Can mould design a website?

[Melooon]

I was talking to someone recently about the Tokyo subway and how during its design and testing they used mould to simulate the optimal flow of organic life moving through the subway system. The mould did a very good job apparently and you can look at some videos like this one to understand more about the mould!

It got me interested though because recently the question of "what shape is digital space" has been on my mind. A digital space in this case is a website, but it could also be a game or even an audio experience. Anyway, when we design web-based digital spaces most of us follow a series of cliches or tropes that we have learned from other websites - e.g. pages are like rooms, navigation goes in bars, text goes in a block, there is always a central page that leads to subpages etc.

But why do we split information into these rooms? The splits that we do (like a page for music, a page for pomes etc) are entirely arbitrary and based on assumptions we have about how information is grouped. Equally the flow of a person's path to that information is based on a preconceived hierarchy of information that we are imposing on a webspace.

The strange thing about a website is that it has no literal form, anything can be anywhere - so why do essentially all sites end up with the same formula? Im sure there are lots of logical reasons, and I know many of them - but it makes me wonder if there might not be entirely new ways of organisation information that have just not been explored yet.

I also think it ties to how we design 3d / game worlds; why is every game attempting to simulate our reality?? There is no technical reason to do this, it's just a goal that we as a species have decided we want to pursue.

I suppose that gets back to the topics general question; if an entirely different form of life were to design a website, what would it do differently (if anything) and what could we learn from it 

[brisray]

An interesting thought about what websites could look like. Things are grouped as they are on most sites to make it easier for the visitor. Some blogs go another way of finding things using keywords, but I still find it annoying to find a page that starts off, "Part two of a series of 3 articles about..." - Where are the other two?

Another way I've seen things done are single page sites. I'm not too keen on those, especially the ones with parallax scrolling. Art agency sites are sometimes very inventive. Luckily, people have collected some of the best of these together such as Spinx, and Webflow but there are other collections.

I'm a great fan of early science fiction. In 1944, Frederic Brown wrote a story called Arena (a Star Trek episode was sort of based on that) and an even earlier story written in 1934 by Stanley Weinbaum called A Martian Odyssey both featured truely unique aliens. I suppose whatever websites the Rollers, Tweel, Barrel and Pyramid creatures made would end up looking similar to each other according to however the species organize information. The Pyramid creature sites would be interesting. In the story their thought processes are described as "2 + 2 != 4". They can think, but chaotically.

[Memory]

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[Melooon]

i'm going to be pedantic and ask how /would/ mold design a website? like the folks growing rat neurons to play DOOM; how would this be technologically achieved?

If I knew that then I would probably be mould  But it is a good way to approach the topic! Firstly, you could imagine that the mould must not only make a website, but also create the entire web infrastructure and computer system in its own way. In reality mould has already sorta done this - you can lookup forest mycelial networks which often exist in natural forests and consist of large fungal networks that appear to be able to transmit information that is passed on to plant roots and trees and vice versa.

Alternatively you could consider a website to be a purely human invention, in that case we would need to convert human information into mould information and then turn it into computer info for the website. For example you could take each important piece of information you want on your website, then represent that information as piles of oats arranged in a circle around a mould source - with more oats representing more important information. You could then allow the mould to grow, photograph the results and create a site based on the strongest areas of mould growth. The results would obviously be very dependent on how you setup your oats.

That’s why I asked “what shape is digital space” is a website a circle of oats? Is it a sphere of oats?? Or maybe it’s a doughnut of oats? Orrr maybe the oats are all floating around weightless? What if you put our oats and mould in a spaceship? (I actually think this might be the closest result to what a website is really like)

@brisray I like the sound of these pyramid creatures; I remember reading an early sci-fi (I forget its name) but it was about travelling above the clouds and discovering the sky was full of strange lighter-than-air squids and balloon creatures. It stuck with me; before most people could fly it must have really changed how they felt when they looked up.

[Kolo]

This isn't fully related, no... but the question of "Can mold design a website" leads me to the follow-up "what would mold post about?" To me a website is a vector for information, and to me the design of a site usually should present that information in some way - think about the presentation of the contents first, then work backwards, sort of thing. Humans value information transfer and it's a large part of our success as a species, so we tend to lay out sites for that information transfer purpose. Which, like, I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here.

So... what would mold want to post? Share? What would it choose as things of import, that it wanted to share with other mold? What interests it? What values does it have? What goals would it have? What does mold dream about...?

It's a cheap answer to say growth, or food, or something like that. All humans grow and all humans eat, and while there are sites discussing this, it's not a central nexus or anything. Many websites (and social media, even) are simply expressions of the self, sharing information about the self. A space for someone to make their own in a digital world - not just the physical, not just the literal room we sit in. We mirror it, sure, but people are drawn to making these digital spaces for themselves regardless of their physical. So there's something else there....

Tying back to the original question, I wonder... would mold's sites be impulsive, opportunistic? Random and unlinked, information sequestered as their interest explores an idea and then abandons or finishes understanding it? Would a human call this site unusable or crazy? Or would it be more like an adventure? Does a human's opinion of a mold's website even really matter?