"The viewer should experience a dilemma: is it serious or not? Real or not? For critical design to be successful, viewers need to make up their own mind." — Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne from Speculative Everything
You will create a fully-formed website that pretends to be something that it is not. While "hoax" can often be a one-liner trick or joke, the goal of your hoax website is instead to construct a universe — perhaps one you'd like to inhabit. Consider making a website for a hypothetical school, event, institution, club, invention, startup, etc. The pairing of content to the site should reveal a thought experiment in the form of exaggeration, criticism, hyperreality, speculative design, etc. While I invite you to have fun, please be mature about the intentions of your hoax and aware of the impact your hoax may have on others.
While this project is meant to utilize your imagination, it will also allow you to hone your practical skills. Your hoax website will need to look "believable" to work, so making a website that behaves as others do today in 2016 will be important. Therefore, your website must be responsive (viewable at all breakpoints: 320, 480, 600, 768, 1024 px).
To get yourself in the mindset of this project, I would like you to:
Listen to this podcast "Show of Force" about the “deception unit” that employed artists during World War II.
Writing response and wireframe — due Tuesday, April 5
After absorbing both pieces of media (above), write a paragraph response or ask three questions. Think about the connections between the two and your personal opinion on both. Please paste your response in Week 12 Google Doc before 6pm on Tuesday.
Additionally, create two concepts for the hoax website. You will produce a wireframe/sketch of each concept, beginning with the home page.
Mid-Project Review — due Tuesday, April 26
Your site should be online and basically functioning as intended. This will allow us to troubleshoot design and code issues in class and give you the final week to fine tune the elements of the site.
Final — due Thursday, May 5
Final review of site.
Adapted from Laurel Schwulst's project.