In my line of work, you have to keep up with the digital Joneses. So I carved out an unscheduled hour a few weeks ago to set up a Google + account. Or rather, I started to set it up. It’s still unfinished and somewhat mysterious to me, and it’s going to take a bigger effort to learn about the circles, huddles, sparks, and other idiosyncrasies of this newest online effort to connect. But when? Who has the time for all this socializing?
Apparently, a lot of people do. Over 10 million people signed joined Google + in its first two weeks of existence, according to reports. At that rate, it will overtake Facebook in … three years.
Of course, Google + isn’t the only way we digitally connect. I have at least a dozen social apps or media accounts from About.me, which needs no description, to Qrank, which is a trivia app that allows you to compare your scores to your friends (I try not to take the comparisons personally). I also own two laptops, an iPad, and a smartphone to ensure access to the Interwebs wherever I am, except, apparently, at any hotel in the U.K., a country that is bizarrely behind the wireless times. When I want to share a photo of my son’s hamster funeral, write an article about drywall texture, or make a comment on the idiots… on politics in Washington, I can be pretty certain that at least 500 people are going to see (if not necessarily read) those posts. I also follow hundreds of other people, some of whom reach tens or hundreds of thousands of other individuals every day.
One could say that I’m connected. One could say that most everyone is. Even if you don’t have any social media accounts (yes, I know at least one person who is not of my parents age who eschews Facebook), you probably carry a tiny computer in your pocket to text or to actually make one of those odd things called a phone call. In fact, one could say that as a whole, the human race has never been more connected. And as Google + is proving (and Facebook continues to prove), the demand for more connectivity remains unsatiated.
It is for this reason that we decided to dedicate an issue of design mind to connectivity. “The Connective Issue” takes a look at this Age of Connectivity we live in. It leads with a behind the scenes look at Facebook’s design team. (How do you design a website and online experience for hundreds of millions of people to connect?) But we also recognize the fact that connecting is so much more than what we do online. We still date. We still haul our meatspace lives to work and back home again. We live in cities that we have to navigate and organize. We play video games. And we die. All of those issues, and more, get a close examination in the issue.
We also changed the format of the print edition. It’s now a broadsheet instead of a perfect bound magazine. It used to be that newspapers were the only way a person could connect to the world around them, and we wanted to pay homage to that connective tissue.
This also marks the start of our new publishing schedule. We will now print design mind quarterly (instead of twice a year)—just in case you weren’t connected enough.
Happy reading.
Image courtesy of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.
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