Domains as a Digital Sandbox
I grew up playing sandbox games. Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, SimCity, The Sims, you name it– if I could make something without too many rules, and it didn’t require the internet (what?!), I played it. In elementary school, I would sit down in front of my clunky Gateway monitor almost every day after classes and disappear for hours into the creation of zoos, theme-parks, and mansions for both the residents of my virtual spaces and myself. These games offered me creative, virtual worlds in which I was given the freedom and tools to build expressive spaces of my own.
The Domain of One’s Own project out of the University of Mary Washington seems to me a modern intersection of this creativity and play in a digital setting. We could imagine it as a “digital sandbox” where we can experiment and create on our own time, alone or with others. Georgetown University’s Domains, for example, offers plenty of backend options ranging from Wordpress to Omeka for students who want to create new online spaces, and we’re allowed to create as many subdomains as we would like, for free, while in undergrad. However, the way that we currently imagine Domains as a creative online space poses a problem for the amount of freedom students have to create.
Caught Between Two Worlds
I see Domain of One’s Own as a groundbreaking, but complicated, space for its two main characteristics: it is a project centered around creativity, and it is online. It allows students to understand their data as they create it, to become versed in the language of the digital while navigating forms of self-expression. But this dual identity also complicates Domains, and has limited the ways in which I have seen it used.
If I think of other acts of creative self-expression, most of them are slow-paced and private. Aside from my offline sandbox games, I think of the hours one spends in art studios, drawing, or writing without worrying the final product to perfection for an audience. Processes are slow in these creative worlds; journaling does not result in the best journal entry ever, but becomes a space to which I can turn over the course of a week to express and better understand myself.
These acts require learning the tools, methods and execution — and dealing with unavoidable mess-ups and false-starts — in order to fully create. They do not require audiences to be productive.
Online spaces for self-expression are different. They are quick, curatorial creative spaces with intended audiences and pre-determined structures. My LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and course blogs become methods of curating my presence in the digital, for communicating myself to others.
Slow time in my offline virtual worlds is contrasted with the fast pace of interconnected online spaces, where anything that I create — usually within minutes — can be liked, retweeted, shared, or just scrolled past. Self-expression in these online spaces becomes a curation for an audience within the confines of the structures built for me and that I know how to use from the start. Curation online happens much, much faster than creation offline (save the course blog perhaps, but this is a novel blend of homework-turned-digital).
The Trouble with Digital + Creative Expression
Domains projects sit in this contradictory space. They are paradoxically thought of as creative, cumulative projects meant for self-discovery and expression and as quick assemblies, like the basic WordPress posts, Twitter biographies or Facebook profiles that populate our digital worlds. I’ve seen reluctance on the student’s behalf to build a Domain because of the background knowledge and time commitment that is required to do so, requirements which are antithetical to our other, pre-configured online spaces.
As a result, students get frustrated when their “final” Domains look like Web 1.0 projects rather than interactive, colorful, sleek websites, and leave them on university servers, untouched, to gather digital dust. If some computer science majors spend their entire undergraduate careers understanding <the language of code>, the reasoning goes, how can a student who wants to create online but is working within the constraints of a 15-week semester concentrate on both displaying the content and configuring the form?
Further, Domains follows in the footsteps of online creations that are outward-facing. They are not personal in the sense of work created for — and by — the student exclusively, even in their situations of address. When a student feels the need to present in a way that models past precedents in online or academic spaces, these precedents limit her creative expression and ownership in the digital.
If we are talking about student ownership, empowerment, and reflection with Domains, it seems fair that this creative process exist “offline,” at least in the sense that the student can develop tools in time to create a space for herself first, and others second.
My Domain is a Sandbox
Instead of leaving Domains in this contradictory space, we could imagine it as a digital sandbox. This requires disassociating Domains from other digital spaces and academic projects, to refigure it as a slow, building process of creativity that lasts longer than a semester and diverges from the quick post or constrained final course project. This differentiation is essential to set Domains apart as an accessible, digitally-minded, creative tool for students.
We can imagine Domains projects within digital sandboxes by asking a set of design questions: What does it mean to create one’s first domains project not as an outward-facing academic endeavor, but as a space for slow trial, error, and creation first and foremost? What questions that we ask during personal creative processes can be reoriented in the creation of a Domain? What is the time-frame, and (co)curricular context, for a successful Domains project? Is the project better created in the analog, offline?
When I started working with WordPress through Domains in the fall of my Junior year as a part of a co-curricular cohort, were asked to create a space for something we hadn’t had time to pursue in our other activities at Georgetown. I worked through the frustrating part of reading all of the documentation for a single theme and learning about widgets that made creating easier, like SiteOrigin and Visual Composer. I stayed up late making tiny changes to one page and incessantly clicking “Preview Changes.”
Now, I am in my Senior spring. I have 7 sub-domains, all of them incomplete, all of them spaces for me to try out new WordPress themes, widgets, fonts, and layouts. I use sub-domains to model web projects for work, to try out new layouts for my personal website, or just to see if I can create a project that I’m envisioning in my head. I have benefited from thinking of Domains as my digital sandbox.
I love Domains, but it takes time and hard work, and I was the exception in the Domains cohort. I wonder, if we were to imagine Domains outside of the assumptions of our other digital precedents, if that outcome might be different.
