Chapter 4: Design, Emergence, Experience

This chapter presents a series of visual/rhetorical design tasks, highlighting the rhetorical and technological decision-making that each requires in order to emerge from networked digital production. Each task is as simple and abstract as possible: “simple” in the sense that each task could reasonably be expected to be a part of any Web page; “abstract” in that each task is treated apart from other visual elements of page design, which would necessarily add additional layers of complexity to the choices going into Web production. However, as the coordinated example demonstrates, any of the task solutions in this chapter can work on the same page, without disrupting each other.

There are often many possible solutions to any given design task in the Web medium that, under certain viewing conditions, appear identical. Throughout this chapter, there are numerous renderings that exhibit no visible difference whatsoever from other renderings on the same page. But each example responds to different readers’ technological conditions, and thus emerges in very different ways. Some of the solutions, like those to display a red square, could be combined to address multiple viewing contingencies. Others tasks, like replacing XHTML text with advanced typography, require the choice of one method over another. In some methods, the “best” solution with regard to the technology’s sustainability is the worst solution rhetorically, as in using the <object> tag to load content images—the more sustainable technological method of loading any media content (from images to Flash movies), but which will fail to load images in all versions of Internet Explorer, making it an ineffective visual rhetorical choice. And some tasks are only possible in conjunction with the choices made regarding other tasks, such as when applying a designed treatment to content images loaded in the image tag.

Then there are the tasks, like adding richly descriptive structure to a page or designing layouts that function independently of content, that can be addressed in multiple ways and seem, again, to have the same exact visual effect in a contemporary, compliant browser but that vary significantly for older or alternative equipment. Occasionally there are methods, like that of declaring a page’s character encoding, that are not as much about choice among many alternatives as they are about a digital producer’s being literate with the medium and choosing correctly (which means, in the case of character encoding in the WYSIWYG editor Dreamweaver, choosing something other than Dreamweaver’s default).

But for many, if not all, of the tasks presented in this chapter, the amount of control a digital producer has over page design is ultimately nowhere near the amount of control an end user’s device has (throughout the chapter, as in the rest of the dissertation, I refer to people as “users” in relation to their technology, and as “readers” in relation to their experience of a digital production). For just one example, the most talented digital producer cannot force a user’s device to display images if it is unable, or configured by the user not to.

In the methods of networked digital production presented here, a rhetorical, artful producer would choose among different methods of production for each task and settle on the one or two that best serve her rhetorical purposes as well as the needs and contingencies of a variety of users. In other words, this imagined producer would leave as little to chance as possible, enabling many alternative experiences of the artifact she creates.

Where chance erupts, then, is both the user’s body, particularly in case of blindness, and on the user’s machine: different operating systems, versions of various browsers, plus a wide variety of system settings, such as font smoothing or even the installation of various fonts. Given that users may not even know that there are multiple contingencies in their control and that the sheer number of contingencies make it impossible for a digital producer to account for them all, the production method examples offered in this chapter share a few basic assumptions:

• that all browsers should be served the same XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 2; no server-side “sniffing,” where a Web server attempts to identify the make and model of a user’s browser, is employed.
• that the production methods provide a readers an experience without forcing them to choose between, say, a text-only version of a site and a fully graphical one. The emergent, networked methods presented here adjust to the readers’ technological conditions—some gracefully, others not—providing, in the best cases, the rhetorically effective illusion that each page was created especially for each reader’s viewing conditions. (This is sort of like the messages that TV stations informing viewers that “This movie has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen.”—but, in the Web medium, without the explicit message explaining what has happened).
• that the preferred solutions to each problem are arrived at through code literacy and respect W3C standards for XHTML and CSS, negotiated against the pragmatic rhetorical situation of users equipped with browsers that ignore or misinterpret W3C standards.