Call for Participation : www.designtimeline.org

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 Webdesign 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, Schoenerwissen/OfCD,
Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales, etc. Further speakers are yet to be confirmed.

Organization
Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam,
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
Institute for Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Register for the conference by sending an email to [email protected].