutalism (a counterexample to the Flat-design) been influencing the web design market?

Does the Flat design agenda necessarily draw a better user experience in terms of efficiency in the web and mobile context? (both agreeable and polemic examples)

The history of "mobile-first" approach in the industry

Field research questions: Interviewing and Making participatory coding workshops


1) Interviewing designers and developers in the industry, asking practical process of their works (structure of the company, tools they're using...), their perceptions of it, and demands of their clients, etc.

• In which circumstances do developers and designers extract codes from framework libraries such as Bootstrap and React?
• In which sense does it helpful/frustrative when using the frameworks?
• How do they deal with issues when they can't easily find the desired codes from such libraries? (ex. Some might have approached to fit their design to the existing libraries so that they compromised to keep their creativities.
  In contrast, some might have approached, (over)writing or implementing their own codes with intense research to really embody the result as they want.)
• Have they ever had frustration to balance their creativity and work efficiency? or not really?
• Have do they perceive the ‘mobile-first’ approach?
• (Ask to net artists): How do you make your web works? (Practical process)
• (Ask to net artists): How much do you care making your website to be responsive on all viewports?



2) 0rganising a few coding workshops. A tentative title of it is Clumsy code.

• Activities will be mainly making a few simple HTML page layouts (already made by css/javascript frameworks such as Bootstrap) together, but mainly with their knowledge and research, without relyong on the code snippets from frameworks.
  Target participants will be both people having only a basic capacity of front-end coding and professionals in the practice.
  Through the workshops I'd like to see how do the tml pages not using the frameworks look like, and in which logic did participants code.

The format of the archival web is relevant in that I aim to explore how all the research records will be making a (new) connection, contextualised each other, not just being juxtaposed by an obsession with a term like 'objectivity'.
PUT EXAMPLES AS IMAGES

This archive will be meaningful for designers and developers to overview the circular structure in the field and contemplate their stances, and even use it as a context of a further discussion.

Timeline

Oct 2021˜ Dec 2021:

Investigating the connection between Flat design motto and the web industry market

Collecting interface examples of the flat design on web and mobile

Collecting interface examples of NON-flat design on web and mobile (such as Brutalism ..)

Nov 2021 - Dec 2021

E-mailing to designers and developers that I'd like to meet/interview (The interviewees can be also artists working with the medium of web, app)

Start interviewing them up! (At least two people!)
So far my interviewees list : Francesco from XPUB1, Thomas Karlberg Waalskaar (XPUB alumni, media researcher, graphic designer),Julia Luteijn (A net artist), Sander Sturing (a developer in Studio Dumbar)

Testing out my workshop idea (Clumsy code) in collective XPUB2 workshop (The workshop plan that I mentioned above in the 'what and how' section)
- List participants, materials needed, and brainstorm the activity in specific

Dec 2021

Experiment how I can document my research materials on web context
(How photos, voice records, films, screenshots will be displaced in the web context, then be created to the archive?

A second test for the workshop (Clumsy code) with some implementation

E-mailing to designers and developers that I'd like to meet/interview

Nov 2021 ~ April 2022

Interviewing and recording

Jan 2022

Orgnanising first workshop (not a test but rather a significant part of my research+thesis) (Clumsy code)

E-mailing to designers and developers that I'd like to meet/interview

Feb 2022 ˜

Start building up the archive (sketching the potential outcome)

E-mailing to designers and developers that I'd like to meet/interview

Feb 2022 ~ Mar 2022

Another test of the workshop idea with implementation. (It might even be a different format of experiment)

Apr 2022

Orgnanising second workshop (not a test but rather a significant part of my research+thesis)

Polishing thesis

May 2022˜

Finalising thesis

Finalising the website build up

Relation to my previous practice and a larger context

My trajectory in Experimental Publishing can explain why I am particularly interested in the lack of diversity in the web context, especially in the web market. The first year in the course was composed of making a collective publication each semester, called ‘Special Issue’. The mechanism of it was working, learning together then communicating with audiences as a group. The projects were created by collages of each student's individual interpret of subject matters. In the process of documenting my interpretation, I particularly enjoyed spreading my narratives into the ‘web’ format. Although I didn’t have advanced technical knowledge in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, which are key languages for making a webpage, I’ve been very charmed by various possibilities in aesthetics and tools of making the pages.

This attraction in HTML world has inspired me to create my personal essay website called ‘TEXTYOURS[[1]]’ in March 2020.

In the platform, I’ve been experimenting to create hand-made web pages with stories I wanted to talk about. On top of that, the stories are displayed in visual languages that I personally found relevant to the contents.
The style and the level of completion of the works are admittedly amateuristic from a professional perspective. Yet, for me, this process itself has been a big part of my artistic statement as I feel great freedom and intimacy, unlike in other websites having all the similar aesthetics and moving systems under the name of professionalism.
And this enjoyment has gradually triggered me critical questions:

'Why so many times am I bored in the web context?'

‘How will I be able to balance myself between the flat + efficiency-orient agenda and fun + creative desire, when working as a commercial designer in the future?’

These have naturally motivated me to look into the structure of the web design industry.

And while doing pre-research for writing this proposal, I’ve realised some professional designers(UI/UX, Product, Graphic) have been also making some critical voices about the status quo in the industry. For instance, Boris Müller, a UI/UX designer and professor, keeps writing about the scarcity of diversity and creativity in the web design market and also initiating some projects about it.

Web design today seems to be driven by technical and ideological constraints rather than creativity and ideas. Every page consists of containers in containers in containers; sometimes text, sometimes images. Nothing is truly designed, it’s simply assumed. (from his essay on Medium: Why Do All Websites Look the Same?)

Another relevant example is arguments made by Olia Lialina, a Net artist, theorist, experimental film and video critic, and curator. Through many writings and web projects, she has expressed her regrets on the gradual disappearance of the(amateur) personal webpage, which was used to be active in the past.

Nor was there some sort of evolution or natural development that would make people stop building their personal websites. Professionalisation or faster Internet, which you could hear as reasons for amateur pages dying out, could have become the reasons for the opposite, for a brighter, rich and long tradition of people building their cyberhomes themselves. (from her essay : From Me To My)

They all commonly warn about iterations of certain mechanisms on a discipline. Thus my personal question eventually all resonates to a larger social context.

Who can help you and how?

Boris Müller (Professor for Interaction Design at FH Postam, Co-director of Urban Complexity Lab) (https://esono.com/ , https://borism.medium.com/) <- Since one of my biggest inspiration for this project is one of his essays(projects), called ‘The User Condition’, I’d like to bring him some questions about how he has been discovering the web industry, and what is his teaching philosophy in design, and how he personally manages to balance personal creativity and market demands.

Many potential interviwees

XPUB Tutors: Manetta Berends and Michael Murtaugh(As for technical inputs and discourses)

XPUB Tutors: Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux (As for direction and structure of my research)

Silvio Lorruso

Bruno Setola (He is a teacher in an art academy and was a director at a studio where I did an internship. He is not a web designer, but has abundant working experiences in commercial field. He used to work in Studio Dumbar. He can connect me with some designers for my research.)

References / Bibilography

[Surname, initials of author(s) (date) Title, place and name of publisher]

Carpenter, J. R. (Mar 2015), A Handmade Web, Bath Spa University, UK, Slow Media (http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html)

Galloway, Alexander R. (2012), The Interface Effect, Cambridge, UK, Polity

Johnson, S. (1997), User Experience: Interface Culture, New York, Basic Books

Kay, A. and Goldberg, A (1977) Personal Dynamic Media, _____, _____

Lialina, O (),____,_____,______

Lurroso, S. (Apr 2020), The User Condition 04: A Mobile First World, Entreprecariat, (https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/mobile-first-world/)

Lurroso, S. (Feb, 2021), The User Condition, the Lectorate Design of KABK (https://theusercondition.computer/)

Müller, B. (Sep, 2018a), Why Do All Websites Look the Same?, Modus (https://modus.medium.com/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73)

Müller, B. (Nov, 2018b), Balancing Creativity and Usability, Medium (https://borism.medium.com/balancing-creativity-and-usability-9bb2cd0fe929)

Olia Lialina - She regularly writes and publishes about new media, digital folklore, amateur or vernacular web design, the early history of home pages and the early conventions of the web.[24] Her essays, projects and publications include:

A Vernacular Web

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (2011-),[27] a project with Dragan Espenschied. Lialina and Espenschied downloaded the entire Geocities archive (Geocities was shut down in 2009) and regularly and automatically publish screenshots of GeoCities websites on a Tumblr blog.

Digital Folklore

(http://art.teleportacia.org/#CenterOfTheUniverse)

Hackers & Designers
(A non-profit workshop initiative organizing activities at the intersection of technology, design and art.)