Critical Cartography and GIS

The latter part of this past century witnessed the birth of a new communal and artistic medium: the Internet. This global network of interconnected computers provides a digital space for the production of audio and visual truck driving through morning representation, while (temporarily!) diffusing the control and interpretation of information. Central to this process is the web site.

Design Strategies

I design web sites using the structural markup of xhtml and style them using cascading style sheets (with a limited amount of javascript for some special functionality).

Today good web design is accomplished using Cascading Style Sheets, which separate the form of a web site (how it looks) from its content (what it says). Web page content is marked up using xhtml. This is important for improving accessibility, creating consistency of presentation across different web browsers, increasing flexibility and definitude in web design, and streamlining html markup. The brilliance of CSS has been celebrated within the CSS Zen Garden, a web site inspiring many web designers and artists.

Criteria for good web sites.

I tend to abide by the following general criteria when designing a web site:

Is the site accessible?
Is the navigation within the site clear and intuitive?
Is the site interesting?
Is the site useful? Does it serve a purpose?

It's not that every web site on the Internet needs to follow these guidelines. For example, it will be the case that un-intuitive navigation may occasionally be the intention, as in the practices of digital art. But these general rules will help ensure the design enhances the widest appeal and accessibility of the web site.

Criteria for evaluating academic and scientific web sites.

In addition to general criteria, those of us who use the Internet as a resource for scholarship are concerned with the merit of the information we find on the Internet. The following criteria are used to critically evaluate a web site's content and therefore inform design practices when building a reputable web site:

accuracy: How accurate is the information? (this is largely answered through establishing the credentials of the authors)
authority: Who is publishing the site?
objectivity: Is there a bias within the content?
currency: Is the site up to date? is the information current?
coverage: What topics and themes are discussed? What is the depth of coverage?

Good web design practice will ensure the answers to these questions are easily accessible to the user.

Web Design Philosophy

A web design philosophy explores the implications of digital space along five prominent themes of philosophic thought:

epistemology: How do web sites effect how we construct and justify claims to knowledge?
metaphysics: To what extent is there a distinction between a virtual identity and an embodied one?
phenomenology: How can web design facilitate the bracketing (or setting aside) of certain assumptions that underlie our perceptions of reality?
existentialism: How does our creation of a web site allow us to experience a radical freedom with no pre-defined essence, yet already constituted by our consciousness of it?
ethics: How can web design help us use (and create) the Internet in ways that will benefit the good of humans, society, the environment, and the future of technological innovation?

The persistent grappling with these issues inevitably informs the practice of my web design.