[Air-l] Call for participation

[Sabine Niederer]

Call for Participation 
www.designtimeline.org 

We would like to invite you to contribute to the online collective web
design history timeline. This project wants to map your encounters with
design for the World Wide Web. It is part of a larger project entitled 'A
Decade of Web Design' that includes an international conference in
Amsterdam, January 21-22, 2005.

Open History Timeline
www.designtimeline.org is an 'open research' website/database into the first
decade of web design.  The online forum is a visual and textual timeline
generated out of a self-customizable questionnaire. Using a custom content
management system the site will allows: 
. Users to add images, comments and links, making a collective history of
webdesign as it developed.  Such elements might include histories of their
own first homepage; the first use of a technology; original html code;
reminiscences of key designers, innovators, critics and technologists. 
. Using a question-based interface users can write their own questions and
respond to those of others.  All questions entered are available, ensuring
that no one set of views or way of writing predominates. 
. Multi-lingual use.

The site is designed for use for anyone involved in web design over the past
ten years.  It is also ideal as a simple structured tool which can be used
for both research and teaching.  This project is intended to be of interest
to a broad range of disciplines from design to computer science and from
history to sociology. If you are a teacher we would like to invite you to
consider integrating this site into your curriculum, as a piece of
independent research for students, as a set workshop, or as the basis of a
sustained project. The project starts now and continues until the end of
march 2005, at which point it will be archived.  Please - make history!
http://www.designtimeline.org  

Conference: A Decade of Web Design (www.decadeofwebdesign.org) Until
recently web design discourses have been dominated by a frantic, market
driven search for the latest and coolest. The ongoing media buzz around
'demo design' has prevented serious scholarship from happening. Technical
innovations such as frames, flash, WAP and 3G have dominated the field.
Until 2001 a substantial part of the sector's activities was geared towards
instruction and consultancy. The dotcom crash and IT slump have cleared the
field-but not necessary in positive ways. Due to budget cuts firms now
believe they can do without design altogether. Instead of asking ourselves
what the Next Big Thing will be, we firmly believe that future design can be
found in its recent past that offers a rich mix of utopian concepts and
undigested controversies. In short, these ten years of web design has seen
design change as much as it has seen the impact of a new form of global
media. We want to celebrate this and to use a consideration and testing of
the recent past to provide a platform for thinking about what is to come. In
this, the conference will be unprecedented, the first event of its kind.

Sessions for the event will be:
-Histories of Web Design
What do social, technical and cultural historians propose as ways to make an
account of the last decade? -Meaning Structures As automated site-design
becomes increasingly important the history of the interweaving of technology
and culture up to the point of semantic engineering is mapped out -Modeling
the User Creativity and usability have often been set up as the two key
poles of web design.  This panel asks instead for a more sophisticated
narrative about the change in understanding of user needs and desires over
the last ten years
  - Digital Work
Following on from the Digital Work seminar this panel brings together key
observers and critics of the changing patterns of work in web design along
with designers
- Distributed Design
The web amplified an explosion on non-professional design.  This panel will
ask what happens to design once it becomes a non-specialist network process.

Confirmed Speakers
Michael Indergaard, John Chris Jones, Olia Lialina, Peter Luining, Peter
Lunenfeld, Geke van der Wal, Franziska Nori, Danny O'Brien (NTK), Steven
Pemberton, Helen Petrie, Rosalind Gill, Adrian McKenzie, Jimmy 'Jimbo'
Wales, Schoenerwissen/OfCD, etc. 
Further speakers are yet to be confirmed.

Organization
Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam,
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/  
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, www.networkcultures.org  (online
October 8, 2004)
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, www.stedelijk.nl 

Register for the conference by sending an email to info at networkcultures.org.

---
Sabine Niederer
Institute of Network Cultures
sabine at networkcultures.org