Once a song enters my brain and becomes part of my inner landscape, it becomes entangled with my beliefs and impressions and no longer belongs to Coldplay. It becomes part of me and I become part of it, and what it means to me is just as valid as what it means to its creators.

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?

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.

The heart of storytelling used to lie with imagination. But today, we see so much that our imagination is not touched in the same way, removing our personal interpretation and a sense of intimacy from many of our shared experiences.