Kathi Berens's List: interface

• The message from Adobe is clear. The less you think about source code, scripts, links and the web itself, the more creative you are as a web designer. What a lie. I liked to show it to fresh design students as an example of misunderstanding the core of the profession.
• they feature designers and design evangelists talking about unleashing, increasing and enriching creativity as a direct result of fewer clicks to achieve this or that effect.
• Cory Doctorow
• “The coming war on general computation”
• the history of the war on general computation
• The works of Lessig, Zittrain and Doctorow do a great job of explaining why both computer and network architectures are neither historic accidents nor “what technology wants”.24 The stupid network and the general purpose computer were conscious design decisions.
• There can be different examples and levels of autonomy that users can imagine for themselves, but the capacity to be universal is still in all of us. Sometimes it is a conscious choice not to delegate particular jobs to the computer, and sometimes it is just a habit. Most often it is not more than a click or two that uncover your general purpose architecture.
• Still, I have difficulties finding a site or an app, that actually addresses the users, and sees their presence as a part of the work flow. This maybe sounds strange, because all web 2.0 is about pushing people to contribute, and “emotional design” is supposed to be about establishing personal connections in between people who made the app and people who bought it, but I mean something different. I mean a situation when the work flow of an application has gaps that can be filled by users, where smoothness and seamlessness are broken and some of the final links in the chain are left for the users to complete.

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