Just because something is in the digital dimension does not mean that nobody built it with their hands. It is simply sensory deprivation. While your body sits in the tank, your mind is creating, you simply can’t feel anything as you are making it. When building websites, we often experience this phenomenon just like when making things to be printed. Printed matter goes through a similar creation process. You use InDesign to make a poster or a booklet or a zine and then you print it. However, with web design, we lose the final step. Even if you are only typing on a keyboard, you probably used a pen and paper to write down or sketch out your ideas, therefore a part of your website creating was physical. There is still a need [for some] to feel a physical connection to the space around us even when what we are creating does not require it. But then how is a website an object if there is not a physical ending to the project? You don’t have to press print and then cry in the design lab, so what makes a website an object or how can we make it an object?

Growing up with my mum as a UX designer and my dad as a programmer, I thought of design as ‘how can you make going from point A to B, point A being opening the program and point B being accomplishing the task that the program is there for, as easy and intuitive as possible?’ With an object, there isn’t always a task to be performed. With abstract sculptures there is never a task, unless that task is confusing and making things up. Now I’m expanding my idea of what A to B means. Why does it have to be so linear? It’s similar to small notions of life and time. They are both thought of as linear but I constantly find myself reminded of things in the past or going full circle. An object doesn’t have to be experienced in a linear manner, and websites seldom are. A website further breaks the linear rules when you ask: how does a website age? It will continue to work until it isn’t supported anymore and needs to be updated. Is there a way we can measure a website’s age more than simply, when did it first go online? Carpenter says that she won’t update her website until out-of-date design is no longer cool, there is nothing new under the sun, we are passed the point of originality in which the concept of ‘time is linear’ truly crumbles.

There are many similarities between objects and websites, everything has nuance and abstraction and soon you can find yourself sitting in a first year critique repeating the same words over and over again. You can apply what you want to whatever you want. Regardless of what an object is, or a task is, you will inherently apply your own lens to it. Can we draw a conclusion to this or are we stuck in confusion?