Johann Spindler

Sandcastles is a project on and about the internet. In several parts, it investigates the current state of the internet as a space that is often opaque and intentional, and yet designed in a way that is increasingly uniform. In a series of podcasts and a research booklet, it reflects on the history, nature and design of websites, while through the website itself, Sandcastles prototypes more explorative and open-ended alternatives of what the internet could look like.

For the most part, design on the internet works for the straightforward tasks it´s made for. Templated design and increased speeds make accessing tutorials, comparing products or checking out in an online store easy. These kind of tasks don´t require us to think, and strides around UI/UX seem to have made our active involvement even less essential. When this generation picks up a new piece of technology, we don´t need to read a user manual or consult an expert. The same is true of websites. However, the fact that we immediately understand what we need to do could be not just because UI/UX design is so advanced, but instead because we are actually passive and being engaged with, or because the technologies (and the websites) we´re using aren´t actually that different. For the tasks above this isn´t a problem. They have clear, ethically unambiguous goals which this same kind of design is great at achieving. But for those for which the goal is less clear, like building communities on social media, accessing correct information using search engines or using the internet as a medium for creative or personal expression, these goals become less clear, and increasingly similar design will limit those options.

The Sandcastles website was created from scratch and with the help of David Breuer, who did almost all the programming on the website, while I took care of the front end. This being the first programming heavy project in this form was a massive challenge, but in some sense this goes to show how the existence of templates disincentivizes the creative use of design on websites and the difficulty of creating truly unique designs and information structures online.

For this website I created a series of modular and interchangable glyph systems, some of which are animated, sonic or metaphorical, others that actually change the way we interface with a website, such as the non-hierarchical glyph system above (which, instead of arranging a certain number of glyphs in an intended order and hierarchy, creates a navigational system that is more free and gestural). Another aspect I incorporated into the final website is the use of a synchronous interface, creating a website that exists between devices and whose information is interchangeable and interdependent. Through the smartphone implementation, which is accessed through the QR code on start-up, the designs of the website are adjustable, which finally also changes the approach to the information displayed on the website and the way the podcasts are experienced.

Along with the podcasts, much of the research for this project is documented in a research and design booklet. Similar to the way Paul Rand created booklets for his brand identities, I created this research booklet to include some of the rationale behind the design decisions for the website. It also includes thoughts and summaries of thoughts around computers and computer networks. It covers everything from why certain colors were chosen to the history linking cyberneticists to the counterculture movement, and explores the ways in which design, history and culture on the internet are related.

Lying Awake Dreaming is a personal project and a visual journal of my experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. It documents my time back in Germany during the first lockdown and my return back to London. It documents a shared experience of solitude and isolation and an event that is and was as much invisible as always present. Photography for this project meant both bridging the challenges of photographing with limited access to the outside world as well as a tool to overcome and as a cathartic practice.

During this past year at RCA I had the chance to collaborate with students from all different pathways on a variety of projects. This included fashion shoots, collaborative films as well as the design of booklets and posters. This section is just a cross section of some of these projects. All images are made by me, the creators of works and models are in order of appearance: Fashion by Bea Brücker, modeled by Karjai Lisbie, Kaiden Ford, Esther Durotolu, Lulu Wang, photography and lighting by me. Performance film developed in cooperation with Lulu Wang, filming and photography by me, with garments by Nicole Kaminska and music by Adam Dove; Fashion by Hyejin Ko, book design and photography by me, Photography for Siobhan Palin, Jenny Choi, Bolim Jeon, Anna Deller-Yee and Nirav Beni