TWO YEARS AGO, when I published my book, Interface Culture, I argued that the rise of the web would create a renaissance of information design. Tools that were once limited to academic centers and corporate R&D labs would trickle down to the wider population. The graphic interface revolution ushered in by Doug Englebart, Xerox-Parc, and Apple would be succeeded by an even more powerful, and more diverse revolution -- this time led by artists, amateur programmers, and end-users. These armchair interface designers would take advantage of both the web's lowered barriers-to-entry and its heightened powers of distribution. In the past, if you stumbled across a new visual metaphor, a new way of imagining information, you needed to scramble past the gatekeepers at Microsoft or Apple to get your vision onto other people's desktops, assuming you didn't have the funding to start your own software company. But the web enabled all of us to experiment with different lenses, and share those creations with others. Surely that change would result in more ways of seeing.

In a way, the last year of this column has functioned as an extended test of that original hypothesis. We know that the web has lived up to its potential as an e-commerce platform and as a communications vehicle, not to mention an endless supplier of public offerings. But has the web lived up to its potential as an interface generator? Has there been an explosion of new ways of seeing data -- or hearing and touching, for that matter -- because of HTML's lingua franca, or the more nuanced tongues of Java and Flash?

Looking back over the past year's columns, sifting through all the innovations contained therein -- from Harlan Hugh's Brain software, to the bird's-eye-view cityscapes of ActiveWorlds -- I'm inclined to answer yes. Some of this cast of characters have gone on to become commercial successes -- Patti Maes' visionary Firefly software sold to Microsoft; Brewster Kahle's Alexa bought by Amazon; the controversial Third Voice start-up landing significant venture capital funding. And the more experimental projects out there -- like Starry Night, and Everything -- demonstrate that the gene pool is diversifying at an encouraging rate. Even a skeptic would have to admit that we're better off than we were in the days when the Next Big interface breakthrough was Microsoft Bob.

But even with this promising landscape spread out before us, you'd be pushing things more than a little to say that any of these innovations amounted to a paradigm shift on the order of the graphic interface, or the hyperlinked web browser. There's a wonderful supply of experimental projects or refinements of existing ideas, but nothing in sight that promises to transform all of our desktops, the way the GUI or hypertext did. (Voice software may be the one exception to this rule.) So in the spirit of our 21st-Century Inventions issue, I decided to go back to some of the artists and programmers originally profiled here -- along with a few other industry analysts -- and ask them to look beyond the current product development cycle, and speculate on where our interfaces will be in 10 years. What are the current problems and limitations that we'll have solved by then -- and what will those solutions look like?

The answers were a reminder of how many artificial conventions remain on our computer screens, the residuum of earlier technological or imaginative shortcomings. Our data is needlessly organized by applications; our input tools are woefully underpowered for the sheer quantity of information we're processing; even the notion of an interface itself can seem arbitrary, compared with the more intuitive tools of analog technology. If our screens have become more user-friendly over the past 10 years, they're still trapped in conceptual boxes that were designed a quarter century ago. It's enough to make you think we're primed for another interface revolution after all.

Eric Zimmerman, independent game designer: If the development of the computer parallels the development of similar ubiquitous technology like the automobile, in 10 years the computer will have moved out of its breakdown-prone, tinkering-heavy "hobby" adolescence and will have begun to shift into a more stable adulthood. What does this mean for the future of interfaces? The concept of the interface will fade, replaced by computers that facilitate human activity. You don't "interface" with a pencil: you simply pick it up and write. You don't "interface" with a car: you simply get in and drive. In 10 years, we won't "interface" with a computer: We will simply communicate, calculate, and play -- with the computer and with each other."

Dan Ancona, evangelist for the vizbang project: I don't think the next revolution is going to be as big of a change as the WIMP revolution, at least not at first. I do still think there's going to be a literal marriage of information and architecture, resulting in a switch to some sort of, as yet undefined, three dimensional interface; it'll look neat, but at first it may not offer many more features to end users than are available right now.

It will, however, allow for evolutionary, incremental features to be added: more flexible linking structures, top down views, and integration of features that are being added on top of the browser now, like annotations and multi-user presence. So much of the power of the web as it is now rests on the simple elegance of the link, of simply being able to say that this thingie is related to that thingie. Being able to see and express those relationships more flexibly and visually will be the next step in the progression of the development of hypertext.

Michael Joyce, hypertext author: Something with the erotic surface and potentiated multiplicity of skin or silk or water, not the evolution of the wearable computer exactly, neither that bandolierish sam brown belt quality of information as munitions nor the trifocaled infrared of heads-up navigation and targeting, but rather something akin to the satin binding a colleague's preteen daughter carried with her long ago, a relic of her baby blanket given over to languid rubbing against her cheek or streaming between surreptitious fingers in her jean's pocket, a prayer bead unpeeling into a splayed Moebius surface, a Riemann space of reveries, the rabbit hole as third eye, muse's whisper, handmade paper, the moon, a thing you can carry or wrap yourself within.

Harlan Hugh, developer of The Brain: When I sit down at my computer (or anyone else's), I want to see a useful representation of everything in my life. The fundamental difference is about focusing on the connections between information instead of the separations. All my information should be connected in a single interface -- email, web content, contacts, documents and everything. I don't want to use different tools for related information just because it's stored in a different place. For instance, the way we perceive email as being separate from other data is an artifact of building interfaces that expose too much of what's going on "under the hood." The interface should distinguish information based on its content and not it's source. Taking this a step further, I'm looking forward to a world where the whole concept of "email" -- a special mode of operation where everything is viewed based on discrete transactions -- is replaced by a much more powerful way of viewing and sharing connected information in context. Your screen should not look like a bunch of pretty buttons that you use to order your computer from one task to the next. Instead it should be a dynamic representation and experience of everything that's important to you. I think The Brain demonstrates the beginnings of realizing this vision.

Denise Caruso, New York Times columnist: One of the things I find most interesting, in terms of how I'm looking at screens these days, is how averse I am to dealing with them. For example, I am not a Palm Pilot user -- I have a spatial relationship with my calendar, I really need to see the whole week at a glance and be able to flip through it in a way that helps me orient myself. I feel the same way about digital watches -- knowing the precise time is less important to me than how late I am, for example, or how much time I have to get somewhere, or how many hours I have to stay stuck on the plane. That's a spatial relationship.

In terms of the interface itself, it seems to me that the keyboard is woefully lacking in terms of giving me the kind of navigability I need for 6 megabytes of data. I don't know how you deal with that issue, it's the dealbreaker for me. Definitely a librarian should have a lot of input for this next phase. Because certainly mere mortals have no way to wrap our heads around organizing that much disparate information.

Mark Tribe, found of Rhizome, and the co-creator of Starry Night: The year is 2009. I'm lying on my back on the couch, editing the second edition of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2000). My wrists, long-ago wrecked by carpal tunnel syndrome, lay useless at my sides. I scan the lines that hover before my eyes, which scroll automatically as I complete each page. As I dictate edits, Word marks up the text in lurid hues. Tiring, I wink to switch the data glasses into transparent mode and head for the fridge.

Steven Johnson is editor-in-chief of FEED and author of Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms The Way We Create And Communicate.
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