Endineering

1password sat there open with its graveyard of 710 logins, among them the forgotten remains for a pizza place in another country I haven't lived in for six years that I can’t delete. I can't come up with a better metaphor for the haunting that is the state of computing and identity today.

What happens to products and services, or pizza delivery logins, that we acquire when they stop being useful to us? I never really thought about it that deeply until I took the Endineering course, which you should take as well. One of the more fascinating ideas is that we just let them, and sometimes not by choice, not quite die, but linger on. This is especially the case with data, which is what I'm interested in as a designer.

These zombie accounts, sit undead on servers somewhere, everywhere and nowhere somehow. There is likely a metaphor for eating brains in there I'm sure. But this is the problem. With data we can’t actually see the volume. It won’t bother us like that third garlic press you somehow got for no apparent reason you slightly hesitate in shoving into the junk drawer. We have numbers to quantify the amount of it, but the numbers are abstract. 2GB or 23GB doesn’t look or feel bigger, especially when data becomes cheaper than chips. So maybe with data we should start thinking about where it goes and how it should end just like we do with those pizza boxes we hope end up as paper again.

Thanks to all my endineer classmates and our brave leader in looking for how to design the totality of products, Joe MacLeod.