A grand idea for an Automatic Information Classification
Backstory
It’s 2000, my partner and I took digital photos for going on five years – starting with Apple’s QuickTake digital camera. With thousands and thousands of pictures from all corners of the globe, it was nearly impossible to weed through them. Apple’s PDA Newton had been released. General Magic was working on a unified communications experience. It was time to invent an entire system of classifying and capturing information for these up-and-coming devices.
What could go wrong?
Nothing really. Google came along. iPhone came along. Cloud computing, satellite arrays, and all the unifying technology required for automatic classification, logging, sharing, tagging, etc. Not exactly how we were thinking about it, but it was a blast thinking about it.
What went right?
I built an entire comic book’s worth of graphics to tell the whole story. How data could be captured, how it could be organized, stored, searched, and accessed. Numerous use-cases to help people imagine a world like this.
I like the friendly whimsey of the illustrations. They accomplish a few things:
- not having to accurately represent devices that don’t exist
- keeps a potentially boring explanation of data manipulation upbeat
- relatable to anyone
- keeps everything on a speculative, what-if frame of mind
PDF of the full nDimension story
Notes to self
It’s over 20 years later. I’m struck with how one’s vision of the future is projected from the place they are standing and how much zeitgeist we bring forward. When we are finally bobbing around the universe exploring strange new worlds, I hope we will be spreading notions of fairness and equality. But maybe not the tight-fitting uniforms.
