At SmashingConf this year, we asked the attendees to write down what their idea of the Future of the Net would be. They wrote down their ideas onto word bubble post-it notes and pinned them to our Wall of the Future.

At the end of the conference, we had over 110 post-its, focusing on everything from specific technical requests to wide-ranging concepts to entertaining sarcasm. We’ve grouped them together, and here are the trends SmashingConf attendees think will make up the Future of the Net.

Focusing on the User

Many predictions were around the rise of UX and user-centred design, whether it focused on more personalised content or producing more conversations. With many of the talks focused on design systems and designing for the user, it makes sense that most people were thinking about the user rather than the newest shiny framework.

But safety and security was also on their mind, with people mentioning end-to-end encryption and privacy for everyone, as well as overall ideas for how people can use the internet, including learning, helping others, and building a place where people interact with each other with respect.

Making the Internet of Things

IoT was also a hot topic among the attendees, with many people stating that the Internet of Things would take over the world. With everything from the Apple Watch to internet-ready toilets being mentioned, the future of the net seems to be, as one person said, “wherever there is a screen, there will eventually be the web.”

VR was also a major point. Focusing on everything from using websites as physical virtual reality buildings to performing heart surgery over the web, many attendees thought that while we might have had our first life, and might have played on Second Life, that our third life might be coming soon.

Passing the Turing Test or going for the construction GIF

And to run all those IoT refrigerators and VR goggles, you’d need an artificial intelligence in your computers, which was another hot topic. Aside from the two declaring that Skynet would be upon us, we also saw mentions of Siri and that we would have “more free time to be human”.

But while the future of the Internet may be on everyone’s mind, there’s still a small audience for 1990s’ web nostalgia. MIDIs, the <blink> and <marquee> tags, Flash, and Geocities were all mentioned, where people wanted to go back to a world where the Internet wasn’t a collection of gated social media communities, but, instead, a wild and wonderful place where anyone could make a website any way they wanted.

But in the end…

While many people had many ideas about the future of the internet, probably the best message of the day was:

“I don’t think this Internet business will catch on.”