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 outcome of my project will be an archival website, presenting documentations of research materials.
The format of the archive web will be relevant in that I aim to explore how all the record materials will be making a (new) connection, being 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 design industry to overview the circular structure in their fields, and to contemplate their stances, and even to use it as a context of a discussion. 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.
why archive? for whom do I make this? The sub-questions will be, for example :

<Desk research questions>
• Reading references/theories about Reproductive Economy
• How have histories of aesthetic movements such as Flat-design (mimicking Minimalism), Brutalism (a counterexample to the Flat-design) been influencing the web design ecosystem?
• Does the Flat design agenda necessarily draw a 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 a good responsive design mechanism?

<Field research questions>
• Have product designers and front-end developers (in the industry) ever felt that ‘mobile-first’ agenda influences their creativity?
• How have Bootstrap and React, open-source libraries made by mega ten companies, been influencing the ecology of the web design industry? (both through desk and field research, but it’d be interesting to look into or even ask 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 dealing 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 the existence 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 succeeded in drawing an efficient user experience and responsive system?
• Thoroughly studying the basic html/xml languages in the libraries. Maybe I could find if there are some patterns per function, 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 modify, analyzing 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 a context like Jstor, and essays/articles on 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. The 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 multi-disciplined artists and currently working designers. These methods lie on a borderline between the desk and the field research.

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

Timeline

~May 2022:

Reading theories and essays about Reproductive economy and to deepen my insight about the topic

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

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 meeting them up! (At least two people!)

Preparing XPUB2 workshop: Probably I want to do a small workshop called 'Naive code', letting participants to make small a menu bar or banner on the web page, but truly by thier hands with pure research(ex.looking into W3C, etc), not extracting codes from libraries

Nov 2021~Apr 2022:

Interviewing and recording

Implementing the Naive Code Experiments (through workshop formats)

Sketching my web archive with the documentations of my research

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:

'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 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?

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

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)