doors6 - bio - butterfield

Adriaan Beukers
Ole Bouman
Stewart Butterfield
Ben Cerveny
Elisabeth Diller
Michael Douglas
Maya Draisin
Brian Eno
David Garcia
Marti Guixe
Adam Hyde
Ivo Janssen
Nathalie Jeremijenko
Lee Eng Lock
Winy Maas
Malcolm McCullough
Irene McWilliam
Sugata Mitra
Andre Oorebeek
Chris Pacione
Garry van Patter
Fiona Raby
Hani Rashid
Rick Robinson
Alexander Rose
Tiffany Shlain
Bruce Sterling
Lisa Strausfeld
John Thackara
Tjebbe van Tijen
Michael Waisvisz

STEWART BUTTERFIELD
Can high design values coexist with low bandwidth? Stewart Butterfield, Director of Vancouver-based Sylloge, decided to find out by throwing down the gauntlet to the digital design community. His 5K Awards challenge web creatives to come up with a page that weighs in at no more than 5K – an almost unthinkable idea at a time when the average multimedia-enhanced page consists of a heavyweight 80 to 120 K. "There's a lot of bloat on the web," he explains. "It's not about commercial web design for big companies." The entries on the 5K website show a wide variety of solutions, though several themes emerge: poetry (especially haikus), Piet Mondrian, and nostalgic games are particularly well represented. Some of the sites show an inventive elegance which proves Butterfield right – less really is more when it means engagement with the subject and attention to detail. At Doors 6, he presented some of the best entries from 2000 and considered how, and why, they work.