Epi-Centres of the World Wide Web: 30 years of Italian Web Interface Design History, a Critical Investigation

Bollini, Letizia and Guida, Francesco E. (2024) Epi-Centres of the World Wide Web: 30 years of Italian Web Interface Design History, a Critical Investigation. In: P/References of Design. Cumulus conference proceedings series, 1 . Cumulus Association, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest, Budapest, pp. 227-240. ISBN 978-952-7549-03-5

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Abstract

When we think of the third industrial revolution, namely the digital one, we have Silicon Valley in mind. The southern area of the San Francisco Bay is where, back in 1969, Stanford University launched the ARPANET, the first seed of the Internet revolution, and many of the pioneering and contemporary companies driving the digital turn, as well as most of the innovation in the field comes from California. Nevertheless, the WWW backbone and the globalisation brought up by the Internet have declined in the different regions according to a glocal perspective, creating a relationship between the centre and the peripheries that should be critically investigated. Although in a borderline position, Italy was among the early adopters thanks to a technological infrastructure that created favourable conditions to establish a context for the flourishing of website design communities of practitioners and experimentation in the field. Besides, some of the Italian protagonists of the 90s and early 2000s gained visibility on the international scene and established original trends in the Italian community. The paper proposes, drafts, and discusses a possible Italian historiography of the last 30 years, treating web interface design as a contemporary digital artefact at the crossroads of transdisciplinary approaches: graphic design, computer science, and Human-Computer Interaction. In doing that, it also faces aspects of research in the fields of contemporary design history able to propose different perspectives and trace down different stories compared to the official mythology of the Information Age. The historical approach, in fact, questions the relationship between global and local actors, decolonising the vulgate in order to include decentralised experiences enriching with points of view a complex, articulated, interconnected, but not monolithic evolutionary process as narrated so far.

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