An utopian world, where you can be whoever you want. Where you can be as rich as you want, as pretty as you want and as successful as you always dreamed about.
The surface of a web platform is the perfect playground where anybody can play with its value using psychological trickery. The internet has brought something completely different form the real life; the infinite surfaces multiplication, that allows co-existence on a same territory. Nowadays, with these accessibles surfaces, where you can fill all blank spaces with you utopia life, your wished life, the difference between “elite” people and poor people no longer depends on their wealth. It doesn’t matter anymore wich class are we part of when we are online. The separation is made between people who have access to internet and those who have not.
As designers, we are the geographers of these spaces, it’s part of our new reality. As creative people, we have to imagine the future of this exponentially growing machine that the web is. The way we started to use Internet is a greater leap forward, which allow us to open doorways to New Virtual World. Beyond our work to transform societies, we work to transform ourselves.
“It is no longer enough today to lock ourselves in our studios and produce culture. We must engage in our world in as many ways as possible. We need to ground our artistic production in the realities of our lives and those many others around us.” — Realizing The Impossible, Art Against Authority
We have to base our artistic productions according to the Web and the new medias. We have to think further, faster and bigger. We have the potential for a totalitarian control technology that may cause massive problems for the whole society. We just didn’t realize that yet.
What about the style?
Minimalism rules. There is no longer passion for gold or diamonds.This was part of the old elite. Everything has changed. The simpler things are, the more attractive they become. The most space we give to people to personalize spaces, shapes and colors, the more they get into it.
Minimalism? That’s kinda like not designing something, right?
Not really.
There was a time designers were going crazy making things in some impossible shapes, with impossible materials and impossible colors. It was, sort of, impossible to determine the real function of the objects. We have now the possibility to modulate the future only by creating blank spaces. It seems contradictory, isn’t it?
“It is said that an anarchist society is impossible. Artistic activity is the process of realising the impossible.” — Max Blechman, Toward an Anarchist Aesthetic
References/
_White Night Before A Manifesto. Metahaven. 2008
_Certifying Responsible Design Manifesto, towards certification for the communications design profession. 2012
_First Things First, an update to the 1964 and 2000 manifestos addressing design in the Digital Age. 2014
_Web Design Manifesto. Jeffrey Zeldman. 2012
_Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation. 2010
_Internet Manifesto: How journalism works today. Seventeen declarations. 2009
_This is Not Manifesto – towards an alternative design practice – hard-hitting anarchist perspective. 2009
Anouk B.Paradis 