Dieter Rams pointing at things he doesn't like

In order to contribute to historical awareness in our field, we have compiled a list of interaction design classics. Our aim was to include examples that we find inspiring and insightful — which led to our greatest challenge, keeping in mind that we wanted to create a concise list — leaving things out. So, we decided to focus on productivity software — in a very broad sense — and to order the projects chronologically. We didn’t address user interfaces from games, websites or artistic projects; that really would have been too much.

We’re in a weird time for the way the future looks; somehow House of Cards can slyly introduce a floating text-message interface to their present-day political drama without so much as blinking, but most of our iconic near- and far-future worlds run on tracks laid down well before the ’90s.

"I don't need inspiration. I need deadlines." Stefan Sagmeister http://t.co/9TNmy9p #design

You must look at this amazing artifact out of the BERG cluster in London. I’d like to call this “the greatest design-fiction writing I’ve ever seen,” but (a) it’s not about design, (b) it’s not fictional and (c) it’s not even writing.

This is new. The web has broken a lot of silos between the disciplines in the past 10 years, but this is a new thing that is visibly rising out of that rubble. It’s contemporary creative work which pops on the screen like a web page, but it feels like it wants to be art history, a comic book, an embedded video, a special FX anime movie… It even wants to plan a utopian city.

It’s not possible to read this in the way that texts were once read. Accessing this changes the way you walk in the street and the way you look out the window. This is not a traditional manifesto. There’s something different and hallucinatory and transformative about this. All those links, those correlations of ideas, those connections to real-world projects…. It feels like it ought