On Expression There was a germ of something there. And it’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I think that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. If you talk to people that use the Macintosh, they love it. I mean you don’t hear people loving products very often. But you could feel it, there was something really wonderful there. So I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. And before they invented these things, all these people would have done other things. But computers were invented, and they did come along, and all these people did get interested in them, either in school or before school, and said “Hey, this is the medium that I think I can say something in." Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview connectionexpression
Constrained by the medium The inevitable reciprocation that occurs between the act of drawing and the thinking associated with it. The hand moves, the mind becomes engaged, and vice versa. We might ask: How much does the medium of expression actually constrain a design process? A medium has a way of constraining our choices, and this influence may not involve conscious choice at all. The planner, in the end, sees and understands only those things for which they can provide expression. Peter G. Rowe, Design Thinking Michaelangelo's hammer constraintsexpressionmedia
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
This used to be our playground An Essay by Simon Collison colly.com There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home. A shifting house next to a river of knowledge wwwexpressionidentityblogging
Rediscovering the Small Web An Article by Parimal Satyal neustadt.fr The vast open seasThe gatekeeperIt can also be art The small web is beautiful www
The vast open seas We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click. No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination. explorationwww
The gatekeeper Google has become the de facto gatekeeper of the web, an arbiter of what is useful and what should get visibility. Except, most websites that appear on the first page, the links that you are most likely to click on—less than 1% of searchers click on something in the second page—are designed to be there by optimising for Google's algorithms. One consequence of this is that most of the websites that people get to "organically" are created by professionals and marketers who "position" themselves on those keywords. This means that the smaller, amateur web gets hidden in the shadows of web professionals who design around specific keywords and audiences.
It can also be art It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing. wwwartux