Created: 1989
Where: CERN
Scale: You’re reading this!

Originally designed for a small group of scientists and academics at universities to share documents and information quickly, Tim Berners-Lee and the team at CERN had no idea of the socio-cultural and economic impact their World Wide Web was going to have.

From those very early webpages to our modern era of instantly available information and omnipresent social media, the internet has enabled us to meet ourselves all over again, opening up whole worlds of creativity and thought. It has fuelled revolutions, fundamentally transformed how we interact with each other and both created and destroyed Justin Bieber.

From its humble beginnings, it has become the prism through which we understand and communicate our global society. The potential impact of its future can be perceived through the gradual emergence of ‘the internet of things’, a concept for integrated, responsive systems of intelligent tech, seeded into millions of networked everyday items.

Such a future would see the original web concept expand to touch many aspects of our physical environment - as Berners-Lee himself declared at the opening ceremony of London 2012, ‘this is for everyone’. More recently, the concept of an open internet has come under question with big tech companies facing increasing scrutiny over their concentration of power and lack of transparency. Celebrating its 30th birthday next year, The World Wide Web Foundation has launched a campaign to remind the public of the internet's original premise and to fight for a free and open space for everyone. Similarly, our Engineroom project is responding to growing concerns over the centralisation of power by exploring ways we can ensure that this transformative innovation is inclusive, human-centric and resilient.