The Anti-Brief

Module 2

Websites as Plants
that Grow and Thrive

—

Tim Rodenbröker reflecting on an Essay by Laurel Schwulst

I often have conversations with my students about why it actually matters to learn to code. In these times, programming as a craft seems to be under threat: AI can write code, and it is actually not bad. Often it’s even technically good! But nevertheless, the assumption that programming could become obsolete is not just short-sighted. To the worst: it is simply built on top of premises that are ultimately just PR of large companies (I remember NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang preaching the end of programming).

What does programming actually mean in 2025? There’s a whole universe of answers to this question. In this text, I want to look at this question through the lens of an essay I really love. In it, artist, creative technologist and educator Laurel Schwulst talks about hand-coded websites.

She frames the website as a medium, not just for communication, but for personal thriving:

To those creative people who say “I don’t need a website,” I ask: why not have a personal website that works strategically, in parallel to your other activities? How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? How can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? How can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?

I think many people are tempted to say at this point: Fine, then I’ll get a subscription to a no-code tool (like Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, for example) and start to build my own “house” on the web. Or I’ll use AI to do that for me. But this is the trap, because as long as we do not write the code ourselves and understand what it does, we are actually building a house on a foreign property.

I know this is overwhelming: As website creators, we do not only have to care about the content, but also about the system behind. And if a paid or free service does that for that for us, is that necessarily bad? I think the question should be, why we necessarily want to be efficient about such a personal project and why do we want to use a template to determine what our website should be? Because through the broad possibilities of web technologies, our websites can be much more than just presentations of content. But to get the ability to really understand and use their potencial, we have to learn how they work. I love how Laurel puts it:

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

So why rushing your website project? Why not taking time and creating something that really suits you and enables you to thrive? Why should we actually want to shorten and accelerate this journey, this beautiful adventure?

A website is like a plant. It grows and it thrives. It’s never done. You can have as many websites as you want. A website can be a calm medium of contemplation, but it doesn’t have to be. it can be anything – if you let it. Learning HTML, CSS and Javascript is a subversive act of self-empowerment.

I’d love to see a beautiful network of handmade websites circling around the big questions emerging within our master for societal design.

My own website is vivid garden of ideas circling around design, technology and philosophy. What could be yours?

Reflections from Tim: 

Questions that I am responding to:
2.3 How can we design respectful, generative dialogues?
2.2 What are the languages of contextual design?
4.3 How can designers be creatively strategic?

The relationship between this text and Tim:
Tim uses websites for personal thriving and as experimental media since two decades. He has built an online ecosystem for learners in Creative Coding, prototypes and proposals for life-enobling social media platforms, digital gardens and much more. Tim loves websites and advocates for learning web technologies since the beginning of his career as a creative coding educator.

Why is this relevant?
In these times when huge companies try to determine the trajectory of the internet through extractive incentives, building one’s own website, slowly and independently, is an act of resistance. The hand-coded website is a subversive medium by nature. When it contains hyperlinks to other sources (like this article), it creates a network of nodes, of calm places, outside of the noisy information inferno of social media.

Questions for the students:

  1. What is your opinion of code as a medium and tool?
  2. Would you be willing to take the plunge and learn coding, even if it takes time?
  3. What could stop you from doing so?
  4. What is your image of a website as a medium?
  5. What would a website that you enjoy working on look like?
  6. What project is still lying dormant in your drawer that you would like to show the world?
  7. Could a website be just the right medium for it?