For the history of interface design. The Italian Government Interface: from the Spoils System to the Guidelines (1997–2022)
Gianni Sinni & Ilaria Ruggeri
The first website of the Presidency of the Council, created and managed externally by the Italian Journalistic Agency (AGI), was presented to the public for the first time in September 1997. As Claudio Caprara and Lucio Picci describe, it was configured as the typical “showcase site ”, the result of a journalistic conception of the web and not at all integrated with the “concrete work of the building” (Caprara & Picci, 2001). Created by the Prodi Government with the coordination of the then Undersecretary of the Prime Minister and Head of the “Information and Publishing” area, Arturo Parisi, those first web pages, with the images mounted on the classic gray background of the early days of Html, represented, however, an important technological advance considering that in 1998 the only wired part of Palazzo Chigi — the large four-storey historic Government building — were the three rooms of the Prime Minister’s secretariat. Executives and officials could access the Internet only using generally obsolete modems, and for the majority of employees the “network” had at most, as we recall with undisguised irony, a fishing significance (Caprara & Picci, 2001).
In 1996, in fact, for the general public, the internet was still an unknown quantity. The arrival of Windows 95 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer were progressively making the web more accessible and more people wanted to get involved in websites starting to to experiment with its possibilities (Ford & Wiedemann, 2019, p. 30). In 1997 Macromedia released Flash, a software that allowed you to create vector graphics and animations overcoming the limits of the HTML language and allowing you to experiment with the expressive and narrative potential of the web. These are also the years in which the first reflections on web design are formulated. Giovanni Anceschi (1997), in the first review on Italian web design, underlined the maturing of a “rhetorical or rather directorial awareness” and the shift of attention from the technical structure to look and feel and multisensory quality, while Erik Spiekermann (1999) highlighted its narrative capacity: “a good website has to tell a compelling story, lest it bore any but the hardcore information seekers”.
In Italy, it was in the months following the fall of the Prodi Government (October 1998), with the Inauguration of the D’Alema Government (21 October 1998–22 December 1999), that a process of organization and definition of the project for the Government website was started.
[…]
