Navigate

Topics

The Asilomar Institute is dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture.

A Question

How will we create and access information in 10 years? In 20 years?

How do you wish we would?

Progress is so constant we rarely pause to acknowledge it. We have split the atom, put astronauts on the moon, and replaced unhealthy hearts in the living with healthy hearts from the dead. Computer technology leaves a record of faster, smaller, easier to use technology: We've come from mainframe computers the size of large rooms to microprocessors embedded in credit cards. From assembly language to Java. From command line interfaces to mouse-and-keyboard driven multimedia interfaces. From computers dialing each other at 1200 bits per second to constant communication at millions of bits per second.

We have so much potential.

With so much progress, it strikes me as odd that we devote so little time to planning for it. We have an understanding of what we need to do now when designing products ("make it usable", "make it beautiful", "increase brand equity"...). How helpful it would be to hold similar common understandings of what we should all have 10 years from now. This could then guide all our efforts towards our goals, rather than design products as a series of guesses about what should be next year.

How will we create and access information in 10 years? How do you wish we would?

Sunday, September 1, 2002 | Permalink | Filed in Knowledge Base-Driven Systems