Mick's World

Just read a post at Airbag Industries about anti-design (a.k.a. non-design, anti-marketing-design). A lot of sites seem to be going this way and it seems silly that we’ve finally reached the point with internet speeds when we can design sites that have a bit more weight, such as Flash and high quality images and people are cutting their sites down to text. The thing is it’s not nice text either, it’s ugly. And that’s the aim.

To me this seems like a lot of fashions that i don’t understand (metros, emos, etc.). I don’t understand why they would want to make such a statement. The excuse is that people don’t need a nice and pretty website, they just need usability and content. I like my cake and i’ll eat it too thanks. Why have one and not the other? So would you like a beer that was easy to open and consume but tasted like something that came out of a camals behind?

Anyway, a comment someone posted to the anti-design post on Airbag Industries was that Google sports a clean and effective design. More like a dull and boring throw together. The comment reminded me of something i read a little while ago about the the Google design. I would have to agree with that one, the result of the looks great, it’s far more clean and is much more effective.

I’ve recently been reading about Douglas Engelbart’s Hyperscope (a.k.a Augment) project. Started in 1968, it was designed to perform many of the internet tasks such as hyperlinking and email that we use today. Engelbart and his team were far ahead of their time. Engelbart was also the inventor of the mouse - "X-Y position indicator for a display system", and was one of the first nodes on the internet.

Brad Neuberg has recently joined the team to recreate the project for online use. After introducing hyperscope, Brad posts a screencast demonstrating how the Augment works. It was interesting to watch the screencast after watching the original Mother of All Demos video.

It will be interesting to follow the progress of this project and actually use it once released to the public. As stated in Brad’s screencast there are features of the Augment system that have still not yet been implemented into mainstream internet or hyperlinking systems. It’s amazing that someone (Engelbart) was thinking that far ahead and it’s taken this long to catch up.