Adactio: Links

A Digital Tomorrow on Vimeo

A design fiction video depicting technology that helps and hinders in equal measure.

Ross Andersen – Humanity’s deep future

A really great interview with Nick Bostrom about humanity’s long-term future and the odds of extinction.

Brett Jankord – Active development on Categorizr has come to an end

I think it’s a bit of a shame that Brett is canning his mobile-first device-detection library, but I totally understand (and agree with) his reasons.

There is a consensual hallucination in the market, that we can silo devices into set categories like mobile, tablet, and desktop, yet the reality is drawing these lines in the sand is not an easy task.

Olaf Stapledon

The out-of-copyright books of Olaf Stapledon are available to download from the University of Adelaide. Be sure to grab Starmaker and First And Last Men.

All Systems Are Go!(ing to Come Apart) - Cognition: The blog of web design

I really like these thoughts on the importance of design systems for the web. It’s not about providing a few perfect deliverables that won’t survive once they go live; it’s about designing for the unexpected, the unpredictable:

Design for every state, not the best state.

Connections

This is quite an astounding piece of writing. Robert Lucky imagines the internet of things mashed up with online social networking …but this was published in 1999!

Playing with the future at the seams | Labs.info.nl

Yet another write-up of this year’s dConstruct.

dConstruct 2012 | Happy Famous Artists

A nice write-up of dConstruct that focuses on three ideas that were threaded throughout the day:

Digital is about beauty and about layers,
The power of play, and
The interconnectedness of things through chance.

dConstruct 2012 – a review : Sjors Timmer

Another thoughtful write-up of this year’s dConstruct, weaving a thread between the talks from Jason Scott, James Burke, and Tom Armitage with a detour via Italo Calvino.

dConstruct 2012 – Our positions of power

This is my favourite write-up of dConstruct so far. I love that way that, rather than simply giving a linear description, Laura weaves together the implicit strands that were running throughout the day — a very thoughtful, considered approach.

And how about this for an opening line:

After a weekend of reflection, I’ve decided that dConstruct 2012 had the best talks of any conference I’ve ever attended.

dConstruct 2012: the alternative theme was Education - andrewjohns.net

I like this! Andrew Johns found a thread in this year’s dConstruct that ran parallel to its official tagline of “Playing With The Future”: Education.

dConstruct 2012: A quick review - andrewjohns.net

Another really good description of this year’s dConstruct that describes each talk.

Playing With The Future – dConstruct 2012 | HYPERNAKED

A lovely write-up of this year’s dConstruct:

Curated well by the Clearleft team, its speakers are always intelligent, insightful, and on the whole, world-class. Pouring out insights through divergent thought, challenging norms and touting innovation.

beta.guardian.co.uk

Those clever chaps at The Guardian are experimenting with some mobile-first responsive design. Here’s how it’s going so far.

The code is on Github.

Warren Ellis » How To See The Future

The opening keynote from Warren Ellis for this year’s Improving Reality. I’d like to walk into space with this man.

The Computer for the 21st Century

A classic piece of design fiction written by Mark Weiser 21 years ago.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Lessons from dConstruct 2012 | Michel’s Exhaust

A great write-up of this year’s magnificent dConstruct and its theme of playing with the future.

A future friendly workflow | Opinion | .net magazine

Some more thoughts on how our workflow needs to adapt to the current ever-changing device landscape.

Welcome to the Future Nauseous

I, for one, welcome our Manufactured Normalcy Field overlords.

[this is aaronland] “an index of reality”

Aaron should definitely skyblog more often if this is the result.

Are we in the future yet?

It’s not enough to have the same Photoshopped image from Back To The Future trotted out every. single. year. …now you can pass this meme around every minute of every day of every month of every year. Thanks a lot, Seb.

Fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner - a set on Flickr

Magazine covers created by Tom Southwell for background scenes in Blade Runner.

In Flux | Trent Walton

Trent offers some excellent advice for dealing with the effects of the iPad’s retina display on your websites. That advice is: don’t panic.

Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design - HTML5 Rocks

A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.

Nielsen is wrong on mobile | Opinion | .net magazine

Josh responds to Jakob Nielsen’s audaciously ignorant advice on siloing mobile devices. Josh is right.

Nielsen says his research is based on studies of hundreds of mobile experiences, and I don’t doubt it. But because he’s finding tons of poor mobile websites doesn’t mean we should punt on creating great, full-featured mobile experiences.

The Future Friendly Campus // Speaker Deck

It’s great to see the Future Friendly call-to-arms being expanded on. Here it’s university sites that are being looked at through a future-friendly lens.

BBC - BBC Internet Blog: BBC News on mobile: responsive design

BBC News are using the mobile subdomain to plant the seed of responsive design. It’s a smart move that’s been really nicely executed.

ARC 2012: The future is on its way - New Scientist

A new publication from New Scientist dedicated to future thinking. The first issue has articles and stories from Bruce Sterling, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Alastair Reynolds.

Content Parity | Brad Frost Web

Yet another great post from Brad:

Whenever I think of the concept of “One Web” and providing universal access to information on the web, I tend to break it down into something much simpler: give people what they ask for.

Jordan Moore | Web Design, Northern Ireland, Bangor, Freelance

A sweet little meditation on the nature of the web and responsive design.

Thinking About Futurism | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

A collection of articles on the tricksy art of Futurism from—amongst others—Bruce Sterling, Annalee Newitz, and Matt Novak, creator of the Paleofuture blog.

Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done - YouTube

Neal Stephenson speaks at Solve For X on the relative timidity of scientific (and science fictional) progress in our current time.

LukeW | Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS?

Luke outlines three different solutions to delivering a site to multiple devices.

A List Apart: Articles: Future-Ready Content

A great article from Sara Wachter-Boettcher on crafting future-friendly content. The content prioritisation described here mirrors what I’ve been doing in workshops.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Responsive Images — Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s a great braindump from Paul following the Responsive Summit, detailing multiple ways of potentially tackling the issue of responsive images.

JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · The Responsive Process

Josh goes through the talking points from the recent Responsive Summit he attended. Sounds like it was a great get-together.

Responsive Design: Why You’re Doing It Wrong | Design Shack

A rallying cry for a content-focused—rather than device-focused—approach to responsive design. Despite the awful title and occasionally adversarial tone, this article is making a very good point about being future friendly.

Building a Responsive, Future-Friendly Web for Everyone | Webmonkey | Wired.com

A nice round-up of responsive and future-friendly resources.

A plea for progressive enhancement | Stephanie Rieger

Yes! Yes! Yes!!!

Progressive enhancement is the only sane approach to today’s massively divergent landscape of devices. It can’t be repeated often enough.

The ‘trouble’ with Android | Stephanie Rieger

Stephanie focuses on Android but this is a cautionary tale about trying to impose control over what you’re sending to the multitude of mobile devices out there.

Designing to fixed screen sizes is in fact never a good idea…there is just too much variation, even amongst ‘popular’ devices.

Predicting the Future of Computing - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

An interactive timeline where we, the wise crowd, can add our predictions (although the timeline for the past, showing important technological breakthroughs, is bizarrely missing Cooke and Wheatsone’s telegraph).

Support Vs Optimization | Brad Frost Web

Brad is on a roll. He knocks it out of the park again, this time talking about the difference between supporting the huge range of mobile browsers out there compared to trying to optimise for them.

The mobile app is going the way of the CD-ROM: To the dustbin of history | VentureBeat

Some future-friendly musings on mobile from Mozilla and Yahoo.

Mobile content strategy link-o-rama 2011 « Karen McGrane

A great round-up of links and posts relating to the increasingly-important role of content strategy and structured content in our multi-device, responsively-designed online world.

inessential.com: Apps and web apps and the future

Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:

If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)

That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.

I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.

The Mobile Case for Progressive Enhancement | Brad Frost Web

A great, great reminder from Brad on the importance of progressive enhancement especially on mobile. There seems to be a real mindset amongst developers working on mobile sites that JavaScript is a requirement for building anything (and there’s a corresponding frustration with the wildly-varying levels of JavaScript support). It ain’t necessarily so!

Shimizu’s Dream - Shimizu Corporation

Among the proposed projects from the Shimizu corporation are a space hotel, giant lakes in the desert, and a ring around the moon to harness solar energy.

Future Drama

Past predictions of the future in concept videos.

inessential.com: The Readable Future

Brent Simmons writes about the desire of regular web users—not just the geeks—to have a comfortable reading experience. Publishers ignore this at their peril.

russell davies: again with the post digital

In a single post, Russell Davies manages to rehabilitate the term “post digital.” And he paints a vivid picture of where our “Geocities of things” is heading.

LukeW | The Web OS is Already Here…

Luke points out that the web is everywhere: it’s accessible through the browser but also through many native applications. This is the real Web Operating System.

The Web (browser) is inside of every application instead of every application being inside the Web (browser).

Mark Boulton on designing websites using ‘content out’ | Interview | .net magazine

Mark continues to hammer home the most important thing to keep in mind when creating responsive designs: design from the content out, not the canvas in.

The Future of Open Fabrication

A thorough hypertext report from those good folks at the Institute For The Future on our fabrication overlords.

The Myths of Mobile Context by Josh Clark

A PDF of the slides (with copious notes) from Josh’s brilliant presentation. I love this guy!

BlackBerry Future Visions 2 - Leaked Video - YouTube

Possibly the least imaginative concept video ever made, this piece commissioned by Blackberry shows a dystopian near-future ruled by security departments run by people with very, very tired arms.

#816: Revert mobile-first media queries and remove respond.js - Issues - h5bp/html5-boilerplate - GitHub

This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.

Productivity Future Vision (2011) - YouTube

This vision thing commissioned by Microsoft shows a future-friendly networked world where content flows like water from screen to screen.

Newsstand Is Promising, Yay! But Enough with Issue-Based Publishing (Global Moxie)

Josh nails it: publishers need to stop thinking in terms of issues:

Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.

Understand The Web · Ben Ward

Given some recent hand-wringing about the web as a “platform,” it seems appropriate to revisit this superb article from Ben. The specifics of the companies and technologies may have changed in the past year but the fundamental point remains the same:

Everything about web architecture; HTTP, HTML, CSS, is designed to serve and render content, but most importantly the web is formed where all of that content is linked together. That is what makes it amazing, and that is what defines it. This purpose and killer application of the web is not even comparable to the application frameworks of any particular operating system.

Why are you fighting me? - Blog | Andy Hume

Andy responds to Joe Hewitt’s recent despondent posts about the web. I tend to agree with Andy: I think comparing the web to other “platforms” is missing the point of what the web is.

See also: http://benward.me/blog/understand-the-web

The Next 6 Billion | Web Directions

John reinforces the importance of universal access above the desire to build only for the newest shiniest devices:

Universality is a founding principle of the web. It is the manifesto the web has been built on, and I believe one of the key drivers of the almost unimaginable success of the web over these last two decades. We ignore that at the web’s peril.

WSOL :: Envisioning a Responsive Future :: Design Beyond Device

A great collection of the future-friendly techniques of today: progressive enhancement, mobile first and responsive design.

The typography-out approach in the world of browser-based web design » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks

An insight into Elliot’s current design process which highlights the advantages of designing in the browser when you take a content-first approach.

Future Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events

A speculative timeline of future history.

For a Future-Friendly Web | Brad Frost Web

A terrific presentation on progressive enhancement and mobile web development from Brad at Web Design Day. You can look at the slides, read the notes and watch the video.

Crap! It doesn’t look quite right, or, how I learned to stop worryi…

Looks like Lyza’s presentation at Over The Air at Bletchley Park was really excellent.

Crap! It doesn't look quite right, or, how I learned to stop worrying and set my mobile web sites free from Lyza Gardner

Interview with Lyza Danger Gardner - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Set my Mobile Web Sites Free - Ubelly

A great little interview with Lyza, wherein she outlines her future-friendly attitude to web development.

Responsive IMGs — Part 1 « Cloud Four

Jason takes a high-level look at tackling mobile-first responsive images (his next post will dig into the details). This is a really good summation of current thinking. Be sure to read the comments too: Andy chimes in with his experiences.

Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6 « Paul Irish

Paul paints a grim picture of our future support nightmares with multiple Internet Explorers, each one with multiple buggy “compatibility” modes.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site : Future friendly, or Forward to Yesterday?

Bruce nails his colours to the mast of future-friendliness (and nicely summarises recent heated debates between John Allsopp, Alex Russell and Joe Hewitt).

Future Friendly | Brad Frost Web

Brad documents his time at Mobilewood and cast his gaze to a future-friendly horizon.

Future Friendly at Mobilewood (Global Moxie)

Josh sums up the Mobilewood experience wonderfully. He also makes it clear that futurefriend.ly is just the beginning:

This stuff is hard, and we need to do it together. This is a time to be generous, and it’s a time for conversation. Let’s get after it.

LukeW | Future Friendly

Luke beautifully encapsulates the forces that drove the creation of the futurefriend.ly site. I feel like I should be standing on my chair, declaring “Oh captain, my captain!”

Future Friendly

In today’s incredibly exciting yet overwhelming world of connected digital devices, these are the truths we hold to be self-evident…

The Technium: Why the Impossible Happens More Often

A wonderful reminder by Kevin Kelly of the amazing interconnected world we live in, thanks to network effects.

Nanolaw with Daughter (Ftrain.com)

A superbly written piece of near-future legal-dystopian speculative fiction. Damn, that Paul Ford can write!

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE on Vimeo

Just imagine the world we would be living in if it weren’t for the warnings given to us by these film-makers.

A History of the Future in 100 Objects | Mssv

Adrian Hon’s Kickstarter project has already reached its goal. I can’t wait for the podcasting to start.

YouTube - A Day Made of Glass… Made possible by Corning.

There are two things I’d like to see after watching this video:

A slew of parodies to highlight the unintended consequences of this marketeer’s panopticon,
The Paleofuture blog post in 100 years looking back at this.

Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food - New York Times

A tour of the Global Seed Bank in Svalbard.

Damn Interesting • This Place is Not a Place of Honor

Trying to design a warning message for future generations, without relying on language, writing or current semiotics.

We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.

Forever Future | Sascha Pohflepp

The intriguing tale of a fictional archivist, storing past visions of the future in a storage facility that acts as a space ark.

He has put money in the bank which will pay for the space well beyond his lifetime. Each year he collects technological predictions that had been made for that year and conserves the ones that didn’t come true in the form of 35mm slides. The ship itself consists of a refrigeration unit to help preserve the slides, a slide projector and light box in case these technologies have become extinct by the time of its recovery, and a system to get power from the outside. In an annual ritual on April 11th Walker adds another box to the mission.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop on Vimeo

One potential nightmare vision of the future …that looks kind of cool.

FuturICT: FuturIcT

An attempt to turn psychohistory into reality using a “Knowledge Accelerator.”

YouTube - paleofuture.tv [episode 00000: food]

The Paleofuture blog, that excellent trove of past visions of the future, has a corresponding video channel. The first episode is all about food.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2010 — Page 8

How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?

Flowers for cyberpunk « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird

A personal ode to cyberpunk.

How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025)

An entertaining missive from the future.

Design at the End of the World, by Ben Fullerton - Core77

Designing for the apocalypse.

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash - Charlie's Diary

Charles Stross peers into his dilithium crystal ball and tells tales of the future as decided by Apple.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Putting the Future Back in the Room

Here is the star to sail your ship by.

Where I’m actually living in augmented reality, Jefferson Airplane and what does this mean for photos. « geobloggers

Rev. Dan Catt's augmented reality future is here; it just isn't evenly distributed yet.

Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction

Download the PDF of this essay from the Near Future Laboratory and wallow in the sci-fi/tech/design goodness.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss

I know this sound uncharitable but there's a good chance that the reason why Bruce Sterling's books aren't selling is because he's just not a very good writer. And I say that as a big sci-fi fan. I mean, really... have you read Distraction? I tried ...and failed.

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