Without Form is a new virtual exhibition space which will showcase the experimental work of London College of Communications students and alumni.
Website Development
Without Form
Fine art
2023
A low impact, accessible site – without compromising the experience
Championing experimental work at LCC.
The brief
Art can – and must – respond to the climate and ecological emergency: not only through our practice, but through the ways in which we exhibit and celebrate our work.
The internet consumes a lot of electricity – 416.2TWh per year. That’s more than the entire United Kingdom. Our challenge was to create a low impact, accessible site – without compromising the experience or the work of exhibitors.
Its creation has been a collaboration between ourselves, the designers at OPX, the London College of Communication Exhibitions Team and recently graduated students from the Information and Interface Design course.
Overview
We set out with a target weight for the full populated site of 5MB. At launch the site is 480.86kb – just under half a megabyte.
By prompting users to consider their browsing decisions we can educate and inform.
Design decisions that matter
Buttons are flat, so they can be created via code rather than an image, and no background images or textures are used. Colour is minimal, selected to minimise the amount of light emitted by the screen. A compromise to create a richer experience was to use simple animations in the background of pages. These animations can be turned off to further reduce the size of the site and enable users to see the difference this makes to their carbon footprint.
Changing behaviours
We developed an algorithm to calculate the amount of energy being used dynamically in real time as a user is engaging with the website. This is then logged to the overall total every time you refresh the page.
“Without Form Space has proven to be an incredible achievement that I will cherish as one of the first official projects of my career.”
