WE

are asking the question: what does the web want to be? What is the natural use of all the power it gives us?

ARE

the solutions we’ve learned in the last five years – minimalism, flat hierarchies, and the occasional flash of javascript – helping us advance or holding us back?

NOT

only are these designs five years old, they operate inside interaction models that are forty years old. Draggable rectangles, pointing with a cursor, and filling in forms were imagined too long ago to be the best we can do today.

THE

way forward isn’t obvious, but we know what needs to be left behind. The metaphor of the screen as a page, a scroll, a control panel, or a desktop. The metaphor of a website as a book, a shopping cart, or a helpful person.

WEB

design is something completely new. It isn’t a medium where you passively observe a creator’s work. It isn’t a person you interact with according to social norms. It’s a new interaction. The closest thing to a web site is a pet: you can think it beautiful according to a variety of standards. You can consider it useful or just entertaining. You interact with it, though not as an equal, and you come to project emotions onto its complex behavior.

YET

with so little control and so many resources for building the new web, who but we ourselves could stop us from doing something mad?