Yesterday, I received final confirmation that the Museum of Modern Art in New York has selected my mash-ups twittervision.com and flickrvision.com for its 2008 exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind.

I’m certainly very flattered to be included and have never considered myself to be an artist. I didn’t seek out MoMA on this. I am just very, very happy to have an opportunity to participate in a small way in the ongoing dialog about what technology means for humanity. Crap. Now I sound like an artist.

Incidentally, this means that twittervision.com and flickrvision.com are the first ever Ruby On Rails apps to be included in a major art exhibition. I already told DHH.

Anyway, at RailsConf Europe a few weeks ago, Dave Thomas’ keynote speech emphasized the role of software designers as artists. He said, “treat your projects as though they are artworks, and sign your name to them.” Or pretty close to it. I think this is incredibly valuable advice for software designers today.

We’re past the days of using machines as amplifiers of our physical efforts. It’s not enough to jam more features into code just so we can eliminate one more position on the assembly line. We’re at a point where the machines can help amplify our imaginations.

Today, creativity and imagination (what some folks are calling the right brain) are becoming the key drivers of software and design. With imagination, we can see around the corners of today’s most pressing challenges. While technical skill is certainly valuable, if it’s applied to the wrong problems, it’s wasted effort.

Creativity, imagination, and artistry help us identify the areas where we should put our efforts. They help us see things in new ways.

Everywhere I turn (perhaps partly because I am a Rubyist), I hear discussions of Domain Specific Languages, and of framing our problems in the right grammars.

This is hugely valuable because the creative part of our brain thinks in terms of semantics, grammars, and symbols. If we can’t get the words right, our imaginations can’t engage.

Everything stays stuck in the left side of our brains when we have to jump through hoops to please some particular language or development environment.

I hope you all will come out to see Design and the Elastic Mind when it opens at NYC MoMA, Feb 24 – May 12 2008. I’m not sure how we’re going to present the sites but we’re going to see if we can get some partners and sponsors involved to do something really beautiful.

And again, thanks to MoMA for the selection. And here’s to creativity, imagination, and artistry as the next big thing in software design!

Over the next two weeks, Jay Phillips, Chad Fowler, Marcel Molina, Rich Kilmer, Ed Guy, Glenn Dalgliesh and myself are getting together to work on advancing Adhearsion, the open source VoIP technology.

For those of you who don’t know about Adhearsion, it brings a simple, elegant grammar to the world of VoIP. It’s an object-oriented DSL (domain specific language) written in Ruby. But that’s what’s going on underneath. Here’s what’s going on for you, the user:

# This is an example extensions.rb file which
# would handle how calls are processed by
# Asterisk. This is all completely valid Ruby
internal {
  case extension
    when 100...200
      callee = User.find_by_extension extension
      unless callee.busy? then dial callee
      else
        voicemail extension

    when 111 then exec :meetme

    when 888 
      play weather_report('Dallas, Texas')

    when 999
      play %w(a-connect-charge-of 22 
         cents-per-minute will-apply)
      sleep 2.seconds
      play 'just-kidding-not-upset'
      check_voicemail
  end
}

Obviously this is much more palatable than what you might find in your average asterisk extensions.conf file.

Chad, Marcel, and Rich are some of the biggest names in the Ruby & Rails communities. Ed Guy is a legend in Open Source telephony. Jay is the originator of Adhearsion. Glenn, Ed, Jay, and I all work together for the project’s sponsor, Truphone. There is some thought that with all of us on the job, Adhearsion might just become the next big thing to come out of the Ruby community.

We’ll see about that; it could certainly happen. One thing that is for sure though is that our efforts should bring a level of beauty and clarity heretofore unrealized in the VoIP/telephony/collaboration world, and that certainly is a good thing.

We were on vacation in San Francisco in July 2005 when my wife was asked to pose hanging off a cable car by some photographers from American Girl.

In New York yesterday, we took our daughter to the American Girl store there and were greeted with these giant 7′ tall posters. Jennifer immediately remembered the incident in San Francisco. The staff was amused and gave us a free poster. And I’m amused that she’s the 1974 character who gets to say things like “Far Out.”

She looked up the illustrator, Robert Hunt, online. He’s apparently a major illustrator in the business, having done the artwork for the Dreamworks logo (kid sitting on the moon) as well as a bunch of other major work. Anyway, he described his process very thoroughly, and it seems unlikely that her “likeness” was used, as that would have required a model release, etc.

The team taking the photos was so emphatic (watch for it, it’ll be you!) though and the overall likeness to the pose that day is so great that we think those shots were used for blocking out the design.

We’ll probably never know, but these little coincidences add a touch of magic to life.

Few people will likely read this post, as it’s the first in my blog.

I want to say, first, that I am opposed to the idea of blogs on principle. Not because I don’t want people to express themselves, or that I am any kind of luddite. What I fear is a universe of commentators and navel-gazers who are so busy pontificating, prognosticating, pointing fingers and engineering calculated praise that they don’t have time to create anything original or real.

Taken to its logical conclusion, a world of bloggers is largely a world of watchers, not a world of do-ers. A world of masturbatory, self-congratulatory noise, with so little signal remaining to be undetectable. A veritable echo-chamber of idiocy. A post-apocalyptic world of film critics.

So, with some reservations and resentment, this is the world I now join. Hi, Blogosphere. I hate your name. It is ersatz, self-important, and pretentious. It’s representative of our failures as a society. We are so decadent and self-absorbed that we have actually given a name to our latent, reactionary rants. And not a very good one. Blog is bad enough. Blogosphere? C’mon. If it was the seventies we’d be calling it the “Wide World of Amateur Halfwits.”

I’m not saying Blogging portends the fall of human civilization. On the whole prime time television has been leading the way there for at least 50 years now.

So why do it at all? In fairness, I felt like I had to. Where I roll, information is everything, and information is interconnected. The currency of this world is attention. When people want to pay it to you, you need to give them a signal to follow. In practice, that signal is best produced in the form of a blog. Having a blog is like having a bank account in the attention economy. You can’t get paid with out it.

And thus my blog was born. I consider myself a contemplative person. If I am going to have something as preposterous as a blog, you can expect that I will put some effort into it.

So there’s a flaw in my logic. If blogs are all noise and no signal, then why bother trying to make it good? Because I care about what I do and say. And perhaps I should allow for the fact that others do too.

Damn it, blogosphere. Forgive me. And as for you, the jury is still out. History will tell us if blogging was the beginning of the end of civilization.