Our goal was to give the School of Art a website that would change every day, with no staff to do this. To attract prospective students, an art school’s website should have just as much vitality as the art school itself. And for current students, faculty, and staff, an art school’s website should be as much a part of their shared lives as the school’s physical building is.
To accomplish these goals, we made the entire website editable and expandable by all 200+ students, staff, and faculty, with no training and using only a web browser. It’s a custom-built wiki that allows visual as well as textual expression through a system of versatile modules, which allow both a consistent identity for the site, and endless permutation and subversion of that identity.
This website and social experiment has been running strong for ten years and while it’s not always great, it often is great. It continues to feel new and is used in new ways each year by students, who have used the site to share events, publicize work, register protest, plan exhibitions, and start unofficial courses. In 2007, the website received the AIGA “365” Award. In 2010 it was declared “the year’s suckiest website” by Vincent Flanders. In 2012 it was featured as part of Linked by Air’s Jury Award in the Brno Graphic Design Biennial. Here is an interesting review from 2016.
