Hi, I’m Matt Balara.I solve design problems with my head.

This was originally published last June on Stowe Boyd’s blog /message, reproduced here with Stowe’s permission due to my odd feeling of wanting to have all my stuff in one place.

This afternoon my best friend Steffen called me. The first thing I said was, “Hey! What have you been up to the past couple of weeks?” As be began to tell me, it surprised me how strange it felt having to ask him that question.

If the laws of chance should flip on their heads, and I would bump into Jeffrey Zeldman on the street tomorrow, I’d ask him, “How’s your dog doing?” If Jason Santa Maria were with him I’d say, “Dude, killer relaunch. ” Derek Powazek’s in town? “Damn, I’d love to get some of that heat over here.”

These three are all web celebrities - let’s call them blebrities - but I’ve never met a single one of them. I follow them on Twitter, so every day I have the feeling of looking through a pinhole at their lives, even though they wouldn’t know me from a hole in the wall. We’re continually in touch (even if it’s one-way) and they therefore have a kind of daily presence in my life. We all know how this works, so I won’t waste any more time on it.

But what’s this do for my meatspace friends? Steffen (the poor bastard) is part of the “don’t get it” crowd and isn’t on Twitter, or anything else online that we call social. He writes emails (rarely) and calls me occasionally. Although he’s one of my favourite people in the world, and we have a great time together when we see each other once a month, I know less about what’s he’s doing every day than I know about any number of people I’ve never met who’re sitting on the other side of the world.

And sadly, although my emotional impulse is to avoid this reaction, I have to admit that Steffen’s becoming less relevant in my life. I miss him.

Typically, someone who doesn’t “get” Twitter, would stare at me in shocked horror if I told them this, but the fact is, Twitter and other online social tools have made it possible for me to have a kind of light, continuous contact with so many people, and this contact has become an essential part of my life. If those people are meatspace friends, it intensifies the relationship and saves us both time. Instead of asking them, “what have you been up to?” when we see each other I can say, “I don’t really like it either,” and without explanation we both know what we’re talking about. Meatspace friends who aren’t online are a conspicuous absence.

In a way that I myself find completely unfair and strange, I’m starting to resent Steffen’s non-participation, as in, “dude, why aren’t you talking to me?” As Jyri Engstrom said in an interview with the BBC,

Being-hyper connected will become a precondition for citizenship.

In the same way mobiles are a necessity, in five years time being hyper-connected will become a necessity to be an active participant in the social world.

Sure, there are still some curmudgeons who still refuse to own a mobile phone, but they’re seen as stubborn outsiders. I’m looking forward to the certain future when hyperconnectivity is the norm, and I can help, soothe, laugh at and commiserate with all of my friends, whenever and wherever we are.

Even Steffen.

What do you think? Leave a comment…

Leisa Reichelt calls herself a designer. Stowe Boyd calls himself a designer, too. Ryan Singer says he’s also a designer. Zeldman talks about design all the time.

I don’t mean to suggest for even a second that Leisa, Stowe, Ryan and Jeffrey aren’t designers. They’re just four people who, although they all work in the indernetz, do wildly different things. Talking and listening to them, and my discussion with Mathew Patterson the other day, got me thinking about how the folks who call themselves “designer” define what they do.

The web has exploded the concept of design. Once was the day that a designer was someone who made aesthetically pleasing things (that’s right, objects you could hold in your very own hands) which solved a problem. Sometimes the problem was a selling a new car, sometimes it was selling concert tickets, sometimes it was earning points for taste with your neighbours, and the list goes on and on. Although these are very different endeavours, all are called design, and there are also fancy, well-designed drawers for all of them: industrial design, graphic design, furniture design, and so on.

Now we’ve got “web design”, a drawer that’s full of folks who do funky stuff in photoshop, some who think and scribble, others who write HTML and CSS and quite a few mash-ups of the above.

Do you call yourself a designer? Think about design for a minute, and write a comment below and let me know:

• What do you do every day?
• How do you define “design”?
• What parts of what you do are essential to your definition of design?

The more answers, the more interesting the comparisons, so even you lurkers and off-chance one-time-only visitors are encouraged to chime in.

What do you think? Leave a comment…