Designing for Uncertainty

Ethan Marcotte coined the term "responsive web design" back in 2010 and instantly gave a name to the loose collection of technologies that were fundamentally changing how the web was being built. A decade later, he brought that same insight to another revolutionary force within the industry, the workers themselves.

Either one of these would be an invaluable contribution to how the web gets built and Ethan's sharp intuitions grounded in moral clarity offer some valuable lessons to the exciting, if still uncertain, early days of the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

• The Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp
• The original Responsive Web Design article
• Announcing the then-redesigned BostonGlobe.com, one of the first large scale responsive designs
• Ursula Franklin's Massey lectures, which were later collected as The Real World of Technology
• Ethan's book on the labor movement within the tech industry, You Deserve a Tech Union

The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-08-03-designing-for-uncertainty-ethan-marcotte.

Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

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