Web Design: The First Hundred Years

A great talk from Maciej Ceglowski in 2014.

Our job is to get [the people] connected, maybe put a decent font on the knowledge, and then watch the fireworks happen.

What happens next is wonderful and unexpected. It’s a humble vision of technology. We know how to make the tools but we don't believe that we're smarter than seven billion people in how we choose to use them. We say, “Surprise us.” And then we iterate back when we see something cool they're doing. Then maybe we try to design different tools to make that happen more easily.

A lot of the interesting things that happen in technology are not things we planned or anticipated, yet we still like to think this next time around we’ll design things from the ground up.

When Twitter came out, they didn’t even anticipate things like the hashtag...again and again we have this history of not really knowing how our technologies are going to be used but it doesn't stop us from thinking we can design the next ones from the ground up.