A Place to Sit, a Place to Learn

October 2, 2026 Summer 2026

What is this class about? How did it start?

Munus: Hi, I’m Munus Shih! I’m a Taiwanese Minnan-Hakka designer, creative coder, and educator. I teach full-time at Pratt Institute in New York, mostly around technology and computation in design, and a lot of my own work is also around open source tools, publishing, and thinking about how we can use technology to bring people together.

Spencer: Hi, I’m Spencer Chang. I’m an artist and technologist based in San Francisco and I like to say I make software you can touch. These range between internet spaces, interactive sculptures, and creative infrastructure that examine and amplify the human edges that are exposed in our interactions with and through technology.

M: Spencer and I met at NEW INC a few years ago. At the time, I’d been teaching HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in art and design schools for a while, and pedagogically I think I often approach the web through this transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Students can learn HTML and make a website pretty quickly, but then very naturally they start asking: how do I make this interactive? How do I make something where people can actually connect with one another? How do I make something that exists at a bigger scale than just one person opening one webpage?

Technically, that jump gets complicated very quickly. Suddenly you’re asking them to understand a whole web stack, or set up something like Firebase or WebSockets, which can be a really big leap when someone has only just learned HTML.

So when I discovered PlayHTML when we first met, I remember thinking, this is amazing! This is exactly the missing piece. I really love that it still begins with HTML, because HTML can otherwise feel strangely siloed: you learn how to make this handmade, self-contained webpage, and then there’s suddenly this huge jump between that and making something multiplayer, networked, or socially interactive. Playhtml gives you this almost plug-and-play environment where you can stay with HTML but very quickly start experimenting with what it means for a website to have other people inside of it. For me, the library really fills that pedagogical gap.

S: Thank you Munus :) It’s really gratifying to hear praise for this tool, especially coming from an educator! Playhtml was my first big open-source project that I started in the summer of 2023. I got the idea after playing with a lot of shared interactions to really make a website feel inhabited with my friend Jacky Zhao to create we-b.site, a website we made to host collective letters about our dreams for the internet. We had a lot of fun making the website itself express our own dreams, like having live cursors and chat and fingerprints left on the letters when they dragged them. I thought about how simple the idea of these interactions were, yet they were incredibly difficult to implement.

After the initial release, I took a break from new features and really came back to it this past year after starting my work on we were online. I wanted to bring the ethos of playhtml to the entire web, and it was really exciting to be able to teach a dedicated multi-week class to support people creating their own social spaces with the library! Munus and I have shared the same perspective on the kinds of collective technology we want, so doing this class together was a natural fit.

Why benches?

S: I’ve always been really inspired by what makes physical spaces feel really good and started trying to articulate more precisely the kind of web I want (and the feeling I’m searching for). I wrote “The Internet has no benches” in the spring, inspired by how I love sitting outside in public watching people. I can participate ambiently in society just by sitting there and hanging out. There is no equivalent in digital space. We are either invisible, or we have to broadcast ourselves to the entire world. All the rich, layered ways of interacting and participating in society rely on having a spectrum to participate on. So what if the web could be like that? It felt like just being able to hang out (and have the space for emergent encounters) was key to all that.

I reference a lot of public goods that I admire (public transport, parks, playgrounds, etc.), but benches felt like the best representation of the core idea. They are so ubiquitous and have so many great qualities to emulate. They are inherently public, multipurpose, expressive, and become a symbol for the kinds of spaces that support us. Even when people try to mark them off as private, it highlights how absurd the idea is. And of course, they come in many, many different forms.

M: When Spencer and I started talking about benches, I immediately thought about these plastic stools in Taiwan. They are these little red stools that are kind of everywhere. You see grandparents sitting on them outside, aunties and uncles pulling a few together and chatting, people using them at markets or in front of shops. There’s something very warm about them to me. They’re incredibly ordinary, but they also feel very communal.

I think what I like is how easy and casual they feel. You can just pick one up and move it. If another person comes, you add another stool. And then I started thinking: if you put two of these stools apart and lay a wooden board across them, suddenly you have a bench. It’s almost like a trestle. So I was like, why not? It’s not not a bench. That became a useful analogy for the class. A bench doesn’t have to be this fixed piece of public infrastructure. It can be something assembled very simply because a few people need somewhere to be together.

You see spaces like that all the time physically, in parks, playgrounds, sidewalks, outside somebody’s home. But I don’t think we have nearly enough spaces like that on the internet. So part of what became interesting to us was asking: what would the online equivalent of those red stools be? What are the really simple pieces of infrastructure that people could move around, combine, and use to make their own little social spaces?

What was surprising and rewarding about the class?

M: One thing that surprised me was how little the difference in coding experience mattered. We had people who were very comfortable with code and people who were basically beginners, but because the APIs were already there to play with, everyone could make something quite quickly. In a way, not knowing too much could even be productive. You’re less constrained by what you think the tool is “supposed” to do, so some of the most creative projects came from people using it in ways Spencer and I hadn’t anticipated.

For instance, a website that really stood out to me was Myla White’s A Website Where We Pretend to Be a Farmer’s Market. Myla was pretty open about not being the most experienced coder, but then she built this very special, hand-drawn farmers market with vegetables, flowers, fish, bikes, and all these little things you can pick up and drag around with your cursor. She crafted all these assets herself, and with playhtml, it suddenly became very lively. Everyone was moving things around, wanting to buy things, and joking about opening their own stalls. I think it shows how even though the interaction itself was actually quite simple, somehow it really did start to feel like being at a market together.

I also valued how international the class was. A lot of writing about the internet becoming more commercial, platformized, and ad-saturated tends to come from a very American or European history of the web, and I think I had absorbed some of that framing too. Hearing how these questions resonated with people from very different contexts made that feel much less universal. It was humbling, but also made me really curious about the different histories of how people have gathered, built community, and understood public space online in different parts of the world.

João Bernardo Narciso made Teletext Rooms, which was basically this pre-web information system, especially popular in Europe, where televisions could receive numbered pages of news, weather, sports, schedules, and other information as text and these really chunky, limited-color graphics. You would type in a page number on the remote and wait for that page to appear. João took that very specific visual and technical language and turned it into a place where people can make teletext pages together. Honestly, I didn’t really know what teletext was before this class, so to me, being able to learn and discover this whole history through someone’s project was very rewarding.

S: I also loved that we had such a diverse spread in coding ability across students. I think it provided a good balance of inspiration for what was possible along with a humanizing experience of people sharing the bugs and issues they were struggling with to normalize the struggle of making something.

I was really honored to see how much people cared about their projects. Some made multiple tests over the course of the class while others focused on developing one core idea over the entire time. This was one of the hardest classes for me to teach because I felt a lot of responsibility both maintaining the library itself (fixing bugs that were discovered and being honest about shortcomings) while also showing what was possible and encouraging exploring. But it was incredibly rewarding at the end to see the fruits of everyone’s hard work, and I felt so grateful to have such dedicated attention to a tool that I made from so many wonderful artists and programmers.

I really appreciated the ideas that transformed existing internet spaces that we already spend time in to make them feel more connective or imagine a new kind of interaction. For example, kae made a cyber hospital to create a space where people can commiserate when they’re sick instead of seeing that they have cancer on sites like WebMD. It felt like such a human and joyful reimagination of this everyday experience when the current standard experience is so dictated by function. I also loved Liam Houlihan’s (com)post, which reimagines a classic message board as one populated by wriggly worms who can decompose each message. Jordan Mess’ destroy my room site features hand-drawn everyday objects that crumple up with every sequential click, recreating the experience of a smash room. Sheng Li’s network of coincidences creates a playful poem-making space that uses angles and space to draw with your poem. What other common spaces that are focused on function could better serve us if they were collective and community-oriented? This provocation feels like a rich starting point for creating more benches on the web.

Anything else?

S: It’s just been such an honor to steward & see all these little spaces come to life! Many students also reported heartfelt interactions with their spaces from the showcase, which, for me, is always the most gratifying part of creating these little spaces for people. I’m excited to see how these spaces grow and spread, and hopefully, see how the alumni from this class become advocates for playhtml and, ultimately, a more human internet for all of us.

M: I think it also felt really valuable to have a class that was specifically about making smaller, more intentional spaces online, especially now when so much of technology is pushing toward things being faster, more productive, and more scalable.

It also reminded me why I liked making websites in the first place. After making so many of them, I think I had forgotten how crafty and rewarding it can feel to make something small, put it online, and have somebody else actually use it. Before everything had to become a platform or a product, the web was also just a way to connect with other people. I think the class really brought some of that feeling back for me.

You can find all of the projects from the class at class.playhtml.fun. And check out the playhtml library for contributing your own benches to the web!