I think that’s what’s required to build great websites and teach the next generation of web folk. Ultimately we need to unthink of these things as tools for developers and see them for what they really are; a playground, a wellspring, for making websites.
And when we strip away all the chrome—all the Aero and Paper and Frosted Glass, all the evidence of the “design systems” we have poured billions into developing and maintaining—we come face to face with a skeleton of XEROX PARC’s 1973 invention.
Disruptive innovations have weird metabolisms. They have a cost structure and product-market fit that are alien—even toxic—to incumbents, like blue-green algae eating sunlight and generating oxygen. Incumbent companies can’t adapt to it. It’s not in their DNA.
We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other. Simultaneously, we’re never really in any place—we can always blame connection issues... See more