I love realizing that almost anything around you has been thought up and manufactured by someone. Just imagine, somewhere on this earth there is at least one person who does nothing all day but operate the fascinating machine that produces the little nets they put oranges in and an engineer who thought up and made that machine.

Although it’s not always apparent, all things around you have also been designed, not in the sense of how something works but how it looks. Sometimes this has been done consciously, sometimes without the designer at hand realising it. This last group is very interesting to look at, because the design process is then steered not by creative thinking but by what things looks like at that moment and what is unconsciously percieved to be beautiful.

Mom has, as long as I can remember, made meringues, a simple dessert made by beating eggwhites and sugar, putting that on a plate in little heaps and drying them in the oven for a few hours. The recipe has never changed: they’ve always been deliciously sweet, crunchy on the outside and mellow on the inside. What has changed, is the shape of the meringues, the way they are put on the plate. They have, along with the perception of what is beautiful, evolved. The first meringues I can remember (probably from around 1996) had this shape:

They are quite complicated and baroque compared to what is perceived as beautiful nowadays.

Later (2000-2004) the design simplified, less rococo, a smooth surface but still somewhat symetric and artificial:

And this is the way the meringues look nowadays:

They are now as unartificial as possible, thrown from afar on to the parchment paper and put in the oven without too much tampering. They look completely different from the ones I remember giving me my first toothaches.

It’s fun to see trends in things were no one would bother to look for them, but it also means everything manufactured by man will once look dated and old. Reminds you of the impermanence of things…

Then again, if you eat them, no one will ever know.

The ACTA treaty, for which the latest negotiations were held just a few days ago in Korea and the horrific rules it plans to impose to supposedly stop piracy and the ‘Internet Freedom Act’, a bill proposed by American Senator John McCain to stop the government from forcing ISP’s to treat all information going through their cables equal are only two examples of how this freedom is threatened

I strongly believe that the guarantee of net neutrality could be one of the most influential historical moments in our lifetime, one that will set in stone the inventions made by the the information revolution.

Why then are these laws being imposed or planned without larger public outcry? Corporate greed, their sole reason, can only go as far as the populous lets it. As long as there is no education on this matter so that a large enough percentage of the public can cry out in horror, our rights will never be safe. We will have to  to start a campaign to inform people who are unaware that their rights are being violated using commercials and ads in newspapers. Once everyone knows what net neutrality means and understands its value, ISP’s and governments will back off.

Iʼve been reading Jeff Jarvisʼ “What Would Google Do”, in which he looks at how various businesses and institutions can make their step into the “digital age”. One of the institutions he talks about is universities, a specific section of the book which he also put on his blog in February:

“Who needs a university when we have Google? All the world’s digital knowledge is available at a search. We can connect those who want to know with those who know. We can link students to the best teachers for them (who may be fellow students). We can find experts on any topic. Textbooks need no longer be petrified on pages but can link to information and discussion; they can be the products of collaboration, updated and corrected, answering questions and giving quizzes, even singing and dancing. There’s no reason my children should be limited to the courses at one school; even now, they can get coursework online from no less than MIT and Stanford. And there’s no reason that I, long out of college, shouldn’t take those courses, too.”

Although I might not agree with his notion that students could be able to take courses at different schools – it might be pessimist on my behalf or Utopian on his, I donʼt know – I do agree that our universities are too invested in the transfer of facts. Students in their first year of university have to stuff their heads with vast amounts of easily researchable factual knowledge in preparation for their exams: who the painter of a certain work of art was or the year in which a book was written. This might have been necessary in the 19th century, but why would we memorize these things in an age where all knowledge is – as they say – at our fingertips?

If universities would stop forcing us to memorize loads and loads of facts, the focus could shift to the way facts could be interpreted and by doing so broadening the spectrum of our knowledge.

It is the case in Belgium and other European countries that a student who chooses a certain academic field, he will never receive a course unrelated to that particular field of expertise. This produces engineers who arenʼt interested in culture whatsoever and have trouble communicating. This produces language or art history students who have never learned the first thing about science or the law. Why not give engineers one or two hours of literature or philosophy a week? Or give Art History students some biology?

One might argue that, since the information is freely and easily available, students can educate themselves. To them I say: Newsflash: They won’t, or at least most of them won’t. Most students and most people refuse to take a leap into the unknown, even though there might be things to learn, things that might arouse their interest. We (the students) should be forced to take that leap. Give us a course or lecture of one hour a week on something that is as far away as possible from our field of study, donʼt make it too hard (thereʼs a reason we do what we do), show us the benefits of what you are teaching us and we will become better, more versatile people.

A pessimist will ask: How much more will the nature of what we do with computers and networks change? In the 1960s computers were used for, well, computing, nowadays they are used primarily as a means of communcication. Will the difference between now and the 2050s be as massive as that shift? If the revolution of the last decade evens out, we won’t have to worry about learning new technologies, because there won’t be anything radically new. Yes, the core technology itself might possibly not bring anything radically new, but the effect of the inventions of the last decades will only be felt when we figure out what cool stuff we can do with those.

When these new applications arrive when my generation is going on fifty, will the basics of networking and digital communication that Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and others are teaching us now be enough to face these evolutions? We are growing up with applications that are constantly evolving and hardware that is and will be for the forseeable future getting faster and faster. Is that enough to make us more flexible when we become old grumpy farts? I’d like to think so, but I might be biased. As someone who is young and interested in these things, I have no trouble whatsoever adapting to new technologies and I find a certain delight in being ‘bleeding edge’.

I don’t believe hostility towards new things in general lies at the core of adaptation of new technology, but rather the unwillingness to learn new things. When we get older we can’t be bothered to learn new things. We are tired, leave us be. It is the industry’s task to minimize the learning process of a new technology. The UI has to be intuitonal and self explanatory not only on the surface but also in settings and uses that are more advanced. This can be done by introducing intuitonal multi-touch gestures in screens (or other places) or replacing keyboard and mouse by pen on screen like in Microsoft’s Courrier tablet among other things. Certainly, the replacement of the WIMP-model is imminent and necessary.

If new technologies are presented in an intuitive way, we don’t have to worry about adapting when we are old and rusty. Granted, this would only solve the problem of not wanting to adapt because it is too hard. There are other reasons too: new technology is expensive to implement and some people gathered a certain power gaming the system. The first problem might be solved by cloud computing or software as a service but the second problem can’t be solved by implementing new technology and has to be (if at all possible) approached in some other way.