Tending the Webpage
What if a website could be watered? Pruned? Left to overgrow?
Drawing on the feeling of cozy games and the spirit of the early web, this workshop reimagines interaction through the lens of maintenance and care. Participants design and build small tools in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that act on a shared live webpage using gardening and tending as metaphor. Together, we tend a collective garden in real time, where every participant's tool leaves a mark on the webpage.
Each tool can be dragged to a plot for its effect. Ripen was made by Daphne Hsu; Flower + Lawnify by Nicci Yin, Plant by Fiona Dy, Propagate by Fredo Herrera, Cross-Pollinate by Lauren Tsao, and Tiller by mary oleary. Real-time sync built with Partykit.
Related Research:
Each participant chose a garden—physical, digital, real, or imagined—and annotated it. We imagined what inhabits these gardens, how people would move through the space, and generated actions/verbs to inspire the tools we designed.
We treated storyboards as "maps for our code," designing the logic and step-by-step behavior.
