SANDCASTLES
Sandcastles is a research project into the history of interaction design and communication design on the internet. In several parts, it investigates the current state of the internet as a space that is often opaque and intentional, and yet designed in a way that is increasingly uniform. Sandcastles consists of two parts: a series of podcasts and a research booklet, that reflect on the history, nature and design of websites, and a website that prototypes more explorative and open-ended alternatives to what the internet could look like.
PART 1: Research Booklet
A lot of the research that went into creating the website and the podcasts is documented in the research booklet. It consists of essays, illustrations, and photographs and covers the prevalent design metaphors we use today, where they come from and also what their wider implications are. According to the metaphors, the book along with the website, is divided into 5 sections (Design, Space, Text, Sound and Network) for each of the metaphors.
For the layout and structure of the book I took inspiration from the design guides Paul Rand created for his visual identities, while expanding on them both in terms of accommodating more information for my collaborators and also being appropriate to the time in history many of the essays in the booklet are set. It serves the dual function as a guide to how to use the design and a documentation of its significance.
In terms of the content, what I realized during this project is how many aspects we conventionally see as completely unrelated phenomena of the internet, be it social networks, its use as a creative and personal communication tool, hacking culture or even its economic implications, are in fact historically interconnected. People like Marshall McLuhan, who are often treated as prescient of our contemporary media landscape, actively shaped its formation in the libraries at Xerox Parc or at the MIT Media Lab, and the same is true of the neoliberal and heterarchical economic systems that seem to many like the result of and not something engrained in counter-cultural thinking.
The research booklet covers everything from media science to politics, cybernetics and Gestalt psychology to the history of Silicon Valley. However, everything it covers is centered around the role of design, and identifying how now prevalent ideas around design have significant impact on all those other areas as well. Because, as the booklet will point out, we no longer use the internet as a computational tool, and we instead use it as a tool to communicate, to build communities, to express ourselves, or as artistic mediums, design has become more important than ever in shaping how we do that.
PART 2: Website
One central idea for the website was that it would be far more open-ended and explorative than most templated websites are designed to be. To achieve that it uses an extremely modular design approach, meaning that it can be navigated using 5 unique navigational glyph systems, interchangable color schemes, layouts and an unusual information structure, that exists synchronously between various devices. To retain its usability, this meant keeping the identity visually transmutable, but consistent, explorative but enjoyable to use.
For this project I created five unique navigational glyph systems, which are typographic, visual or sonic. Some of these glyphs are animated, others interface using a gestural, non-hierarchical glyph. They are fully interchangable through the app implementation of the website and change the way the website is approached, from something hierarchical, to codified, explorative or gestural. The synchronous information structure is accessed through the QR code on starting up the website, and allows information to be interchangable and interdependent between both devices.
For the most part, design on the internet works for the straightforward tasks it´s made for. Templated design and increased speeds make accessing tutorials, comparing products or checking out in an online store easy. These kind of tasks don´t require us to think, and strides around UI/UX seem to have made our active involvement even less essential. When this generation picks up a new piece of technology, we don´t need to read a user manual or consult an expert. The same is true of websites. However, the fact that we immediately understand what we need to do could be not just because UI/UX design is so advanced, but instead because we are actually passive and being engaged with, or because the technologies (and the websites) we´re using aren´t actually that different. For the tasks above this isn´t a problem. They have clear, ethically unambiguous goals which this same kind of design is great at achieving. But for those for which the goal is less clear, like building communities on social media, accessing correct information using search engines or using the internet as a medium for creative or personal expression, these goals become less clear, and increasingly similar design will limit those options.
