“In short: it’s time to think about the Internet instead of just letting it happen.” (David Gelernter – EDGE)

“This person sits unperturbed by the apparent chaos of his desk. How does he cope with all that complexity? I’ve never spoken with the person in the picture, Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and winner of the Nobel prize for his work on the environment, but I have talked with and studied other people with similar looking desks and they explain that there is order and structure to the apparent complexity. It’s easy to test: if I ask them for something, they know just where to go: the item is retrieved, oftentimes much faster than from a person who keeps a neat and orderly workplace. The major problem these people face is that others are continually trying to help them, and their biggest fear is that one day they will return to their office and discover someone has cleaned up all the piles and put things into their ‘proper’ places.” (Donald A Norman – Living with Complexity)

“This is where the future is entirely in your hands. You can leave here today promising yourself to invent the future, to write meaning explicitly onto the real world, to transform our relationship to the universe of objects. Or, you can wait for someone else to come along and do it. Because someone inevitably will. Every day, the pressure grows. The real world is clamoring to crawl into cyberspace. You can open the door.” (Mark Pesce – The Human Network)

“(…) let’s take a closer look at some examples of visions and strategies. For my first example consider you are living in the 15th century and you have a family with 2 kids. As a responsible parent you want to make sure they are fed well. Your children haven’t had a full meal with a nice piece of meat in a while. As soon as you wake up you create your vision: “Today at 20.00 my children will eat a full meal with a fresh piece of meat, larger than they can eat!”. That is pretty concrete, right? There is a time-line, a quantifiable goal, although the type of meat and the quantity is still left open. But you sort of get it, it is concrete enough.” (Martijn van Welie – Thoughts on Interaction Design)

“Stefano Marzano, CEO and Chief Creative Director at Philips Design addressed a gathering of business leaders on the role of design in creating value for business and society. (…) And remember, the great and good companies will be remembered in the future as those who considered posterity, sustainability, quality of life and a better future for humanity. The choice is yours.” (new value by Design Jan. 2010 – Philips Design)

“We live in exciting times. Finally, we are beginning to understand that pleasure and fun are important components of life; that emotion is not a bad thing; and that learning, education, and work can all benefit from pleasure and fun.” (Donald A. Norman – ACM Interactions XVII.1)

“Working with long lists of information over a network, like web email, can be problematic. Very long lists can have a huge performance hit on your servers, leaving the user tapping her fingers waiting on slow page loads, especially on ‘very thin’ clients like mobile devices. To limit the server hit and increase response times, some systems paginate data, that is, break it up into a series of pages.” (Chris Noessel – Cooper Journal)

“Transdisciplinarity has a semantic appeal which differs from what one often calls inter- or multi-, or pluri-disciplinarity. And, note that the prefix – trans- is shared with another word, namely transgressiveness. If it is true that knowledge is transgressive, then it means transdisciplinarity does not respect disciplinary boundaries. It goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries, but it does not respect institutional boundaries, either. In addition, there is a kind of similarity, a kind of convergence or co- evolution, between what is happening in the sphere of knowledge production and what we can see going on in the way that societal institutions are developing.” (Helga Nowotny – Rethinking Interdisciplinarity)

“In the Age of Links, we include everything. Links create a world of abundance. The irony is that while the Info Age’s strategy was to exclude bad and useless info, in the Age of Links we’re better able to manage the abundance of crap than the abundance of good stuff.” (David Weinberger)

“I recently took part in a fascinating ‘unconference‘ in Seattle aimed at information professionals of various stripes — librarians, information architects, interaction designers and the like. It’s called InfoCamp, and it seems like a natural venue for online journalists too — though there were few in attendance. The sessions covered such familiar topics as information visualization and user-created content, but from a broader perspective than we journalists usually look. This got me thinking: Why should there such a gap between the information gatherers (us) and the information organizers (them)?” (Eric Ulken – De Nieuwe Reporter.nl)