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 design industry. I am pretty much convinced that I position myself as a graphic designer 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 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 webpages today with the demands of the industry.
To be realistically speculating my position, I desire to investigate why can’t the designers and clients get out of the iterative loops of conventional disciplines in web design. There must be indispensable elements and rules that the commercial web designers can’t break or deform, and these have been stemmed from ˜˜

I believe that looking into roots and influential factors of the market structure will definitely help me to have a better understanding about the field and contemplate about my (potential) stance as a designer, not just avoiding or helplessly admitting it. This research will be a good starting point for me to sustain my passion to be one of designers who are willingly challenge to the issue.

What and how do you want to make?

I expect outcome of my project will be an archival website, presenting documentations of research materials.
The archive will be composed of explorations about various sub-research questions, which will be displayed in formats like text, photos, video and audio fragments of interview records, etc.
The sub-questions will be, for example :

Desk research questions
• Reading Reproductive (both through reading and interviewing/discussing)
• How has histories of aesthetic movements such as Flat-design (mimicking Minimalism), Brutalism (a counter example to the Flat-design) been influencing to the web design ecosystem?
• Does the Flat design agenda necessarily draw better user experience in terms of efficiency in the web and mobile context? (The trend of the Flat design was born not just for adoring minimalistic visual culture, but also for the productive user experience.
  Yet, it’s been controversial if that necessarily draw the convenient and understandable navigation.)
• What are representative examples that the flat aesthetic has indeed contributed to positive user experiences, balancing easy navigation and innovativeness?
• Are there any examples that the flat design couldn’t succeed to create good responsive design mechanism?

Field research questions
• Have product designers and front-end developers (in the industry) ever felt that ‘mobile-first’ agenda influences in their creativity?
• How have Bootstrap and React, open source libraries made by mega ten companies, been influencing to ecology of the web design industry?(both through desk and field research, but it’d be interesting to look into or even ask to online forum or community.)
• How often do the developers rely on extracting codes from such existing libraries like Bootstrap and React?
• How have been the developers and designers dealt with issues when they couldn’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.)
• How do the developers and (product) designers perceive about the exist of such open libraries? (both gratefulness and regrets)
• How have contemporary (graphic) designers and multidisciplinary artists been dealing with the ‘mobile first agenda’?
• Is that really important for them to make their contents to every screen size? (= Is the ‘mobile first’ motto something crucial for them?)
• What are representative examples that the non-flat design has succeed drawing the efficiency user experience and responsive system?
• Thoroughly studying the basic html/xml languages in the libraries. Maybe I could find if there’s some patterns per functions, and if the codes are still recommended to use or outdated, etc.
  I can download their libraries and take their codes out to my own file, then modifying, analysing it. (Mostly desk research)



(All these questions can be even specifically articulated or extended)

These sub questions will be explored through either doing desk or field research, or even doing both. The desk research mostly entails reading research papers in context like Jstor, and essays/articles in platform like Medium and asking on online communities for designers and developers.

As for the field research, I will mostly meet and interview designers and developers who are currently working in the field. For instance, questions asking their practical mechanism in their companies and insights about it will be explored better through hearing their real experiences than looking into papers. Recording medium will be decided on the interviewee’s preference. It can be formats of audio, video, photo, or text.
When it comes to some questions, I will run online surveys, targeting on multi-disciplined artists and currently working designers. These methods lies on a borderline between the desk and the field research.

The way how I present all the collection of findings will be naturally followed upon my insight during analysis.

Timeline

Sep 2021 -May 2022 : Reading to deepen my insight about the topic Oct 2021˜: Conceptualising the travel agency, Analysing navigation rules in existing websites such as Expedia ,which I personally feel uncomfortable, and visualise a few hacked(modified) versions of sketches through applications such as Figma and Illustration (not necessarily coding sketches) Nov 2021:

Read relevant sources about navigation in web context and user experience.

Survey about user experience with navigation structures in the chosen existing websites (It will take place at a workshop held by XPUB2 and tutors.)

Keep prototyping alternative navigation systems upon the survey, but entail the method of coding by hands.

Arrange meetings with currently working UI/UX designers to show my sketch and get their (critical) opinions.

Dec 2021: - Approach to relevant academics who have been exploring this topic.
(e.g. Silvio Lorruso (designer & academic), Boris Müller (Designer, Professor for Interaction Design at FH Postam))
Jan - May 2022: I’ll run a small scale of workshop to test out my design prototypes.

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 it. 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 a group. The projects were created by collages of each student's individual interpret on 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 (textyours.world)’ in March 2020. In the platform I’ve been experimenting to create hand-made webpages with stories I wanted to talk about. On top of that, the stories are displayed in visual languages that I personally found relevant with 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 the 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 ecology in the web design industry.

And while doing pre-research for writing this proposal, I’ve realised some professional designers(UI/UX, Product) have been also making some critical voices about the status quo in the industry. For instance Boris Müller and ____ are keep writing about the scarcity of diversity and creativity in the web design market, and also initiating some projects about it.
Another 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 (amateur) personal webpage, which was used to be active in the past. She resonates [QUOTE HER ESSAY HERE] Also it doesn’t seem directly relevant, but Silvio Lorruso, a writer and web designer, also talked about [QUOTE SILVIO LORRUSO'S ESSAY(The User Condition) HERE: Capacity to break the conditions….. An action is basically a choice, and agency measures the capacity of making choices. 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.]  They all commonly warn about certain types of economy being continually reproduced. Thus my personal question eventually all resonates to a larger social context.

Who can help you and how?(Roughly written at the moment)


Silvio Lorruso (https://theusercondition.computer/)

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 the autonomy of user can be gained in computer and the web context. 

XPUB Tutors : Manetta Berends, Michael Murtaugh, Aymeric Mansoux (for conceptual feedback and programming skills)

Aymeric Mansoux

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. Especially worked in Studio Dumbar. He can connect me with some designers for my research.)

References / Bibilography

User Experience: Interface Culture by Steven Johnson(1997)

The Interface Effect by Alexander R. Galloway

https://theusercondition.computer/ (By Silvio Lurroso)

https://esono.com/ , https://borism.medium.com/ (By Boris Müller)

Alan Kay : Alan Kay’s pioneering work on interfaces was guided by the idea that the computer should be a medium rather than a vehicle, its function not pre-established (like that of the car or the television) but reformulable by the user (like in the case of paper and clay). For Kay, the computer had to be a general-purpose device. He also elaborated a notion of computer literacy which would include the ability to read the content of a medium (the tools and materials generated by others) but also the ability to write in a medium.

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)