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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




"I was thinking about books and hiking trails, they both offer information but show a passage of time and they end. What happens if we mark distance and time in the digital space where information doesn't end? Will it help people to become mindful of the amount of information they will take in? Perhaps we could do this with little milestones of information taken in on the sides of our browsers." "When imagining a better way to combat cybercrime and viruses, that are transmitted via the internet, I imagined 'data tethers' that you can control yourself. If your data is pulled in a certain direction you can easily redirect it back to you." "When approaching this concept, I was mainly thinking about how we navigate the internet and those different levels of navigation. There should be more options on how you want to curate your experience: walking from connected sites that make up a larger "land mass", drifting in open waters to unconnected islands, and jumping between separated parts of the internet with speed and ease."