Week 13

Prototype Planning

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So I consulted Andreas, and he basically said that I have too many experiments, and now its time to package them altogether in a website. He proposed either a website with the same few ideas, or a website with all my experiments packaged with a name like 'Alternative Web Spaces' or something. We discussed the difference between the two, and we both agreed the latter, a website with many experiments is a more appropriate direction. We believe that each experiment has more meaning and character, rather than a website with just one experience.

Technical Challenges

Right off the bat, I just know my main struggles will involve the back-end stuff, transferring the cursor party, and collaborative poetry over to my website. Next, the interface, the visuals and the concept for this website, as I don't want it to just be conceptualised as Alternative Web Spaces.

Concept of this Prototype

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I thought of the environment that I want to situate this website to, and Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens inspired me a lot. Hypertext Gardens was written by Mark during the Web Navigation Problem, where website creators couldn't find a way to link pages nor create tables or columns in a way which allowed for an efficient experience, as such, he envisions websites to be like gardens.

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I also resonate with Mike Caulfield's The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral which he also defines the Garden metaphor as:

"The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships"

Personally, I really resonate with the idea of treating websites as gardens, but I'm not too sure if it would come off as a little cheesy or cringey, and I don't want it to come across as just another website or 'branding' which uses nature as a metaphor for something.