January 21-22, 2005 | Club 11, Amsterdam

A Decade of Webdesign marked the first ten years of web design. In 1994, the World Wide Web crept out of its scientific and academic egg and entered into popular consciousness. At this point the web design explosion began. Ten years on it was time to map these years of frenetic and inventive interdisciplinary work.

The introduction of the personal computer in the eighties heralded the era of desk-top publishing. The introduction of the Internet in the nineties brought another fundamental change to the design field. In particular, it affected graphic design as a practice – on the one hand it was empowered, while on the other, made strangely useless in its vocabulary and concepts. The INC sees the web as being a unique and massively distributed laboratory for vernacular and emergent design. The Internet has been the biggest ever Rorschach test for media culture. Some of the key figures and sites over the last decade have developed outside of the traditional computing or design sectors, or have been adapted from them by popular currents or idiosyncratic users in novel and inventive ways. Turning a media technology loose to work almost as a generative algorithm, reiteratively developing through the hands and ideas of millions of users has been an unprecedented experience for the design world.

In short, these first ten years of web design have seen design change as much as they have seen the impact of a new form of global media. The approach of the conference was to mix various means of understanding this first decade of work and creativity. It celebrated the development of web design, considered and evaluated its recent past and provided a platform for thinking about what is to come. In this, A Decade of Webdesign was the first event of its kind.

themes: histories of web design, meaning structures, modeling the user, digital work and distributed design.

speakers: Angela Beesley, Geke van Dijk, Rosalind Gill, Michael Indergaard, John Chris Jones, Olia Lialina, Peter Luining, Peter Lunenfeld, Adrian Mackenzie, Franziska Nori, Danny O’Brien, Steven Pemberton, Helen Petrie, Schoenerwissen/OfCD and Hayo Wagenaar.

website: www.decadeofwebdesign.org

design timeline: The website www.designtimeline.org is the archive of an ‘open research’ into the first decade of web design. The online, collaboratively written timeline is a place for remembering, discussing and discovering the first decade of web design. The Open History Timeline is an open-source content-management system designed to support online community-based history writing, created especially for A Decade of Webdesign by the Piet Zwart Institute, MA Media Design Research. The software is available for download at the website.

credits: An initiative of the Institute of Network Cultures and Piet Zwart Institute, MA Media Design Research, Rotterdam in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Concept: Matthew Fuller and Geert Lovink. Supported by: City of Amsterdam Department of Social Development, Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam Arts Fund, and Digital Pioneers.