Just Browsing.

The Third International Browserday competition in Amsterdam this May gave fifty-two design students the chance to present their visions of the future of Web navigation--in exactly three minutes each. Fortunately, no one needed to waste precious seconds lamenting either the current state of browsing and Web design or the increasingly corporate character of the Internet: This crowd took all that to granted. The brainchild of Amsterdam's Society for Old and New Media Browserday was born of a growing dissatisfaction with the way browsers like Internet Explorer interpret HTML codes (narrowly) and display information (with banner ads attached).

The competitors' alternatives to the "graphical" model registered a broad network of utopianism, desire, and anxiety about the potential of new media. Advocates of text-based utility and design clarity (Victor Vina's elegant and practical "HyperSPC" project, a prizewinner this year, stores text in linked squares on the desktop) vied with evangelists of visually and metaphorically enriched environments (in Vassil lliev's dreamlike project, "you are the browser"; in Louis Luthy's "Backwards," you are the browsed). Many designs attempted to reinvent the software wheel; other offered flights of fancy, like Myriel Milicevic and Axel Ebert's "Quantum Browser." Which promises to collect and process all information everywhere "even faster than immediately." But after five hours of presentations. Shunjien Tibor's cathartic "Parasite" browser had the most appeal. Munching HTML tags, subverting documents, and burning up icons, "Parasite" was the perfect antidote to information fatigue. In January 2001, a New York Brows erday will challenge designers on the other side of the Atlantic. The browser is dead, long live the browser.