Ben Koditschek — Creative Designer

I joined forces with my good friend Silas Reeves in what was originally to be a simple re-design of a flash timeline based on Philip Meggs’ famous History of Graphic Design. However, the project quickly became something much greater. The democratizing power of crowdsourcing and user-generated content,had captivated our imaginations. We decided that instead of focusing our efforts on a simple timeline, we would re-engineer the way design history was itself constructed. The goal was now to produce the plans for a design history web app, code named “meggs2.0”.

In meggs2.0, the design-historical canon is decided upon by all contributors. Each user has the ability to tag and rank the importance of existing work, as well as the ability to upload new work. These Individual pieces of design work are the fundamental building blocks with which are tagged and categorized into author groups or movements. Users can create their own chapters by saving a selection of related works with a title and description that others can browse through. When navigating through this vast collection, time is not necessarily the central method of organization. Rather, works can be viewed as points of data on a chart that charts location, artist, and movement, or by the tags it possesses, such as “blackletter” by “german”.