Hi, I'm Dorian.
I have been thinking about, and making things on the internet for over two decades. The back half of this excursion has been mainly about designing information infrastructure for organizations in the real world
—that is, outside the tech industry. I have primarily focused on not-for-profit entities that have idiosyncratic needs, but perhaps not the budget to hire a conventional development team. Experience with resource-constrained organizations, from working with clients to a stint on the board of the Information Architecture Institute, has led me to a number of inquiries into the process of developing digital information systems, as well as the composition of the systems themselves:
Until the computer came along, the only viable way to manage information was in document-sized chunks, arranged in hierarchical categories. Now that the computer is here—and has been for a while—we can afford much richer forms of organizing information, but don't seem to be using them nearly as much as we could. This, I suspect, has is because we lack a simple concept, the thing that makes a category a category. That concept is intension.
I find hypermedia to be a totally new, deeply fascinating and immensely powerful media paradigm. Despite the Web's runaway success over the last 30 years, as a hypermedium it is only so-so. A sizable subset of my work involves retrofitting forgotten capabilities from earlier systems back onto the Web, for the purpose of creating more powerful and more expressive cultural artifacts.
While over the years I have accumulated experience with over a dozen programming languages, I mainly reserve this skill for writing essential libraries, prototypes, tools, and teachables. Lately I've been making a lot of toys for thinking, such as: