On 50 years

This is the blanket that I’ve had on my bed mostly continuously since I was born, fifty years ago.

a quilt blanket, folded so small that it fits on the corner of a dining room table. it looks worn, with strings hanging off the edges. it had a pattern printed on it when it was new, but that has washed off. now, the blanket is so old that the fabric covering the batting is almost see-through and separates easily from the batting, leaving it wrinkled over every inch.

It is 50 years old. My mom made it. Once upon a time, it had Holly Hobbie and her friends printed on it, but they have long since worn off. As a kid, this covered my whole bed. As an adult, I’ve kept it mostly folded up so that on the nights where I needed something to wrap myself around to see, it was there.

This is Myka, stealing my blanket.

a brown and white jack russell terrier curled into a ball, resting her head on a very worn quilt. behind her are a blue pillow and a plaid throw blanket. she's laying on a grey weighted blanket. She's asleep and looks very comfortable.

This is a bed that we’ve had for roughly 25 years. While it is IKEA, it’s also solid wood, a quality frame, easy to build and move, and a piece of furniture that, if I had kids, I’d probably be sending off to one of them for their first home or apartment. Presuming that no shenanigans such as a house fire, earthquake, or flood took it out, I’d expect this bed to last another 25 years without issue.

a brown wood bed from ikea. it is solid wood. it has rails in the headboard giving it a look similar to missionary furniture, except that the rails are round. the bed is covered by red sheets and a comforter printed with a nebula pattern. two jack russells, one brown and white, and one white and brown, are lying butt to butt lengthwise down the bed.

This is a screenshot of a folder full of files that I saved in college. They were mostly in ClarisWorks and while the dates say 2022, that’s really just when I unzipped them from the zip file I found in an archive folder on a CD that I’d burned back in like 2002.

The only reason I can open any of these files today is because LibreOffice will open ClarisWorks files. Otherwise, they’d be garbage… or at best they’d be files filled with formatting garbage that I’d have to slowly extract the actual content out of.


Twenty years ago we thought that digitizing all of our records would be the answer to archiving. We thought that putting everything up in the cloud would make it safe. We didn’t account for shifting file types, wear on disc heads, Zip drive click of death, companies going under and taking their data with them… There’s a big difference between making things that are designed to be used in the physical world and making things out of electrons. Stored correctly, paper, photographs, fabric, and wood will last a long time with no maintenance involved. Digital, it turns out, is harder.

This is a screenshot of my now-defunct comic kirabug.com from 2006.

A very poorly styled website screenshot from 2006, with a comic at the top, blog posts below it, and a left navigation bar for primary navigation.

The design did not last a long time. By my count, I’ve changed the theme on that website at least three times, since it’s marked in WordPress as a child theme of the Twenty Eleven theme. The comic didn’t last exceptionally long either — My last post on that site is dated 2017. (The archive is still up because I still reference stuff I wrote in it on the regular.)

When I was new to UX, people like Jeremy Keith, Luke Wroblewski, and others talked frequently about how following web standards, building for everyone, and going easy on the Javascript, that we’d build a web that lasts.

They were right.

Obviously not everything has survived.  Early site builders like Geocities, most of the early blogging web app, and many of the early commercial sites have been dead for years, but so have their companies. Enterprise companies that went all-in on their apps learned that people still like to use the web, and changed their approaches to keep the web alive. Plenty of dead websites still exist.

But not all of them.

Many of them are twenty five, thirty, even maybe pushing thirty five at this point. They’ve needed redesigns, as the companies backing them changed strategies or the people owning them changed intents. Some of them (like mine) are still running on the same software packages or frameworks developed to manage them.

Our jobs in the field are changing. AI is having some profound effects on both how companies do their work and what they deliver to the web. There isn’t a guarantee that “UX Designer” will be a mainstream job any more. (When I started, “Information Architect” was common, and now despite the fact that AI could really really use the help, it’s a rare sight outside of archiving positions.)

But when we try, we can still make things that matter. Things that live long. Things that make a difference.

This is the blanket I knit for my niece. I don’t know if it will last five years or fifty, but I know that the work necessary to make it last was put into it.

a navy blue blanket folded up to its smallest possible size. it is hand-knit from thick super wash wool yarn. it sits on a grey blanket on a bed.

I know a lot of people are looking at what we’re producing today and thinking that it can’t possibly last. The quality is low, the accessibility is low, and there are teams developing front ends that don’t know how to write HTML.

But quality is a choice we get to make every day.

My blanket has been put away in my hope chest, because we’re afraid that one more washing will destroy it. That’s ok. Some very dear friends knit me a new one this year. These gifts are the ones that keep us going.

Let’s see what we can do with the next 50 years.

What will the AI Boom leave behind?

I grew up in eastern Oklahoma, and it surprises a few people that mining was a part of my family’s, and eastern Oklahoma’s, history. My great great grandfather emigrated from Yorkshire to the coal mines of southeastern Oklahoma, a place so prosperous they had interurban train lines, brick streets, and minor league baseball teams. The … Continue reading “What will the AI Boom leave behind?”

Previous posts