The Great British Design Quest

The BBC’s Culture Show and the Design Museum are currently running a quest to find the public’s favourite British design icon. From a list of 25 choices, the first stage of voting by the public has now narrowed it down to 10.

 

There are some obvious, and (to my mind) well-deserved, contenders there, for example, Giles Gilbert Scott’s K2 Telephone kiosk, Douglas Scott’s Routemaster, Harry Beck’s map of the London Underground, and Percy Shaw’s Catseye.

 

There are also some bizarre choices: two video games have made it into the top ten: Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto – the latter seemingly a game that glorifies killing people, stealing cars and vandalising property. Charming. No wonder society is going to the dogs.

 

Be that as it may, for me there can be only one choice, and that is Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. It strikes me that this candidate has a handicap compared with most of the others in the list – it’s not a physical object. It’s actually two complementary specifications – one for describing how web pages are constructed, and one describing how that information is carried over the Internet. An analogy would be with the DNA that forms the underpinning of all life on earth – whether the end result is a cat, a monkey, a human, a fly or a bacterium, all those organisms rely on DNA for their existence. Similarly, the specifications at the heart of the World Wide Web are the DNA behind all the information contained in the World Wide Web. And these specifications are the DNA of digital darwinism – the driving force behind the continuing and relentless evolution of the Web. I think that puts Berners-Lee’s invention into a category of its own. Other design icons have (mostly) had their day – but the WWW will continue to evolve and affect the lives of billions of people. Vote for the WWW today!