Browsers of the Future Browser of the Future Paul Jones
Under the ironic mantle "The End of the Browser," the Third International Browserday on Friday presented some 35 visions of the future of the information interface.
Far from being an insular techie gathering, organizers stage Browserday as an entertaining competition with a grand prize of a six-month internship at Medialab, a Dutch research organization. There, the winning prototype can be turned into a full-fledged program.
Held at Amsterdam's grandiose Paradiso concert hall, representatives from a dozen art and design academies throughout Europe each had three minutes to convince the audience of their creation's merits. They ranged from functional prototypes to wildly abstract digressions on the nature of information itself.
The two winners were Victor Vina of London's Royal College of Art for his text-filtering "HyperSPC" project, which prunes information back to its bare roots; and Henk Jan Bouwmeester for his "Dawn of the Browser" concept, a kind of portable, fold-up box that contains whatever data a user wants to fill it with.
