These are largely static pages, but it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to envision what people could make with more functionality: interactive pages (draw four circles; record sounds; make a DIY ocarina), moodboards, personal pages, encyclopedic rabbitholes. It gets really exciting when you give people basic social primitives (permissions,... See more

Playful software that let people experiment with their own spaces and forms of expression are a precondition to a more enlivening internet. It must begin organically from the many and not dictated by the few.

Above all, people need agency. They need to feel in control. Sometimes, that means designing for subversive behavior. I mean, isn't the most fun often had when you're breaking rules? But this is enormously difficult in software, where you must design almost everythingfrom scratch. Unlike life, you don't get a common repertoire of actions for free –... See more

Playful software often conjures up video games, but I don't mean that. Where I see the lack of play is in consumer software: design tools, social networks, dating apps, messengers. Borrowing from Brian Upton's The Aesthetics of Play , I'm talking about play that isn't segregated from ordinary life, “[play that's] embedded within ordinary life;... See more