Founding Team Roles
Davide Zhang: Conceptual Research (Open Source Culture), Web Design and Development
Emily Majors: Conceptual Research (Unfinishedness, Authorship), Social Media Management, Visual Design
Introduction
Version Control is an experimental research project funded by Harvard Graduate Schoo of Design and aims to inquire into open-source culture in the field of design. Our research results will be manifested potentially via publications, exhibitions, and a new collaborative platform that empowers creators to showcase, collaborate, and critique others' unfinished work with version tracking.
In our first phase of development, we are interested in fostering a discourse about the state of unfinishedness, prompted by the dissatisfaction we often feel at the end of a semester with many discarded versions of our work and several ends left loose on the "final" version. In this phase, we ask contributors to reflect on their nearly forgotten iterations, prematurely terminated ideas, half-baked concepts, works in progress, or any variation of the incomplete.
The second phase introduces the idea of "version control" via the incorporation of version history and tracking into the web platform. Playing off of the software engineering term, "version control," we aim to create a space in which file revisions can be "compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged."
Ultimately, we hope to bring open-source culture to the field of design via a new collaborative platform, among other initiatives, that not only tracks version history but cultivates a community for connecting like-minded creators and acts as a catalyst for collaboration and project acceleration.
