Design Map · Eindhoven
Browser Flatland: Worlds, Words, and the Work of Exploring Maintenance
Graduation project by Yirang Ok at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
‘Browser Flatland’ investigates maintenance as the invisible labour of learning, translating and adapting that keeps inherited technological systems running. Rooted in the designer’s experience as a Korean web developer, the work questions why users must continually adapt to inherited technical standards rather than having agency to question them.
Rather than producing a finished technological solution, the project uses workshops as a space for collectively testing alternatives. In two workshops in Korea, one familiar rule is removed or changed: the first translates the Three.js coding environment into Korean, while the second removes the keyboard and mouse, inviting participants to invent other forms of web interaction. Through experimentation, failure and exchange, participants reinterpret these questions within their own contexts. Presented through video, code, photographs, participant works and an online platform, ‘Browser Flatland’ documents this developing process, proposing design as creating conditions in which technological conventions can be questioned and renegotiated together.