Jeet Singh: Website design

I had the great pleasure to participate in the very first Doors of Perception conference a few years ago and at that time the first trickles of what has now become the flood of the Internet was apparent to all the participants, who were like today from very broad area of skills and disciplines and ideas. In that world certainly my colleagues and I have been immersed in the problems of technology as well as design. I believe that the Internet has effects on all of us and certainly on designers, but for some of us more specifically who are more involved in designing the medium itself the problems are even more anxious or I should say more immediate.

One of the things that we do not have is the luxury of a lot of time, as people who are actually building technology, to think a time before we act, because typically we are driven by forces like the market, which give us 90 days to build something and have it up and running. So our time scale is a little bit different. There are a lot of different areas in which speed plays a part. Certainly the speed of processing in computing is changing all the time, the standards that we use are changing, the very medium of design is changing and the tools we have to design it with are changing so fast that we can barely keep up with the skills. If people are out of universities and schools, we cannot hire them, because they do not have any skills that are worth it. On the other hand there are no people with experience. Someone who has twenty years of experience in the industry probably has nothing relevant to the things we have to do. So it is a very problematic thing.

However, there is one specific topic that I will choose today and I will show you a few things that have to do with one element of speed: the rate in which material that is consumed by the public is actually produced. For example with a project we did for Harvard Business School. Without getting in too much detail, it was basically a system in which every student at the Business School and every faculty member could instantly publish a lot of information about their courses and activities. Teachers could ask their students what they thought, there were polls, discussions. It was a way of instantly having information published without any delay.

Another project that we did since then in Japan is even more interesting in the sense of: how do you actually create content that is on the Internet (which is our area of expertise), how to add user's content without any delay, without having to have a production process. 'NTT Data' is the branch of the Japanese telephone company that commissioned us to develop a site that included a lot of communications and collaborations on it. The application knew various elements, including those where people can find each other and communicate with each other, and find attributes about themselves. However, the area which I am specifically going to show, is an experimental system, called World Fiction. And World Fiction's basic idea was that we would like to take an end user and enable him to build objects and events and avatars, without having any knowledge of how to do these things from a programming sense -- and have it instantly available to the whole world. This application works as a Java applet and the basic idea is that there are various things simultaneously on the screen.

So there is this person, that happens to have a representation, eg. there's sheep and those sheep happen to be created by someone. There's things you click on and that are saying various things. They are things that the person who made this comic programmed. One can click on the sheep as well. The basic things you see happening are not all that sophisticated in terms of the actual design or the production quality, but the fact that these things are actually not built by a programmer, but by the end user make them interesting. So there's a little scripted behaviour that the person who builds creates. When you look at the interface you see there is a list of actions that happen. When you click on an avatar, you can tell it to say: 'watch it, paleface', and move to another point at the screen and have it play a sound of a wolf. It is all done within the interface. One can add another event underneath the previous, add an action. Then there is a new action and that action could be: say something. Etcetera... so, 'Watch, it paleface' (sound of a wolf).

World Fiction: www1.nexsite.nttdata.jp/
Art Technology Group: www.atg.com