The phrase “an internet that believes in us” has been floating in my mind the past couple weeks. It makes me think about “bicycles for the mind” and how that phrase feels tough to believe that it was ever taken literally or has somehow gotten less true over time since computers were first introduced into the world.
I think most of modern computing falls into two camps:
- they believe that users are dumb and that they need to explain everything with lots of words in an extremely detailed fashion such that users do what they want
- they make software that is so complicated that only the most expert of experts are able to interact with it and get ti to do meaningful things.
We deserve an internet that believes in us. An internet that believes in us would throw us into an environment where we are encouraged to play around ourselves to figure out what is happening, and the environment would be structured in such a way that it is full of simple tools that are easy for anyone to get started and possible for anyone to become an expert and do things that wouldn’t have been imaginable in the first place.
The kinds of things that feel good
- playhtml fridge arrangement
- lots of the examples in syllabus for walking are joined by the fact that they believe in people
- playful design, the new age of design that is not skeumorphic but more expressive, playful
- what should this design aesthetic be called?
- ai creative tools vs. ai replacements
- krea is the best example of believing in you
- also geoffrey’s explorations around creating a tool for you to use / allowing you to tweak it
- it all comes down to agency. the internet should empower us with agency.
At the beginning of this year, I created a venn diagram that highlighted my intersecting areas of focus. Looking back at my work this year, I’ve made an equivalent 3 questions that have driven my work.