On Tuesday, Involution Studios Creative Director, Juhan Sonin challenged infovis guru Edward Tufte to engage more fully in the discussion regarding our nation's greatest problems, including education, energy, finance, and health, among others, during a segment on The Digital Life podcast.

At Involution, over the years, we've been lucky enough to count among our team a number of designers and strategists who are also industry thought leaders. In this new and regular blog feature, "From the Archives", we'll highlight articles from the past, written by our Invo colleagues that have stood the harsh test of Internet time and still have something to say to us today.

This weekend I attended the Humanity+ Conference at Parsons in New York City. Subtitled "Transhumanism Meets Design", the conference aspired to "explor(e) emerging technology, transdisciplinary design, culture and media theory, and biotech."

Involution Studios Boston is located in Arlington, MA on Mass. Ave., in what was formerly the city's grand ballroom. When we took it over in late 2008 it was a pilates studio with wild green-and-blue paint and fixtures, along with mirrors lining the walls. To the discerning eye it was all potential.

After a conversation on The Digital Life with Brenda Brathwaite and Soren Johnson about "Social Game Design", it became clear that I needed to get to know Facebook Games better and see if there was more there than I thought. So right after the show I signed up for about a dozen Facebook Games. I played all of them for at least an hour. Two of them, Millionaire City and City of Wonder, I liked better than the rest and played them for a week or more. Then I decided that I liked City of Wonder best of all and have been playing it ever since. I even recruited my wife, my family and my friends to play it. And what I noticed early on, and what become glaringly obvious now the longer we play it, is the entire balance and conception of this game is seriously flawed. So, here it is in a nutshell: the design of Facebook Games has abandoned the old-school approach of trying to design a great game experience for players and instead is trying to design an engine to optimize revenues from the players. It is a huge difference in philosophy, where the marketers who are paid to make money have taken over from the engineers who are paid to make great experiences and in the process are reducing video game design from a deep and joyous hobby to a prettied-up form of interactive advertising. It is ironic, because we are at a moment where these games can be made much more cheaply than before, and there is plenty of money to be made even if the outcome is a great experience not a cash optimization engine. But these designers just can't help themselves. Either through corporate mandate or their own misguided design philosophy, they are focused on taking more money from the player while giving them far, far less.

I've been slowly backing away from the field of "user experience" for some years now. More and more, I'm beginning to think it is time that I turn my slow retreat into a full-fledged race to the hills. This evening Juhan pointed me to a terrifying article by renowned user experience thought leader Whitney Hess. Please do read the article, then c'mon back.

There are a lot of interesting things happening around crowdsourcing, many of which intuitively seem really good. Companies like Jovoto and Genius Rocket are serving as global connectors of people who want work done with people who are willing to do it. The benefits, according to Genius Rocket, include "Providing...hundreds of custom solutions, from thousands of creative professionals." and "Delivering agency level creative without the agency overhead." Jovoto's stated objectives reflect more altruism, focusing on "...the act of creation is free, collaborative and, above all, fair." Both companies appear to have reasonable objectives: Genius Rocket is trying to maximize impact while minimizing price, while Jovoto appears based around social consciousness and the professional training of students and young practitioners for design as a profession.

It is no surprise that web design companies are desperately trying to get into application design. Web design as a business is highly commodified with small margins and a crowded competitive landscape. Even the top early providers are watching their ability to get customers affordably and service them profitably become seriously compromised. Web design companies are scrambling for new opportunities.

I’m one of the fortunate few who has had the opportunity to use both a Microsoft Surface and an Apple iPad. While both are “magical” and “revolutionary” devices in their own unique and incomplete ways, I’m struck by the fact that both of them remind me of the only Palm device I ever had, back in 2003: a novelty that did some things well but most things poorly, and ultimately left me ignoring it in its charger. While I don’t expect Surface’s and iPad’s to collect a thickening coat of dust like my Palm once did I do think both are similarly flawed, incomplete devices. The device that will truly be “magical” and “revolutionary” will be a combination of the two, taking the best parts of both parents:

From the Microsoft Surface, the truly “magical” and “revolutionary” offspring will inherit…

By Juhan Sonin (@jsonin) and Dirk Knemeyer (@dknemeyer)