Iterative design is a cyclical process of improving. By testing and evaluating, reflecting and moving on progress is made and the product improved. I used this process refinement as I improved on an original stimulus idea, a poem, to make one of my first, coded from scratch websites using basic CSS and HTML. I’m not intending to become a coder any time soon but the process was handy because it allows for an understanding of the restraints coders work with when they are coming up with user interfaces. The process evolves and clarifies your idea.
I have create a PDF document here where you can see the iterative steps involved.
The website is not online yet but here is a little snapshot of the completed product with some commentary on the steps I took.
The Project
The tragedy of the commons is usually told about individuals, acting independently and out of self-interest, destroying a shared resource. This project inspired by a poem attempts to recreate and rewrite the narrative that commons are not sustainable in the digital era. There is nothing about people themselves that means commons are bound to fail but in the underlying operating systems of exploitative capitalism. We have allowed the commons to become exploited when corporations externalize costs and expect everyone else to pay their way as they harvest our data and personal lives through surveillance capitalism.
Then this project looks to expose the corporations of Silicon Valley which perform as the hip democratic value of youth culture but are really some of the biggest companies in history very much interested in shareholder value. Corporations which took an internet founded on open source and commons values and exploited it. This then is a project of restoration and retrieving what was lost.
Seeing as these corporations were using 17th-century feudal practices using medieval scrips was apt to recreating the script and exposing the reversal of figure and ground taking place.
The Stimulus
The Goose and the Commons
17th Century
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose off the common
But leaves the greater villain looseW
ho steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Index
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