A little internet

Prototypes for a lighter internet

The project 'Prototypes for a lighter internet' describes a collaborative exploration across the Netherlands and Armenia that resulted in a two week-long workshop for teenagers at The TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan – a free-of-charge educational program that puts teens in charge of their own learning.

The aim of the project was to creatively and critically explore contemporary challenges that come with building and participating in contemporary internet culture in a manner that is sustainable and equitable. Data centers, cable networks, always-on devices (e.g. routers and phones) that allow us to be connected via the Internet have huge energy requirements. Moreover, the mining required to source materials for required chips inside our hardware is exhausting the earth and is the cause for geopolitical tensions. With the development of the proposed project we aim to critically and artistically explore the social and environmental implications of internet technologies with a hands-on practical approach and from the perspective of those who will be most affected by the rising threats of climate change – kids and youngsters.

Our collaborative mission!

Participants joined the H&D collective for two weeks for an intensive research trajectory and worked together on developing prototypes for a lighter, less wasteful internet. The learning lab was process-driven, giving space for playful trial and error, guided by hacking principles, The question we researched is:

"Why is the internet so heavy? (And what can we do about it?)"

Through hands-on prototyping we worked our way towards building and imagining a lighter, less wasteful internet, and explored the limits and unexpected possibilities of such a small internet. Along the way we proposed many exercises to get reduce kb, and traced every step of the collaborative research project, document successful and failed experiments, to share with each other and the world.

Outcomes

We made a series of prototypes for a lighter internet consisting of:

• Energy-efficient local network for TUMO
• Websites that are programmed with efficiency, accessibility and low bandwidth in mind
• Low-res digital imagery that communicate 'more with less' bytes, that can be used on the web as well as in print.
• Collaborative code documentation

Methods exercises

The two-week long curriculum broke the question of creating prototypes for a lighter internet into smaller chunks and exercises.

Tooling Days

Participants could choose one of three "Tooling Tracks" that they could be follow for a short period at the beginning of the curriculum:

1. Small images, compression, low-res graphics
2. Accessible and Sustainable approaches to HTML, CSS and JS
3. Building the required hardware and connecting the whole toolchain

The skills and knowledge acquired within these tracks were then brought together in the development of group projects.

Miscellaneous Exercises

Some of the exercises explored during the curriculum

Throwing: Situated Deployment

The most challenging part of the workshop would be to think together about situations the prototypes would be deployed in and their urgencies