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
- 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?
- 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.
2) 0rganising a few coding workshops. A tentative title of it is Clumsy 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'.
This archive website will be meaningful for designers and developers in the web industry to overview the circular structure in the field and contemplate their stances, and even use it as a context of a discussion.
The way how I present all the collection of findings will be naturally followed by my insight during analysis.
Timeline
~May 2022:
Oct 2021˜ Dec 2021:
Nov 2021
Nov 2021~Apr 2022:
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 and ecology of the 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:
These have naturally motivated me to look into the ecology 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?)
But my impression is that right now, designers tend to limit their creativity so that the design works for the template. And I strongly believe it should be the other way round. Instead of asking how they meet the demands of the template, designers and developers should ask themselves how they can create templates that meet the demands of the design. This is one of the reasons why I believe that designers should be able to code for themselves. If you want to push the boundaries, you have to understand the limitations. (from his essay on Medium: Balancing Creativity and Usability)
We should remember that creativity is the core qualification of professional designers. And while creativity always needs constraints to be productive — it should not be drowned out by procedure and conformity. Designing for yourself can provide you with a creative breathing space in the design process. (from his essay on Medium: Design for yourself! (Sometimes))
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)
Also it doesn’t seem directly relevant, but Silvio Lorruso, a writer and web designer, also pointed out user's ways of thinking are being limited and dominated by pervasive notions of agent today.
No choice, on the contrary, is behavior. The addict has little agency because their choice to interrupt their toxic behavior exists, but is tremendously difficult. In short, I propose to define agency as the capacity for action, which is in turn the ability to interrupt behavior.
Here’s a platform-related example. We can postulate a shortage of user agency within most dominant social media. What limits the agency of a user, namely, their ability to stop using such platforms, is a combination of addictive techniques and societal pressures. It’s hard to block the dopamine-induced automatism of scrolling, and maybe it’s even harder to delete your account when all your friends and colleagues assume you have one. In this case, low agency takes the form of a lock-in. If agency means choice, the choice we can call authentic is not to be on Facebook (or WeChat, if you will). (from his writing: The User Condition)
They all commonly warn about certain types of the economy being continually reproduced. Thus my personal question eventually all resonates to a larger social context.
Who can help you and how?
References / Bibilography
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