This link has been bookmarked by 158 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 21 Jul 2015, by Christian Winkler.
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11 Aug 18
Phil SladeOh man I wish I had @baconmeteor’s way with words. (And code. He’s the one behind @pinboard). Here’s the beginning of his talk about web design, which should be read alongside that thread from @www_ora_tion_ca. https://t.co/b4o082jjtv “And then, without w
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31 May 17
Matthew York“They got so caught up in technology that they forgot to ask the important question ‘what are we building this for?’”http://t.co/XQmQajGdDl
“But what if after software eats the world, it turns the world to shit?” Web Design: The First 100 Years http://t.co/XQmQajGdDl -
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14 Apr 16
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08 Oct 15
Yee Sian NgThis is the expanded version of a , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace!
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06 Oct 15
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30 Jul 15
vaughane"despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today."
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29 Jul 15
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28 Jul 15
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27 Jul 15
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26 Jul 15
Kazuhito Kidachi"Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic."
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The key part of this vision is that the Internet succeeds by remaining open and participatory.
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This vision holds that the Web is only a necessary first step to a brighter future. In order to fix the world with software, we have to put software hooks into people's lives. Everything must be instrumented, quantified, and networked. All devices, buildings, objects, and even our bodies must become "smart" and net-accessible.
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25 Jul 15
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24 Jul 15
Adrian LowA presentation full of provocations as applicable to marketing as they are to web design. Well worth a read & ponder http://t.co/mlGHt7dvqD
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Morten JustI’ve finally put up the text version of a talk of mine from last fall, “Web Design: The First 100 Years” http://t.co/ca6vrDXOF5
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Jamie Thomson'hard constraints are the midwife to good design.' obviously. http://t.co/Rb8Yndf1h8 HT @setmajer http://t.co/kDcTtCXRFZ
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The idea that something might work fine the way it is has no place in tech culture
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A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat. As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable
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Developers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes
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So because powerful people in our industry read bad scifi as children, we now confront a stupid vision of the web as gateway to robot paradise.
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All problems are to be solved with technology, especially the ones that have been caused with previous technology
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Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?
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23 Jul 15
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Eric Auld"technology hasn't changed the world because we haven't cared enough to change it." http://t.co/0qW1Wn52ag
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Nathan LongDeeply thought provoking. Ties paralells to the aviation industies exponential growth and plateau as things became 'good enough'
Also expounds 3 visions of the internet. To connect. To fix the world with software. Or to transcend the world with technology. -
Filip Gocworthy read. think about web technology and future
web history culture design technology future IFTTT inspiration
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The 747 required over 75,000 technical drawings. All of them were done by hand. There was no computer aided design to help engineers figure out how to put everything together, just a massive filing system.
Boeing had to build a full-scale plywood model of the plane from these drawings to make sure everything fit together, and that multiple systems weren't trying to occupy the same space.
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My favorite fact about the 747 is that it was built by the company's B team, Boeing's version of the Bad News Bears. All the top engineers, and the ambitious up and comers, had gotten themselves assigned to Boeing's prestige project, a plane called the 2707, or supersonic transport.
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The 747 was meant to be a stopgap. It was supposed to serve the airlines until the SST entered service in the 1970's, at which point it would be demoted to a freighter.
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In fact, that famous hump on the 747 is there specifically to make it easier to load freight. This was not a plane with a glamorous future.
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We even got supersonic airliners! The Concorde entered commercial service and safely ferried douchebags across the Atlantic for 25 years. If you're my age, you may remember seeing one taxi past you at the airport.
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The Russians got in on it too, with a plane derisively called the Concordeski. This proved too loud and unreliable for passenger service, so it ended up being a transport jet. It carried fruits and vegetables from Central Asia at twice the speed of sound.
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The next generation of technology was not just a dream; it was already in the prototype stage.
But it all just kind of stopped.
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We have a space station in 2014, but it's too embarrassing to talk about. Sometimes we send Canadians up there.
Never mind the Moon—we can't even launch astronauts into orbit anymore. If we want to go to our sad-sack space station, we have to ask the Russians, and they're mean to us.
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Being able to get anywhere in the world in a day is really good enough. We complain about air travel but consider that for a couple of thousand dollars, you can go anywhere, overnight.
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The people designing the planes of tomorrow got so caught up in the technology that they forgot to ask the very important question, “what are we building this for?”
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Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic.
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The defining feature of our industry since the invention of the transistor has been exponential growth.
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Exponential growth is one of those buzzwords that has an exact technical meaning. It just means that something keeps doubling, over and over again. Pop science authors never get tired of telling us that we have poor intuitions for exponential growth.
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I'm sure you have heard of Moore's Law. In its original form, it says "the number of transistors we can mass-produce on a silicon wafer doubles" every year or two. Moore made this observation in 1965, and it's held up ever since.
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But again, we've chosen to go backwards by moving to solid state storage, like you find in smartphones and newer laptops. Flash storage sacrifices capacity for speed, efficiency and durability.
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These are the victories of good enough. This stuff is fast enough.
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Intel could probably build a 20 GHz processor, just like Boeing can make a Mach 3 airliner. But they won't. There's a corrollary to Moore's law, that every time you double the number of transistors, your production costs go up. Every two years, Intel has to build a completely new factory and production line for this stuff. And the industry is turning away from super high performance, because most people don't need it.
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And as designers, you should be jumping up and down with relief, because hard constraints are the midwife to good design. The past couple of decades have left us with what I call an exponential hangover.
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Our industry is in complete denial that the exponential sleigh ride is over. Please, we'll do anything! Optical computing, quantum computers, whatever it takes. We'll switch from silicon to whatever you want. Just don't take our toys away.
But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you're not working on the next big thing, you're nothing.
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This leads to a contempt for the past. Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
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This contempt for the past also ignores the reality of our industry, which is that we work almost exclusively with legacy technologies.
The operating system that runs the Internet is 45 years old.
The protocols for how devices talk to each other are 40 years old.
Even what we think of as the web is nearing its 25th birthday.
Some of what we use is downright ancient—flat panel displays were invented in 1964, the keyboard is 150 years old.
The processor that's the model for modern CPUs dates from 1976.
Even email, which everyone keeps trying to reinvent, is nearing retirement age.
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At some point fairly early on, Microsoft Office became good enough. Windows became good enough.
But that hasn't stopped Microsoft from constantly releasing new versions, and forcing people to upgrade. I pick on Microsoft because so many of us have experience with their software, but this holds true for any software vendor.
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After years of patching, XP became a stable, beloved, and useful operating system. A quarter of desktops still run it.
This is considered a national crisis.
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It's 2014, and consider one hot blogging site, Medium. On a late-model computer it takes me ten seconds for a Medium page (which is literally a formatted text file) to load and render. This experience was faster in the sixties.
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This exponential hangover leads to a feeling of exponential despair.
What's the point of pouring real effort into something that is going to disappear or transform in just a few months?
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The other part of our exponential hangover is how we build our businesses. The cult of growth denies the idea that you can build anything useful or helpful unless you're prepared to bring it to so-called "Internet scale". There's no point in opening a lemonade stand unless you're prepared to take on PepsiCo.
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things should go the other way. Once you remove the barriers of distance, there's room for all sorts of crazy niche products to find a little market online. People can eke out a living that would not be possible in the physical world.
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time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?"
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Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
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This is the correct vision.
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The idea of a free, universally editable encyclopedia sounded insane. The idea that a free operating system could run half the Internet was insane. That volunteers in blog comments could write collaborative math papers with some of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world sounded insane.
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A currency based entirely on cryptographic hashing still sounds insane, but it sure is interesting.
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Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE
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This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.
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The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
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Consider how fundamentally undemocratic this vision of the Web is. Because the Web started as a technical achievement, technical people are the ones who get to call the shots.
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There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd's Burden.
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Technological Utopianism has been tried before and led to some pretty bad results. There's no excuse for not studying the history of positivism, scientific Marxism and other attempts to rationalize the world, before making similar promises about what you will do with software.
Like everything in tech, there is prior art!
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Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION
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This is the insane vision. I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. But circumstances compel me.
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Here's Ray Kurzweil, a man who honestly and sincerely believes he is never going to die. He works at Google. Presumably he stays at Google because he feels it advances his agenda.
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If you think the Web is a way to CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS, then your job is to get the people and cats online, put a decent font on the knowledge, and then stand back and watch the magic happen.
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If you think your job is to FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE, then the web is just the very beginning. There's a lot of work left to do. Really you're going to need sensors in every house, and it will help if everyone looks through special goggles, and if every refrigerator can talk to the Internet and confess its contents.
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You promise to hook up all this stuff up for us, and in return, we give you the full details of our private lives. And we don't need to worry about people doing bad things with it, because your policy is for that not to happen.
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And if you think that the purpose of the Internet is to BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION, then your goal is total and complete revolution. Everything must go.
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Tech culture is like a deadbeat who lives on your basement sofa. You ask him:
“When are you going to do all those things you promised?”
“Oh, wait until everyone has a computer.”
“They do.”
“Okay, I mean wait until they're all online. ”
“They are. Why isn't the world better?”
“Well, wait until they all have smartphones... and wearable devices,” and the excuses continue.
The real answer is, technology hasn't changed the world because we haven't cared enough to change it.
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There's a William Gibson quote that Tim O'Reilly likes to repeat: "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
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We live in a world now where not millions but billions of people work in rice fields, textile factories, where children grow up in appalling poverty. Of those billions, how many are the greatest minds of our time? How many deserve better than they get? What if instead of dreaming about changing the world with tomorrow's technology, we used today's technology and let the world change us? Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?
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The web we have right now is beautiful. It shatters the tyranny of distance. It opens the libraries of the world to you. It gives you a way to bear witness to people half a world away, in your own words. It is full of cats. We built it by accident, yet already we're taking it for granted. We should fight to keep it!
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Darren KuropatwaSo despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
Unless we screw it up.
And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.future FutureOfLearning internet society keynote culture participatoryculture PatternRecognition
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There's a corrollary to Moore's law, that every time you double the number of transistors, your production costs go up.
-
hard constraints are the midwife to good design
-
But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
-
The cult of growth denies the idea that you can build anything useful or helpful unless you're prepared to bring it to so-called "Internet scale".
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Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we're wasting so much natural intelligence?
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citizenwaldclever talk about design, contingency, predictability, principle of exponential increase etc.
"Web Design: The First 100 Years
This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace!
I would like to start with a parable about airplanes.
In 1981, my mother and I flew from Warsaw to New York City in this airplane, an Ilyushin-62. " -
22 Jul 15
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As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable.
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The restless sense of excitement we feel that something new may be around the corner also brings with it a hopelessness about whatever we are working on now, and a dread that we are missing out on the next big thing.
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Driessen Samuel"I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?"
I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive.
Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
This is the correct vision."-
I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?" I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive.
Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
This is the correct vision.
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Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE
This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.
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Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION
This is the insane vision. I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. But circumstances compel me.
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Economists have that great word, "externalities", for anything they find doesn't fit their model of the world
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Boeing was genuinely surprised that people cared about this stuff.
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good enough
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the very important question, “what are we building this for?”
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real and troubling social costs.
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always runs into physical barriers.
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popular understanding of Moore's Law
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a step into the past
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the threshold of 'good enough'.
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better displays
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better battery life
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the victories of good enough
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production costs go up
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most people don't need it.
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improving along other dimensions
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Battery life
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Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
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link rot
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no way to run a culture
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legacy technologies.
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deep roots in the past
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love of gratuitous change
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The idea that something might work fine the way it is has no place in tech culture.
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upgrading as our moral duty
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faster in the sixties.
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cult of growth
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Internet scale
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not everything fits in that mold
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centralized
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manifest destiny
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This is the correct vision.
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No one person owns it, no one person controls it, you don't need permission to use it.
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humble
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it does not presume that developers and designers know what they are doing
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a chance to be surprised.
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Even the world wide web itself is the product of a physics nerd winging it, and convincing his colleagues to try out something new.
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ame out of nowhere
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The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
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brighter future.
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software hooks
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taxis
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publishing
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music
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retailing
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unstoppable forces of Progress
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software Manifest Destiny.
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software intermediaries in every human interaction
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fundamentally undemocratic
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colonial
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collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them
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White Nerd's Burden.
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Technological Utopianis
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scientific Marxism
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positivism
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Singularity
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read bad scifi as children
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advances his agenda
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summoning the demon.
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progress is slow and linear
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figures who believe in fairy tales
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messianic thinking
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apocalyptic Utopianism
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full details of our private lives
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All problems are to be solved with technology,
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caused with previous technology
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contradicts our own experience of the last thirty years.
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engaging the real world
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Utopia seems further away
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Let's reclaim the web from technologists
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inevitable
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consumers
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The Web belongs to us all
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let the world change us
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wasting so much natural intelligence
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built it by accident
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Jonathan BeckerVery good: "Web Design: The First 100 years" http://t.co/wu8jzT6Pq6 (although "the web" is not the right frame, but, details.)
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21 Jul 15
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Our industry is in complete denial that the exponential sleigh ride is over. Please, we'll do anything! Optical computing, quantum computers, whatever it takes. We'll switch from silicon to whatever you want. Just don't take our toys away.
But all this exponential growth has given us terrible habits. One of them is to discount the present.
When things are doubling, the only sane place to be is at the cutting edge. By definition, exponential growth means the thing that comes next will be equal in importance to everything that came before. So if you're not working on the next big thing, you're nothing.
-
Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS.
This is the correct vision.
The Web erases the barrier of distance between people, and it puts all of human knowledge at our fingertips. It also allows us to look at still images and videos of millions of cats, basically all of it for free, from our homes or a small device we carry in our pocket.
No one person owns it, no one person controls it, you don't need permission to use it. And the best part is, you are encouraged to contribute right back. You can post your own cat pictures.
Why is this not enough?
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Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE
This is the prevailing vision in Silicon Valley.
The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
If you have spent any time using software, you might recognize this as an appalling idea. Fixing the world with software is like giving yourself a haircut with a lawn mower. It works in theory, but there's no room for error in the implementation.
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Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION
This is the insane vision. I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it, because it's so stupid. But circumstances compel me.
In this vision, the Internet and web are just the first rung of a ladder that leads to neural implants, sentient computers, nanotechnology and eventually the Singularity, that mystical moment when progress happens so quickly that all of humanity's problems disappear and are replaced, presumably, with problems beyond our current understanding.
This is the vision of 'accelerating returns', very reminiscent to that hockey stick graph I showed earlier, where we were supposed to have interstellar travel by 2010.
This Apocalyptic vision of the Internet and technical progress has captured the imaginations of some of the most influential people in our industry.
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The Il-62 exemplifies a Soviet design approach I like to think of as "add engines until airborne".
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The Russians got in on it too, with a plane derisively called the Concordeski. This proved too loud and unreliable for passenger service, so it ended up being a transport jet. It carried fruits and vegetables from Central Asia at twice the speed of sound.
My favorite line from the Wikipedia article is that the plane was so loud, "you couldn't hear the passenger two seats away from you screaming". He had to pass you a note saying "aaaaaaugh".
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The operating system that runs the Internet is 45 years old.
The protocols for how devices talk to each other are 40 years old.
Even what we think of as the web is nearing its 25th birthday.
Some of what we use is downright ancient—flat panel displays were invented in 1964, the keyboard is 150 years old.
The processor that's the model for modern CPUs dates from 1976.
-
After years of patching, XP became a stable, beloved, and useful operating system. A quarter of desktops still run it.
This is considered a national crisis.
Rather than offer users persuasive reasons to upgrade software, vendors insist we look on upgrading as our moral duty. The idea that something might work fine the way it is has no place in tech culture.
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As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable.
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The cult of growth has led us to a sterile, centralized web. And having burned through all the easy ideas within our industry, we're convinced that it's our manifest destiny to start disrupting everyone else.
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The Web erases the barrier of distance between people, and it puts all of human knowledge at our fingertips. It also allows us to look at still images and videos of millions of cats, basically all of it for free, from our homes or a small device we carry in our pocket.
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The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers. The world is a crufty legacy system crying out to be optimized.
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But what if after software eats the world, it turns the world to shit?
-
-
-
A further symptom of our exponential hangover is bloat.
-
There's no point in opening a lemonade stand unless you're prepared to take on PepsiCo.
-
The world is just one big hot mess, an accident of history. Nothing is done as efficiently or cleverly as it could be if it were designed from scratch by California programmers.
-
Technological Utopianism has been tried before and led to some pretty bad results. There's no excuse for not studying the history of positivism, scientific Marxism and other attempts to rationalize the world, before making similar promises about what you will do with software.
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And we don't need to worry about people doing bad things with it, because your policy is for that not to happen.
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