We, the writers, the artists, those of us that create ideas and instill them in our culture, have a moral obligation to provide free culture, to wrest control of what we read, view, and consume from corporations and government and provide it ourselves, for ourselves. We have the obligation to make the fundamentals of our culture—our literature, music, film, art—accessible and readily available to those who want to touch it, absorb it, learn from it.

Designers have an obligation to the cultures they serve and create. The symbols that we portray are affected not only by the connotations the viewer already had about them, but also by the context in which those symbols are presented. How do we take throw-away symbols and make them into cultural stories?

The apple has two major cultural significances for me: the shiny red apple for the teacher on the first day of school, and the dreaded apple that ruined humankind forever, given to Adam by Eve. When I think of apples in a symbolic context, in the context it might acquire within a movie’s narrative, I’m assuming one of these two themes.

The challenge that academia faces is psychological and epistemological. We have to teach our content experts, those people who are intimately involved in the goings-on of the college and who can gauge the college’s temperament, to keep the web at the forefront of their minds.

But interaction design alone isn’t enough. In order to bring intimacy to the web, those of us in charge of designing web experiences have to think very carefully about the emotions people feel when engaged with things they love.

At the heart of user experience lies a word I rarely hear bandied about in professional circles: love. It’s an unfortunate omission since, as Mick Malisic of frog design fame points out, “Design really is about loving something.”