In 2000, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA) published their first “Design Education Manifesto,” noting “many changes” in design practice, defining “visual communication designer,” and suggesting “a future of design education.” The ICOGRADA manifesto marked a turning point—an international design body addressing change at the millennium. Publishing the manifesto was a significant accomplishment. A decade later, ICOGRADA are updating their manifesto. This essay responds to their request for input.

Framing the manifesto
The manifesto acknowledges change without quite defining it and lists attributes of an emerging practice and education without quite prescribing them. The manifesto does not explicitly define goals or audience. It does not decry indulgences or urge reform. It does not sound an alarm or assert a theory.

Instead, the manifesto asks that we consider our responsibility for harmony, balance, and each other. It invokes oullim, a Korean word denoting resonance and connoting mutual duty. It might also have invoked similar ideas with the Chinese word ren.

In a thoughtful commentary on the manifesto and its development, Sharon Poggenpohl and Ahn Sang-soo acknowledge that “the search was for common ground” and “consensus” and that the manifesto is “somewhat quiet.”

Yet, Poggenpohl and Ahn note, “A manifesto is a form of communication predicated on three beliefs: that a change has occurred . . . that human agency can change circumstances into something more desirable; and the timing is advantageous . . .”

Thus, in relation to the ICOGRADA manifesto, we must ask:
- What has changed?
- What could be better?
- Why act now?

Framing the context
The manifesto begins by acknowledging changes in design. “The term ‘graphic design’ has been technologically undermined…. Boundaries between disciplines are becoming more fluid…. The variety and complexity of design issues has expanded.” We might better understand these changes by understanding their context and causes.

So: What is causing the large shifts in design practice?

Computers? Software tools? The Internet?

Yes, but they manifest a much larger shift in technology, economic structure, and culture. The industrial revolution is ending. A new revolution in information is beginning, on top of which comes another revolution in biology, also largely about information—”understanding how organisms encode it, store, reproduce, transmit, and express it.”

The shift is not only about what’s produced (from things to services) and how they are produced (from long-lead editions to continuous adaptation, from proprietary to open source, from transaction to relationship), it is also a shift in world view (from mechanism to organism), a shift in framing metaphors (from clock-work to ecosystem, from turn-the-crank-linear-causality to feedback-enabled-dynamic-equilibrium), a shift in organizing structures (from individual nodes to webs of links, from top-down to bottom-up, from serial to parallel), a shift in human values (from coherence to responsiveness, from seeking simplicity to embracing complexity).

Thus, we must also ask:
- How will we transform design in the age of information and biology?

Framing design
Design grew out of craft. A craftsman planned-for-making-things and made them. The craft tradition was cut short by the industrial revolution. Mass production separated planning-for-making-things from making them. Planning-for-making-things became design, and design took on some of the assumptions of mass production: notions of objectivity (e.g., framing situations in terms of problems and solutions), an expert or “professional” stance, a concern with “getting things right” (because in the world of mass production, the cost of fixing a design mistake can be quite large).

These assumptions may no longer apply; they may even be dangerous. Problem framing becomes more valuable than problem solving. Software is never “right”. And it’s never done. In software development, delays are often more costly than mistakes. With network-based applications, change becomes continuous. We enter perpetual beta. (For designers who acknowledge that improvement comes from iteration and that ending conditions are arbitrary, perpetual beta may be more comfortable than mass production.)

In the new world of information and biology, design will change. Less common will be situations in which things are designed by designers, in advance of use by users, enforcing a single view. More common will be situations created by participants, during use, enabling multiple views. Today’s users will become designers; today’s designers will become meta-designers, creating conditions in which others can design.

In this world, a media-based focus is less relevant. All design becomes trans-disciplinary. A concern for the form of objects will give way to a concern for the experience of services. A concern for products and things will give way to a concern for networks of interaction and communities of systems.

ICOGRADA has shifted from graphic design to communication design. The new position still focuses on individual products. A further shift to focus on platforms—to design of systems in which communications can take place—might be more consistent with the technological, economic, and cultural shifts we face.

We might even go beyond communication (which implies Shannon’s somewhat mechanical model of delivering messages) and focus on conversation (interactions that converge on understanding, agreement, and action). We might frame design as conversation—with a goal of designing for conversation.

Threats and opportunities
The very basis of graphic design is under assault. Printing is dying. In another 10 years, commercial offset lithography will have all but disappeared, save possibly for a handful of luxury artisans. Mass-production lithography will be replaced by mass-customization ink-jet or other digital printing techniques—or by electronic communications. New printed newspapers, magazines, and books may all but disappear, too.

At the same time, new forms of communications will emerge. Networked tablets will provide an environment for re-inventing the relationship between text, image, motion, and sound. Games, movies, and social networks will spawn new hybrids. E-books will become applications. Data-visualization will become a profession, employing thousands of designers.

We are also finding new ways to apply information technology to design. We are learning that “hardware products want to be web-sites,” and data-driven design is emerging as a new discipline. [5] Computation-based design (the application of algorithms to exploring solution spaces), long a subject of research, is entering practice and promises to become a discipline in its own right. Scan-edit-print, long a framework in two-dimensional design, is becoming a framework in three-dimensional design, and not just for mechanical objects but also for living things.

Given these opportunities, we must ask:
- What skills are required to take advantage of them?

Framing design’s relation to code
Juxtaposing the threat to traditional graphic design with the opportunities of “emerging media” might suggest an easy transition. And many traditional design skills do translate directly. But are they sufficient? Designers will also need to understand computers, networks, and software—as they previously had to understand printing, binding, and other manufacturing technologies.

Yet that industrial-age framing no longer fits. A designer’s relation to a printer is very different than a designer’s relation to a programmer. In both cases, a designer may develop a specification, but both the specifications and what happens next are very different. Printing is all about reproduction and requires little invention from the printer; programming has almost nothing to do with reproduction and requires a lot of invention by the programmer. Consulting your printer during design is a good idea; consulting your programmer during design is a necessity.

Practice has not settled the nature of the relationship between designer and coder, and it is the subject of intense debate among programmers. Alan Cooper has suggested it should be like the relationship between architect and builder. But most buildings are designed by builders, not architects. (And most software is designed by programmers, not designers.) Yet, when the architect is also an excellent engineer, such as Robert Maillart or Toni Kotnik, the results can be amazing.

We’ve also seen amazing results from designers who can code, such as David Small, Lisa Strausfeld, John Maeda, Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and many others. In fact, the best young designers are teaching themselves to code, and the best young engineers are teaching themselves to design. Is this a race? Or will they converge? Can we create schools for hybrids?

End-user programming tools have long promised to shield designers and others from coding, but so far, the best they offer is an easier way to begin. So far, learning mark-up and scripting languages remains a necessity. The best way to convey how you want software to behave is to demonstrate the behavior.

Framing design education
Our notions of design are rooted in the industrial revolution framing of design as planning-for-making-things. Yet our strategies for design education are even older; they remain rooted in the craft era, in the master-apprentice relationship played out in the design studio. In this tradition, students learn by emulating teachers. Almost all their learning is tacit. Response to change is slow.

In the craft world, where change is slow, the master-apprentice system works well. In the post-industrial world, where change is fast, the master-apprentice system tends to fall behind. Often, the apprentice knows more about new trends and new tools than the master. A post-industrial design education system can no longer rely solely on tacit learning. It must also turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge—”distill rules from experience, codify new methods, test and improve them, and pass them on to others.”

“The focus on design research at a few top schools is a positive development.” A few design journals publish articles that build lasting knowledge, but they are not widely read. A few design blogs are widely read, but they aren’t building lasting knowledge. Research must inform practice, and practice must inform research. They must co-evolve. This evolution requires invention, for example, fusing the studio and case-study methods.

Research must be more than observation or even abstraction. Research must also invent theory. The holes in design knowledge are huge. We lack theories of conversation, interaction, platforms, products and product management, and service. Filling these holes is an important task for design practice and education. Both must learn how to learn. Both must develop mechanisms to build and share knowledge.

Summary
The manifesto grew out of a recognition of change, mis-alignment, and the need to put things in order. Yet it was circumspect, almost vague. I urge ICOGRADA to greater clarity. Clarity invites response, which can lead to iteration, which can lead to improvement, which is a goal we share.

In the interest of clarity, I propose this summary:

The design practice that grew out of the industrial revolution is no longer sustainable (economically or ecologically). A new practice—one that responds to the information revolution—has begun to emerge. We can see its outlines, but much remains to be invented. For this, we must take responsibility. In addition, we must invent a mechanism (an organic system) through which the discipline of design can learn and evolve.

At the same time, design education still largely reflects design’s origins in craftwork. Simply put: Design education is out of date. What is worse: Change is accelerating, and design education is stuck. It has little means to move forward. We must also take responsibility for re-inventing design education and integrating it into an organic system through which the discipline of design evolves.

And what if we ignore the situation? What if we remain vague? What if we remain stuck?

Design schools will become increasingly irrelevant. But more will be lost: some continuity of history, certain values concerning quality, and perhaps a sense of humanness. The world will fall further under the sway of those satisfied with making things work without making them delight.

This need not be so. Our relationship to our technology is not inevitable. We design it. We have responsibility for it.

I look forward to the conversation that will ensue as ICOGRADA update their manifesto and continue the process of re-inventing design.

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Educom, the main higher education conference for academic computing, was coming up in October 1987. At the time, I was leading the Higher Education Marketing Group, and had been doing so since Steve Jobs and Dan’l Lewin had left Apple to start NeXT in mid-1985. Steve and Dan’l knew all the higher education influencers and decision makers from their time at Apple (Dan’l had led the creation of the Apple University Consortium), and they had been giving sneak previews of various technologies and products that NeXT was building (but had not shipped). NeXT claimed to be focused exclusively on the higher education market. Many of the higher ed influencers and decision makers were saying that Apple had no vision for its future product line. John Sculley was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at Educom, and the stakes were high for us to show some “vision” of where Apple was going. I met with John to prepare for the speech and discuss ideas of what we could do. We planned to incorporate a number of live demos of educational examples of hypertext, multimedia, and interactive learning, using professors and researchers from various colleges to do the demos. John Sculley’s book, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, had just come out and John gave me a copy of it to read. I pored through it trying to find some ideas for his keynote. The last chapter was John’s vision he had developed in many discussions with Alan Kay (an Apple Fellow at the time), where he described the Knowledge Navigator and even had a rough sketch of it, with two joysticks on a screen that one would hold to “drive” through libraries of knowledge.

I discussed the concept of the Knowledge Navigator from John’s book with Hugh Dubberly and Doris Mitsch in Apple Creative Services and we subsequently met with John again to review his thoughts. Michael Markman joined our team to write John’s keynote speech. Together with Mike Liebhold in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, we discussed how we could make a vision video of a higher education example of the Knowledge Navigator. Hugh and Doris wrote the script with input from a number of people (see Hugh’s blog for more detail on other sources of inspiration for the script and all the folks involved in the production process) and I funded the project from the Higher Education Marketing budget. It’s important to note that the Knowledge Navigator vision first articulated in Odyssey morphed quite a bit based on Hugh and Doris’s research, inspiration and contribution from other luminaries in and outside of Apple, and our point of view from working with cutting edge researchers in higher education. We had very little time to pull this off, but sometimes having less time actually focuses the project and keeps the script tight and the length short (KN is only a little over five minutes). Hugh and Doris worked with an outside production company, The Kenwood Group, as a contractor to Apple, and turned the video around in six weeks. John did the keynote at Educom, the live demos came off without a hitch, and we ended with the first showing of the Knowledge Navigator (recall that the example is about a professor coming to work, checking his email, doing some research online, connecting with a colleague in Brazil in a live two-way video a la Skype, etc.). The higher education community received John’s keynote very favorably and felt better about Apple’s “vision,” even though it had nothing to do with our product strategy and had been made in 6 weeks!

There was no big hullabaloo about Knowledge Navigator in the couple months post Educom (the mainstream media does not attend Educom). For Macworld Expo in January, 1988, Jean Louis Gassee, SVP of Product at Apple, was the designated keynote and was supposed to roll out Apple’s new product strategy. About two weeks before Macworld in late December, Jean Louis informed John that he was not going to be ready to talk about the updated Apple product strategy. John called me and asked if we could do the Educom keynote again at Macworld, tweaking a few things for a more general audience. I called all the demoers again and they all agreed to come out to CA and we tweaked the demos to be less academic. And of course we concluded by showing Knowledge Navigator. (We took advantage of the interval to enhance the screen simulations beyond what we could deliver on the original tight schedule.). It was at Macworld that the general public, including the mainstream media and tech media, saw KN for the first time. And they immediately hailed it as Apple’s new vision. John then started using KN in employee meetings, with the press, etc. He was pictured several months later on the cover of Fortune magazine holding the balsa wood model of the KN that we had used in the video shoot. From that point forward, the mythology around Knowledge Navigator has grown unabated! Among the false legends: that it was produced by George Lucas and that it was produced using Apple’s Cray supercomputer.

Several months later, sparked by the widespread interest and acclaim for Knowledge Navigator, the Higher Education Group and our team in Creative Services led by Hugh and Doris, did another visionary video project called Project 2000, which featured Ray Bradbury, Diane Ravitch, Alvin Toffler, Alan Kay and Steve Wozniak. It is very cool, but never received the same notoriety as Knowledge Navigator.

Bud Colligan Apple’s Director of Higher Education Marketing, 1985 – 1988 November 20, 2011

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In 1980, when I was a college student, I heard Nicholas Negroponte speak about the future of computing. What stood out most was his model of convergence. Negroponte presented the model in three steps. The first slide showed the publishing, broadcasting, and computing industries as separate rings; the second slide showed the rings beginning to overlap; and the third slide showed the rings almost completely overlapped. The publishing, broadcasting, and computing industries were converging and would soon become one.

Convergence 1.0 = Publishing + Broadcasting + Computing.

Convergence has become shorthand for a series of arguments. First, all media will become digital. Second, the analog-to-digital transition will transform media production and distribution, creating opportunities and disrupting existing businesses. And third, and perhaps less obvious in 1980, once media are digital, boundaries between media types will blur and opportunities for interaction will grow, creating new ways for us to make arguments, explain ideas, and tell stories.

In many ways, Apple’s iPad fulfills Negroponte’s prediction; iPad is the first platform to bring together rich media, interactivity, portability, and broad distribution. Paul Saffo tell us that new technologies require about 30 years to move from the lab to consumers’ hands.[1] So: convergence has arrived right on schedule.

Negroponte’s model of convergence has helped me make sense of changes in the computer industry since I was a student. Today, however, the original model is no longer sufficient to describe the emerging world of networked, mobile applications. We need to revise the model.

The internet is becoming a sort of operating system, providing networked services to applications; online social networks are evolving into communications and identity platforms; and boundaries between the virtual world and the physical world are increasingly blurred. These changes are not independent; they are connected and mutually reinforcing. Service, social, and physical are converging.

Convergence 2.0 = Service + Social + Physical.

Convergence 2.0 builds on Convergence 1.0 and helps explain the new types of businesses now emerging. Convergence 2.0 also provides a framework for planning and designing applications adapted to the new environment.

The value of these models (like all models) lies in their ability to explain what’s happening and predict what might happen (or generate options). Value accrues at two scales. The models suggest large-scale changes to industries, e.g., the “death” of silver-halide photography and offset lithography. The models also suggest changes for individual businesses and products, e.g., designers can use the models as frameworks for thinking about new applications.

Convergence 1.0

Convergence gained visibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as end-user authoring tools HyperCard and Director led to a boom in “interactive multimedia titles”. Adventurous publishers distributed CD-ROMs (limited to 700 MB of data) through bookstores, but they had no mechanism for previewing, aside from screenshots on the packages.

The web emerged a few years later, offering more efficient distribution and easy sampling. At first, the web was a major step backward from multimedia, a step backward into the mostly-text, not-very-interactive world of HTML1. Over fifteen years, the web caught up. Bandwidth increased; streaming video became viable; and JavaScript and the DOM (document object model) matured. Coupled with mobile devices, such as iPad, the web now provides a convenient way to deliver interactive multimedia.

What else changed during convergence?

Convergence 1.0 = Publishing + Broadcasting + Computing. In 1980, Nicholas Negroponte described the impending convergence of these industries.

Publishing + Computing

Mechanical typesetting became digital; digital typesetting became electronic publishing. The Macintosh, PageMaker, and LaserWriter gave birth to desktop publishing. As desktop publishing tools improved, direct-to-plate publishing became possible. Now, mass-produced lithography is being replaced by mass-customized ink-jet printing.

“Mass” is being replaced by “self” with print-on-demand services like Blurb and Lulu for books and Shutterfly, Snapfish, and the Kodak Gallery for photos. (Kodak is a cautionary tale, an early innovator in digital photography that failed to adapt its core business fast enough to remain relevant.)

Print-on-demand isn’t limited to books and photos; it also includes t-shirt and tchotchke printing services like Zazzle and CafePress. Brian Mathews, Vice President of Autodesk Labs, predicts that the scan-edit-print paradigm of two dimensions will soon expand to three dimensions with on-demand 3D printing and even home fabrication of complex products.

Broadcasting + Computing

Negroponte used broadcasting as a metaphor, a part standing for the larger whole of the music, television, and film production and distribution industries.

Like publishing, filmmaking is becoming digital. Commercial animation is now produced almost entirely with digital tools. And “live action” is regularly merged with digital effects. Human actors have begun to act through or even inside “digital puppets”. Movie theaters are converting from celluloid projection to digital projection.

The convergence of broadcasting and computing includes not only content but also devices—the convergence of consumer electronics and computing. Music players, cameras, phones, and TVs have all become computers. Apple dropped computer from its name while turning itself into a consumer electronics company. The battle for control of the living room has begun.

Distribution has changed, too. First VCRs and then TiVo and other DVRs enabled time shifting and ended the tyranny of broadcast scheduling. VHS and Blockbuster gave way to DVDs and NetFlix. Cable became another means of delivering digital content.

Along the way, video moved online and became “on-demand”. In 2005, YouTube stuffed dancing cat videos into Flash files and embedded them into web pages. Netflix reinvented itself as a streaming video service, followed by Roku, Boxee, AppleTV, and Hulu. The TED Talks and Kahn Academy show the promise of amassing libraries of educational videos. A9’s Block View and Google’s Street View recreated the Aspen Movie Map[2] around the world.

An early sign of the convergence of broadcasting and computing was the video game. Video games have become a $10.5 billion per year business in the US, rivaling the movie industry’s $10.6 billion annual revenue.[3] The two industries are closely intertwined. Disney regularly turns films into games. Harry Potter has spawned hundreds of games. Some movies have adopted aspects of games, and an animation genre, Machinima, has emerged using video games to produce movies.

Video games have affected culture more broadly. Gamification—including game play or game principles in applications and services—has become a way to increase user engagement and has spawned articles, books, and conferences.

Publishing + Broadcasting

Shipping atoms costs more than shipping bits. Printing of newspapers, magazines, and academic journals may largely disappear. Last September, Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, acknowledged, “we will stop printing” as the paper reinvents itself online.[4] [5] In May, Amazon reported “selling more Kindle books than print books . . . hardcover and paperback—combined.”[6]

RSS has disaggregated publishing, and created opportunities for re-aggregators like Google News and Popurls and for attention analyzers like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite. At the same time, thousands of new voices have sprung up in blogs, microblogs, and tweets.

Broadcast news services are also moving to the web and branching out. The BBC and CNN publish text stories. Meanwhile, the New York Times publishes slideshows with voice-overs and recently began publishing videos. (Newspapers have been slow to move into video, especially given how easy and inexpensive video has become to produce.)

Convergence 2.0

The rise of the internet requires a reassessment of Convergence 1.0. Negroponte developed his model of convergence very early. Personal computers were in their infancy. The internet was a small government experiment used mainly to exchange mail and files. Nothing like the web existed.

Negroponte has acknowledged, that none of us saw the web coming. It took a while to see, as Andy Grove later did, that “All companies will be internet companies, or they will be dead.”[7] Or as Tim Misner put it, “All hardware products want to be web-sites.”[8] Or that most human services will become networked. Or as Tim O’Reilly observed, “Virtually every application is a network application, relying on remote services to perform its function.”[9]

Convergence 2.0 recognizes that interactive multimedia exist within a networked world and depend on networked services. It recognizes that most services have a social component. And it recognizes that people are rooted in the physical world and networks are increasingly connected to things. Convergence 2.0 integrates interactive multimedia with internet-based services, social networks, and the physical world.

Convergence 2.0 = Service + Social + Physical. Combined with interactive multimedia, they provide a framework for understanding the emerging generation of network-based mobile applications.

Services

We often think of the internet as a network of networks. It’s that and more. The internet is also an emerging ecology of services. A network of networks requires interchanges, routing services, and other systems for directing traffic. DNS (the Domain Name Service) and its system of governance is an important and early example. Servers that implement protocols, such as FTP (file transfer), SMTP (email), HTTP (web), SMS (texting), and RSS (feeds) are a few of many examples of a growing infrastructure of network services.

Internet users have also come to depend on higher-level services, such as search, GPS, identification, authentication, and many more. Without networked services, interactive media would be less viable. Amazon’s WhisperNet, the wireless network that instantly delivers books to Kindle readers, is a key element in creating a seamless experience.

Some applications such as Google Maps and Facebook have turned themselves into platforms, publishing their APIs so that others can build on top of them.

A new class of network services is emerging. Services that identify context and gauge relevance—providing the right information and the right tools for the situation—are becoming important.

Social

Social networks are important in all cultures. Online social networks, such as Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter, tend to increase the probability of finding people with similar interests, the number of interactions between people, and the rate of communications between them.

But “social” is more than just online social networking sites. Wikipedia and its variants, Threadless (a crowded-sourced design service), and open-source software projects are social. Social has become a component in most networked services. Modern search algorithms, collaborative-filtering, and crowd-sourcing are all inherently social, relying on “the wisdom of crowds” to create value.

Physical

Of course, the physical world has been here all along; we’ve just taken a while to see how it will connect to form what Kevin Ashton calls “an internet of things”. “Physical” means providing context: - Where am I? What’s around me? Location—mapping and descriptions - Who am I with? Participants—identity and relationship - What are we doing? Activity—process and current stage - Why are we doing this? Goals—intention and interest - When is it happening? Time—calendar and commitments [10] And “physical” means providing information—labels, summaries, meta-data, and deep descriptions—about the things around us so that we can understand our context.

“Physical” also means providing information from a network of sensors around us, on us, and in us—sensors measuring location, motion, energy use, temperature, humidity, and a wide range of biomarkers.

Designing with Convergence 2.0 In Mind

The convergence model also has practical value; it can help product managers and designers generate options. We can identify opportunities we might otherwise overlook by using the model as a sort of checklist.

How does the application we’re designing (or redesigning) relate to the convergence of the publishing, broadcasting, and computing industries? How does it take advantage of text, rich media, and interactivity? And how does it connect with network services, social networks, and the physical world? Where does integration yield innovation, difference, and value?

Let’s look at an example. What does convergence means for e-books?

Books as digital text: No more stacks of atoms means portability. (books + handheld reader)

Books as multi-media: Don’t just tell me; show me. (books + photos, videos, animation, and sound)

Books as interactivity: Tell me more or tell me less; let me try it myself. (books + games, simulations, linking, and glosses—parallel texts)

Books as services: Access on demand, integration with other systems. (books + continuous updating, expert sources, etc, e.g. Lexis-Nexis)

Books as social nodes: Conversation topics and learning from others. (books + online social networks—shared interests, notes, highlights)

Books as places: The reader device becomes a window on a virtual overlay of the physical world providing details and explanations on demand. (books + objects in the environment, e.g. contents, instructions, history, provenance)

Taking a service-design perspective, we may consider the experience cycle in relation to convergence. Imagine a matrix with steps in the customer journey along the y axis and the six elements of convergence on the x axis. What goes in each cell? What’s the message at this touch-point? What’s best delivered through images, sound, and motion? What interactions are appropriate? Can we gamify? What network services are needed? What are the social components? How can we connect to the physical world? The resulting matrix reframes the business-unit or channel focus of traditional service blueprints, substituting a focus more suited to the emerging digital environment.

The elements of convergence provide a checklist of options to consider when assessing each step in the customer journey.

Negroponte’s convergence model was a brilliant piece of foresight. The early work of the MIT Architecture Machine Group (a precursor to the Media Lab) enabled him to predict the convergence of publishing, broadcasting, and computing. As a result of convergence, we no longer think of computing only in terms of text; we design with multimedia in mind. Communication is no longer one way; we design with interaction in mind.

But today, it’s not possible to find commercial examples of stand-alone interactive multimedia. Instead, we find it deeply embedded in networks. We find networks increasingly reliant on networked services. We find services deeply intertwined with social elements. And, of course, we find all these things embedded in the physical world. We find Convergence 1.0 deeply embedded in Convergence 2.0. We design with interactive multimedia + service + social + physical in mind.

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Read Cooper Hewitt Museum Director Bill Moggridge’s Blog Post on “Convergence 2.0.”

Convergence 1.0 = Publishing + Broadcasting + Computing. In 1980, Nicholas Negroponte described the impending convergence of these industries.

Related Diagrams

Convergence 2.0 = Service + Social + Physical. Combined with interactive multimedia, they provide a framework for understanding the emerging generation of network-based mobile applications.

Related Diagrams

The elements of convergence provide a checklist of options to consider when assessing each step in the customer journey.

Related Diagrams

Resource actions may be visualized in a page, from a view template.
Names of view templates correspond to controller methods.

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Actions available to a resource are accessed through the controller.
Actions (controller methods) are named with verbs.

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Attributes (or data) of a resource are accessed through the model.
Attributes (model methods) are also named with nouns.

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A model with a controller and a route is called a resource.

Related Diagrams