Look down from the basking light of your LCD screen, down there at the lower left of your menu bar to that icon, maybe a blue “e" for Iexplorer, or a fiery fox encircling a blue marble, perhaps a tiny compass to guide you on your safari, and realize that the scope of human knowledge flows so thick through the Internet that we now require a multitude of tools to view it. In the same way that the art of spelling was lost to autocorrect, and our digit span has been diminished by our cell phone’s flash memory, the Internet stands to augment our brain’s capacity with easy access to the noosphere. Every day the distance between questions and answers shortens by milliseconds, and, while no teacher stands ready to rap our collective knuckles with a ruler in the modern school system, the gulf between the unexamined life and TL;DR gets ever narrower.
So while Messrs. Brin and Page have made a business out of getting us those answers faster, their business plan couldn’t be found through the simple call and response of the query field. Their questions had to dig deeper, owing more to the endless tedium of a child’s “Why?" than to correlative databases. The central contention behind Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, that questions offer more opportunity than facts, should be familiar to any designer who has discovered that loose and sketchy prototypes drive more fruitful conversations than polished finished products. In part, in a world structured to provide the immediate gratification of “answers," the questions often become more meaningful.
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