At dynamIt, we moved into The Design Center at Marconi Square down in the Arena District about two months ago. It is a very intriguing building, so I spent a couple hours and did some amateur research on the history of our building. The building was originally built back in the 1890’s. It has seen multiple additions over the last century, but dynamIt’s office is in the original part of the building. In 1891 the building opened as the paint factory for the Dean & Barry Paint Company of Columbus, Ohio. The building saw to the manufacturing of paint and paint products. For nearly a century the building served that very purpose until the company was sold in 1985. From there the building sat virtually empty used only for some auxiliary warehousing, after all there was really nothing around it. Then came the creation of the Arena District and the once seemingly unusable building became a trendy office spot.

So I got to thinking, how cool would it be to go back in time 50 years and walk the streets of Columbus as they were in the late 1950’s? Well, that might not the best idea for me at dynamIt as leaving the office would mean stepping into the backyard of the state penitentiary, but you get the idea. Imagine seeing the sites and the landmarks of the past and hanging out at the popular spots of the time. Think how fascinating it would be to walk around and see how progress has taken over and molded the city.

Then it hit me, 50 years from now, we will be able to do just that. A certain company we all know and love has very detailed photographs of nearly every street in Columbus. I am talking of course about Google. With Google Maps Street View anyone can walk the streets of Columbus in 2008. You do not have to physically be in Columbus to do so. Thus, there is no need to be in 2008 either. All Google needs to do it hold onto this data for the next 50 years and then we will have the ability to travel back in time.

What if we (dynamIt) were to hire someone whose exclusive job was to do web research. There are many aspects to web, all of which benefit from some type of research. Consider the following:

User Experience
Usability research is nothing new. Numerous studies have been done and reports have been compiled about how people use the web. Look at Jakob Nielsen, the world-renowned web usability guru, for more details. However, though many standards and guidelines have been created, not all apply in every situation. It is probably a good idea to do some level of usability testing on a per project basis. (Note: I have some implementation ideas for this with dynamIt, coming soon).

Not to mention, new technology continually changes how we use the web. Obvious example: with AJAX more things have become possible to make our Internet browsing lives far simpler.

Development Research
Web development is always evolving. There are so many topics in web development today that it is hard to keep up, especially with technologies that are emerging (e.g. semantic web techniques). If we have someone dedicated to knowing about all these things and figuring out how to apply them to common applications, imagine how much value we could produce for our clients.

Beyond new techniques and programming languages, what about all of the Web 2.0 (and beyond) APIs that are popping up. Flickr, Google, YouTube are the big ones, but there are APIs of all sorts out there that we can mix and mash to make some pretty powerful web applications at a realistic cost.

Personally, I would love to do this. I love learning and enjoy the challenge of figuring out that next little puzzle. Plus, I am usually pretty quick to pick things up and figure out how it all works. Ok, now that I have created the ideal job for myself ;-), how do I make it happen?