In Hamlet on the Holodek, Janet Murray writes "The networked computer acts like a telephone in offering one-to-one real-time communication, like a television in broadcasting moving pictures, like an auditorium in bringing groups together for lectures and discussion, like a library in offering vast amounts of textual information for reference, like a museum in its vast ordered presentation of visual information, like a billboard, a radio, a gameboard, and even like a manuscript in its revival of scrolling text. All the major representational formats of the previous five thousand years of human history have now been translated into digital form."

These digital translations of older representational forms are evident in many of today's Web site designs. Web sites such as:The Free Dictionary of Online Computing, MTV Online's Top 20, and the Vasa Museum create familiar communicative experiences for the user by staying within the confines of existing representational formats of the non-digital world. For example, MTV Online allows the user to view the top 20 music videos online in a familiar television-like format. This activity remains as passive online as it is via the television. Transparently the computer monitor transforms itself into a television screen with the keyboard and mouse acting as the television's remote control. Through this transformation little is gained in terms of dynamic interaction and the viewer is left to a visually diluted, time-consuming experience.

With Janet Murray's traditional representational formats in mind, it is difficult to find Web sites that demonstrate newly invented representational formats--most Web sites seem to rely on the traditional proven formats. However, dynamic Web sites such as Carnegie Mellon's Designing for Dynamic Interaction, offer hope for the creation of a new-age representational format.

By sheer combination of all of the digitally-translated traditional representational formats via the Internet, a dynamic new-age representational format has been created. The Designing for Dynamic Interaction Web site allows world-wide participation and provides a virtual space to house participant's contributions and their interactions. Collectively created throughout the semester, this site will become a living document and a record of our experience in this new world.