The existence of the World Wide Web has, from a current vantage point, an extraordinarily short history. The web came into existence at CERN only in the early 1990s. But its conceptual history stretches back much further than the technology necessary to realise it.1 One of the pressing problems it has been seen to address, ‘information overload’, was so named only in 19702 but, as a very apparent widespread condition in all institutions in society, it too had been driving the development of the hypertext systems we now embrace from earlier times. Long-distance cooperative and collaborative work involving multiple contributing correspondents in multilateral communication also has a much longer history than the web.3 Historically, we can see the evidence in linear activities and where there is a request for information and an instruction or piece of information is sent in response; and also in the wonderful collections of letters from the past in which creative souls test and share ideas with their contemporaries. Architects and designers in academia leapt at the opportunity to experiment in collaborating through electronic link-ups before the establishment of the web. In 1988 computer-supported cooperative work was a new but already wide-ranging technical and sociological research field. From that time on university-based designers started to establish ‘virtual design studios.’4 In the late 1980s and early 1990s electronic mail was hailed as the greatest of networking tools, not as yet a channel of signal-drowning noise. In the late 1990s electronic mail was at last becoming mainstream outside academic environments. Hence it was email that acted as the site for feverish creative exchange on a number of projects at the time, among them a project that drew together a group of individuals from many organisations in architecture, mathematics, programming, structural engineering, electronic engineering, ballistics, pneumatics and more, distributed almost evenly around the globe. This was dECOI’s Aegis hyposurface project, a risk-taking experiment not only in inventive and artistic terms but in its exploration of a wholly new type of creative practice underpinned by computer-supported communication. Aegis is the competition-winning kinetic interactive wall designed as an art installation for the entrance to the Hippodrome theatre in Birmingham, then in design.5 The design phases from original competition entry to full-size working prototype spanned the period from late 1998 to 2001. The diverse and dispersed nature of the team was as novel as its objectives. It came together from a range of academic institutions, architecture and engineering practices, and manufacturing-based design. The roles were new and negotiated, and fitted no familiar artistic, architectural,
industrial design or engineering pattern for design or realisation. Electronic mail was the default medium of communication and, in the absence of a more formal system of knowledge capture and management, the main common resource for the project. Informal observation of the communication throughout this project – the challenges of working and creating in a team where many of the contributors never met face to face, had to negotiate their roles with different disciplinary foci, had quite different levels of familiarity with different media of communication from computer code to animation and even ascribed different meanings to the same term – led afterwards to an Australian Research Council grant application by universities to investigate tools to support design collaboration. Clearly, a shared democratic web-based communication environment should be able to improve life, leading to a world where project information accumulates and is searchable, but also perhaps to a world that is a partially ‘proactive’ environment that brings together related topics and documents, unobtrusively contextualising and raising participants’ awareness of what has gone before. Wiki presents itself as ‘the simplest online database that could possibly work’ (as defined by Ward Cunningham, the original creator). Already, as we write, a world without Wikipedia6 seems unimaginable. It is perhaps the closest thing in existence to HG Wells’ vision of an encyclopaedic, crossreferenced ‘shared brain’. Memex is now real. Coincidentally, and perhaps fortuitously for us, Wikipedia came into existence in January 2001, the month the research proposal for investigating tools to support communication in design collaboration was submitted. This research was carried out in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL), a centre set up at RMIT University in 2001 to research innovation in the practice of design that brings together many disciplines and explores the appropriation of new technologies and techniques across discipline lines to put them to new use. It is led by Mark Burry, whose application of parametric design using aeronautical software to the modelling of Gaudí ’s Sagrada Famí lia church has been an exemplar of the potential in this way of working. It has a broad research base, ranging from space as information (design of virtual spaces for interaction, communication and presentation of complex system information) to information as space (exploring new ways of modelling and communicating design information for construction and fabrication, and experimental affective technique). With a particular emphasis on the nexus between research, practice and education (rather than simply any two of these) the communication network supporting any of the
Andrew Burrow, Wiki map: detail of the network Each node is labelled with the name of the page it represents; each edge represents a link between two pages, directed from the text of a page to a referenced page. The proximity of pages is measured in links; if you pass through many pages in tracing the links from one page to another they are distant and might be expected to have only distantly related content.
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