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Technology: From the Greek: τέχνη where it meant craft, skill, trade, art, cunning, wile, means, describing something that is built or created. Etymologically related to Text and Architecture. Occasionally described as an “extension of our body” (McLuhan), technology is mainly an amplifier of our actions, sometimes vilified and sometimes dignified. Since humans are more inclined and talented at making a mess than cleaning up, technology has a strong inclination for amplifying Entropy over clarifying Information. Not everybody shares this point of view. A true Tech Optimist will defend the overall positive impact of technology at all costs. Often, tech optimists will claim that technology is morally neutral, ignoring that technology is designed and produced by humans with a certain morally relevant purpose.

Articles related to Technology

We Need to Go Deeper: How to Master iA Writer

Tutorials, videos, and writing tips to help you become a better writer.

Design as Thought: AI and the Future of Design

Orlando and Oliver studied philosophy together 30 years ago. Their shared love for philosophy, design, and technology reunited them to discuss AI and the future.

I Want You Back (The Dropbox Remix)

Dropbox finally has a native Files app integration. This is good news for iA Writer.

Sharing Presentations Made Easy

Online sharing is now available in iA Presenter beta for Mac.

Designed in China, Assembled in California

As China starts outdoing us economically, technically and strategically, we are turning Chinese, slowly losing the spiritual, cultural and political texture that made us different.

Writer vs Word

Microsoft Word is the classic do-all text editor used by... just about everyone. How does it compare to a modern, focused writing app like iA Writer?

Computer Poetry

Every time we read a computer-generated text, part of our life gets sucked into a little black electric hole.

Make Bots Identifiable

Everybody that has an interest in influencing public opinion will happily pay a handful of Dollars to amplify their voices. Governments, political groups, corporations, traders, and just simple plain trolls will continue to shout through bot armies—as long as it is so cheap.

Is Time Money?

Bitcoin rose from 1,000 to 19,000 in a couple of months. Today it fell back to 10,000. If time is money, then what happened to people’s time? Is it lost?

Web Trend Map 2018

The most important ingredient for a Web Trend Map is missing: The Web. Time to bring some of it back.

News from Facebook

Step by step, Facebook has cut the news from its feeds. Yesterday, they confirmed that they will focus on content from friends and family while de-emphasizing news. How come? A brief history of the odd partnership between Facebook and the news industry and what it means for us.

Who serves whom?

Artificial Intelligence is a complex riddle for all sorts of experts. It’s full of magic, mystery, money, mind-boggling techno-ethical paradoxes and sci-fi dilemmas that may or may not affect us in some far or near future. Meanwhile, it already shapes our everyday life. Things already go wrong. And no one is responsible. What can we do?

“Art at scale”

The excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails are a gold mine. The text itself is a raw cut-up from a series of private emails. Kay argues that fundamental innovation and following objectives run counter to each other. Very much like art, fundamental research needs to be free from objective purpose.

UX Lessons In Game Design

To spice up our monster essay on icons, we created an icon monster shooter arcade game. Planned as a one week hackathon, it turned into an amazing one year adventure. Here is what UX designers learned creating an arcade game.

Information Entropy

Will information technology affect our minds the same way the environment was affected by our analogue technology? Designers hold a key position in dealing with ever increasing data pollution. We are mostly focused on speeding things up, on making sharing easier, faster, more accessible. But speed, usability, accessibility are not the main issue anymore.

Twitterror

How do you deal with erroneous tweets? Not any erroneous tweets, your erroneous tweets. The tweets that you misspelled or, worse, that contain information you later discover is false, or a late night knee-jerk response you regret in the morning.

Follow-up to “Sweep the Sleaze”

Our call to question the common practice of blindly adding social media buttons to every page got a lot of attention, and found many friends across the board. This proves we are onto something. Let’s look at some of the more critical reactions.

Improving the Digital Reading Experience

There is a difference between checking Google Maps on your iPhone and asking a stranger for directions. It matters whether you listened to Beethoven’s 9th in a concert hall or in your living room, whether it plays from a vinyl LP or from your iPod. King Lear is not the same experience when seen at the theatre, studied on paper, or scanned on a Kindle.

A Web Designer on Fukushima

I'm not a nuclear expert. I am a 40-year-old Swiss web designer, with a degree in philosophy, living in Tokyo. And I'm a father of a two-year-old boy. I was nonchalant about nuclear energy so far, but recently, I've read a lot about it; it's hard to understand the discussion.

Form and Information

Here is the lecture iA's Oliver Reichenstein gave in 2010 at Keio University on creativity, information, and innovation.

iPad: Scroll or Card?

How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held a conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps, “Card Sharks” and “Holy Scrollers”. They had an epic battle over this question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?

Can Experience be Designed?

Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences”? The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences”. The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses”. The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.

API for News? Reuters, NYT & iA Inc.

Last week at Media2010, Marc Frons (Chief Technology Officer, Digital Operations, New York Times), Nic Fulton (Chief Scientist, Thomson Reuters), and I were asked several questions on the future of news…

Web Trend Map V3

Das ultimative Tool für Internetfreaks, die Web Trend Map 2008, ist nun als A0-Poster erhältlich.

This is madness! No, This is Radiohead

The release of music for free online is certainly no new thing, with many bands finding success through file-sharing. That fill-sharing kills the record industry is also nothing new, however Radiohead recently made it official by showing that it's possible the make and reach millions without either.

Internet 2007 Predictions

After looking closer at what made the web in 2006, it is time for some bold predictions.

Technorati: Big Business with Bogus Data

Since the PR giant Edelman and Technorati are working together they are both trying to become an industry reference for statistics on the blogosphere. The question is how reliable is Technorati’s data?

Web 3.0: You Say You’re on a Revolution?

Web 1.0 started as a streaming publish-to-read medium; web 2.0 has established itself as a publishing platform for everyone. Now web 3.0 is said to be a technologically advanced Internet, where the user executes and the machines do the thinking.

Build a Plane and Fly to Sicily

Since Mondays are typically low energy days, I’d like to share this story with, to reassure you: If you have a strong vision—no one can stop you.

Jakob Nielsen, Time Machine?

In 2001, usability guru Jakob Nielsen—according to USA Today “the next best thing to a true time machine”—was convinced that by 2007 books would be gone and “fully replaced with online information”. Was he being serious?

Internet Users Visit Only 6 Websites

We now have over 75 million websites we can go to, but still we only visit six of them regularly, as we just learned from a study recently made public by Directgov. Their findings make us think of a new phase of the Internet.