1993-2023. 30 years of Italian web interface design as a paradigm of digital artefacts’ history

It has been thirty years since the Web protocol created by Berners-Lee was made available royalty-free and led to the birth of the World Wide Web as a (future) mass media. Although in a peripheral position, Italy was among the “early adopters” of the digital revolution thanks to a strong infrastructure innovation creating favourable conditions to establish a technological context for the flourishing of websites as communication artefacts and an intriguing experimental field of design.Starting in the 80s, a series of initiatives, organisations, and companies contributed to this scenario. The convergence of the technical infrastructure, the launch of a fully visual browser (i.e. Netscape), and the introduction of the HTML tag , both by Marc Andreessen (1993), set the ideal conditions for a new generation of design artefacts and designers in the digital field. The paper proposes, drafts and discusses a possible Italian historiography of the last 30 years, treating web interface design as a contemporary digital artefact at the crossroads of transdisciplinary approaches: graphic design, computer science, and Human-Computer Interaction and as part of a wider interactive communication ecosystem. In doing that, it also faces aspects of research in the fields of contemporary design history. It questions from a methodological perspective the difficulties in researching digital sources in an ongoing environment and proposes a systematisation and critical mapping derived from the analysis of publications, curated books and manuals, magazines and scientific journals, awards, digital archives and repositories. Furthermore, it aims to discuss the consequences of switching from the canonical approach to historical research – based on archives, primary sources and documentation mainly in the form of written, printed, and sketched materials – to digitised, digitalised or digital-native sources. For their very nature, the latest ones appear to be subject to obsolescence, manipulation and disappearance, forcing researchers to interpret and write design history based on non-traditional sources and approaches.