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housekeeping 
01.12.2007, 2:25 PM
I want to air a few thoughts about how the Institute presents itself to the world, in particular the organization and design of our websites.
If this little planning page is the Institute's "back porch," then if:book is the front stoop -- our main public hangout. Beyond the stoop, up the stairs and through the door, is our main site, which for a while now has felt more like Miss Havisham's house than a proper, well tended home. Things there have ground to a halt. The exhibition and link pages are untended, the mission statement gathers cobwebs, the page describing our projects is conspicuously out of date. The one breath of life is the window in the center column on the front page that automatically pulls in the latest content from the blog. It's the blog that's keeping things going. But is that enough?
Perhaps because it has been an effective-enough tool for so many different facets of our work, we've become comfortable with the idea that if:book can serve as discourse central for the Institute. We never intended for it to assume this pivotal role, but within the first few months of blogging it became obvious that working in the open, in close to real time, was a much more interesting way to develop ideas and document projects for a 21st-century insitute. It also seemed to be the portal through which most people (at least the more interesting ones) were finding their way to us. Seb Mary being case in point. Most important, the blog made us feel (and still does despite our mounting dissatisfaction with the form) that we're part of a larger conversation spanning across the web and beyond. Home pages are relatively static structures while a blog feels more like a living discussion. So we've rolled happily along, embracing the blog as our primary outlet while our main house drifted further and further into neglect.
One might be tempted to say at this point that we should just ditch the home page altogether and be a fully blog-based organization. But there are clearly a number of things that the blog does not do well and I fear that we're shutting out a lot of people and possibilities as a result. First off, as has been grumbled about in numerous posts, blogs are shitty at dealing with time. Their daily diary format works fine for covering the news cycle, or the development of a software project, or for stream of conscious ramblings, but it's pretty rotten for tracing the development of big ideas over an extended period since all but the most recent posts get relegated to the obscurity of the archives. Categories and tags try in their limited way to address the problem, but for a site as eclectic as ours, and for a group of people that generally prefers to do a thing first and understand it later, all attempts at taxonomic discipline have more or less tanked.
Week after week, month after month scrolls by and all sorts of complex patterns and interlinking threads develop, but the site exists in a perpetual present that is difficult for all but the most determined to break through. To people just stumbling upon us, there's a feeling of an insider conversation going on that's hard to break into. The ideas all seem in mid-stride and it's not at all clear how or where to get up to speed. As a result, we're constantly having to explain and re-explain ourselves. In part, this is the healthy byproduct of perpetual self-definition ("book" is a word that can be endlessly unpacked) but it's also due to the lack of any clear, prominently featured overview of our philosophy, not to mention a comprehensive catalogue of our projects. The mission statement comes the closest to doing this, but I think we could write something much more electrifying and original, and in a form that engages the content in a more direct way.
There must be a way to redesign the home site, so as to capture the Institute's work and ideas at a slower time signature than the blog. A way to draw on if:book's dynamism and funnel it into a more stable and accessible form that will be useful for anyone who wants to get a sense of us of our work and ideas as a whole. I'm not sure what this would look like... A library? A gallery? A map? A manifesto linking out in multiple directions? That's one of the things I'd like to discuss at this retreat, although I certainly don't want to get bogged down in info architecture minutiae. Rather, I think we should draw on the first-order questions that Bob raised, and Sol glossed, and that the rest of us have begun to address in our comments and see how those can be channeled into a more tangible framework. One thing I'd like to figure out -- and I'm particularly looking to Rebeca and Josh for inspiration -- is a visual concept for the Institute. Not so much a brand as a structure -- a shape or pattern -- that will provide a better way into our universe and more fully express who we are.
Posted by ben vershbow at January 12, 2007 2:25 PM
Comments
This is prime example of one area that I am personally concerned with here at the Institute: what our relationship is with design, and particular graphic/web design and information architecture. It's the problem that undergirds our troubles with conversation, with our presentation on the website, with pretty much every project that comes our way (except Sophie - though a case could be made there too).
A few minutes of discussion with Rebeca Mendez last spring really opened my eyes to our lack of internal design capability. It's something I've been thinking about constantly since my rebecca has been in school. Design can make a huge difference.
I know that we have so many concerns already (having to do with the role of authorship, changes in writing, etc.) that trying to establish the place of graphic design in the context of our other concerns may be a needlessly complicating factor. But I maintain that regular discourse with a good designer will be beneficial in many ways beyond making our project output look better.
Posted by: Jesse Wilbur at January 12, 2007 4:39 PM
Another concern (this probably deserves a separate post):
Level of finished production vs. experimentation. How much do we want to focus on making a polished presentation of our projects? Of the institute?
Or do we present the institute as a group with a loose confederation of interests and a few unifying themes that does projects that arrive haphazardly.
The answer is probably somewhere along the continuum between the two. But to which side do we lean?
Posted by: Jesse Wilbur at January 12, 2007 4:46 PM