Re/Making the Internet

A workshop with an upper-level undergrad studio on reimagining the internet as a more equitable space.

Workshop
Timeline: February 25th, 2021











Context



The internet is a space for social, political, and economic exchange. Designers have the potential to alter how people inhabit that space, but our capacity for imagining what it could be is limited by reductive motifs like “the cloud” and our 2D screens.

Making the internet’s form tangible can help us understand how it works, where it varies in accessibility, and what implications it has for society. By acknowledging the spatial qualities of the internet we can begin to reimagine what kind of space we want it to be. 

To approach these issues, I led a workshop in which students rapidly generated visualizations of the internet using physical materials. Once they created visuals of discrete structural components, they took their materials and created a final visualization that reimagined what kind of space they wanted the internet to be.

















What kind of space can the Internet be?




















Sample Narratives