“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Web design still amazes me.  Apparently, I’m alone here.

I grew up with loads and loads of sci-fi.  I wasn’t really crazy about flying cars (though they still owe us that…) and space travel as much as I was with virtual realities.

The idea of reinventing the world we live in has always obsessed me.  I have always considered that we have LOTS of limitations and our choices narrow our capabilities.  We get what we can, not what we really want.  The Internet made me dream of a universe much sweeter than the one I lived in.

Instead, we integrated, regulated and adapted the Internet to our mundane needs.  And I still want a flying car, though I don’t really need it or want it.  They owe me that.

Was the Innocence lost?

Just about seven years ago, I remember there were lots of experiments on hypertext.  Writers, graphic artists and web designers were using it for everything, creating almost seamless chains of text that would interact with each other and building up complex structures that defied the way we assimilated information.

The idea was refined and taken by the ever-so-lovely people from Wikipedia and, if you ask me, that was the last hypertext concept ever produced.

But we have encyclopedic information on The Surreal Life.  Yay (?)

The Underdog Becomes a Lap Dog.

Back in the day, I thought there would always be two streams of information available to us:  mainstream and independant.  Today, I’m not so sure.  They feed off of each other and they are so alike nowadays that it is hard to believe there are any relevant differences.

I think it affects the way we design web sites.  We want to play safe.  Sure, I believe that commercial web sites should rely in concepts that work and that the wheel should never be reinvented.  But, come on…

… when was the last time that a website ever surprised you?  I think we’ve lost our edge.

How to Save a Relationship (Between Man and Machine)

• Keep on Dreaming:  I refuse to believe that we have finally reached the edge of the cliff.  Conformism is a horrible thing.  I think that every science has a handful of dreamers for a bunch of drones.  The dreamers are the ones that push the boundaries.
• Build a Better Mousetrap:  There will always be a better, faster, easier, nicer way to do something.  What if your site suffices a need everyone’s ignoring?  Give it some thought:  that’s why customers end up in the arms of the competition
• Think of The Future:  Jules Verne, one of my favorite authors, thought of the future.  He closed the gaps between dreams and science, offering conceptual tools that transformed our mental maps and made them richer.  What would you like your grandchildren to see?  What did YOU want to see when you sat in front of a computer for the first time?

Web design is still evolving.  Concepts are living things that grow at a fast pace.  I still don’t know how the future’s going to be like.  All I know is that it would be great that my great-grandchildren were to find these blogs and wonder about what the heck was on our minds now.  Hopefully, they will have flying cars.  Even if they don’t need them.