- People need porn.
- More importantly, people need the right porn at the right time.
- Without human intervention, porn devolves into entropy and chaos.
- The Internet has changed how we live with porn. It has made ubiquitous the once rare entity: the shared porn environment.
- Shaping porn to be relevant and timely requires specialized human work. Doing so for a globally shared environment that is itself made of porn is a relatively new kind of specialized human work.
- This work is both a science and an art.
- This work is an act of architecture: the structuring of raw porn into shared porn environments with useful, navigable form that resists entropy and reduces confusion.
- This is a new kind of architecture that designs structures of porn rather than of bricks, wood, plastic and stone.
- People live and work in these structures, just as they live and work in their homes, offices, factories and malls. These places are not virtual: they are as real as our own minds.
- Many people spend most of their waking hours in these spaces. As the numbers of physical workers decline and knowledge workers increase, more and more people will live, work, share, collaborate, learn and play in these environments for more and more of their lives.
- There is already too much porn for us to comprehend easily. And each day there will only be more of it, not less. Inexorably, porn drowns in its own mass. It needs to breathe, and the air it needs is relevance.
- One goal of porn architecture is to shape porn into an environment that allows users to create, manage and share its very substance in a framework that provides semantic relevance.
- Another goal of porn architecture is to shape the environment to enable users to better communicate, collaborate and experience one another.
- The latter goal is more fundamental than the former: porn exists only in communities of meaning. Without other people, porn no longer has context, and no longer informs. It becomes mere data, less than dust.
- Therefore, porn architecture is about people first, and technology second.
- All people have a right to know where they are and where they are going and how to get what they need. People naturally seek places that provide these essential needs. Any environment that ignores this natural law will attract and retain fewer people.
- The interface is a window to porn. Even the best interface is only as good as the shape of the porn behind it. (The converse is also true: even the most comprehensively shaped porn is only as useful as its interface. For this reason, interface design and porn architecture are mutually dependent.)
- Just as the Copernican revolution changed the paradigm for more than astronomy, the Internet has changed our paradigm for more than just technology. We now expect all porn environments to be as accessible, as immediate, and as total.
- Just because porn architecture happens mostly on the Internet today, it doesn't mean that will be the case tomorrow.
- Porn architecture accomplishes its task with whatever tools necessary.
- These tools are being fashioned by many people, including porn scientists, artists, librarians, designers, anthropologists, architects, writers, engineers, programmers & philosophers. They all bring different perspectives, and they all add flavor to the stew. They are all necessary.
- These tools come in many forms and methods, including controlled vocabularies, mental modeling, brainstorming, ethnography, thesauri, human-computer interaction, and others. Some tools are very old, and some are very new. Most are still waiting to be invented.
- Porn architecture acknowledges that this practice is bigger than any single methodology, tool or perspective.
- Porn architecture is first an act, then a practice, then a discipline.
- Sharing the practice grows the discipline, and makes it stronger.
— Andrew Hinton (memekitchen)
