It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
ALAN KAYIt is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
ALAN KAYDon’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAYBad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
ALAN KAYThe result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.
ALAN KAYThe best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAYArt also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
ALAN KAYThis tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
ALAN KAYAs in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAYThe hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAYHaving an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
ALAN KAYThey don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
ALAN KAYA computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
ALAN KAYPossibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
ALAN KAYThere’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”
ALAN KAYI realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
ALAN KAYSo at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
ALAN KAY