Part of the impetus for redesign came from an evolving sense of what I want this space to be, part from just wanting to do something cool. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Zen of CSS Design which discusses the tricks and techniques exemplifying the designs on CSS Zen Garden.If you’re not familiar with CSS Zen Garden, it’s a site where only the style sheet changes, not the content. They have a huge gallery of various styles all displaying the same textual content in different ways. It boggles the mind.
Of course all the genetic templates for our new biota are Terran; the minds designing them are Terran; but the terrain is Martian. And terrain is a powerful genetic engineer, determining what flourishes and what doesn’t, pushing along progressive differentiation, and thus the evolution of a new species. And as the generations pass, all the members of the a biosphere evolve together, adapting to their terrain in a complex communal response, a creative self-designing ability. This process, no matter how much we intervene in it, is essentially out of our control. Genes mutate, creatures evolve: a new biosphere emerges, and with it a new noosphere. And eventually the designers’ minds, along with everything else has been forever changed.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Green Mars
