The difference between the little people architects draw on their sketches and the little people interaction designers draw on their sketches

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The difference between the little people architects draw on their sketches and the little people interaction designers draw on their sketches, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Three years at Nokia

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treemerge

Some self-indulgence (on a blog? NO!)
Today, November the 3rd, is three years to the day I started at Nokia.

Having been interviewed by Marko in the balmy, bright-blue-skied days of the Finnish summer, and having brought Foe for a recce in the brisk, equally-bright-blue-skied autumn, I turned up in the dour, downtrodded november streets of Ruoholahti and wondered what I’d let meself in for.

Still do sometimes – three years and I’m still learning. Today was spent in the snowbound forest for instance with the nice people who make the 770 internet tablet and the Maemo platform – who are all about a thousand times smarter than me. Fun.

The first two years were spent more in design research, notably (for me at least) working with Janne, Jyri, Marko, Jan and Chris amongst others on the early stages of NFC and thinking about interaction design for what was going to come down the line as the world got that little bit more spimey.

Also being able to spend about a year or so with Janne again, and Minh – thinking, doing, scribbling and playing with the nature of “Play“ – the greatest human universal and endless source of fantastic insight.

I was a very lucky boy.

The last year (corresponding with the gradual decline of this blog) has seen me in a different role – about this time last year I moved to Nokia Design to work with the team designing the Nokia Nseries products, building the user-experience team and generally wrestling with the sometimes overwhelming job of helping to make the most powerful mobile devices – simpler, clearer and more delightful to use while not compromising the superpowers they can grant the owner.

Nothing on the shelves yet that I’ve been involved with – one thing for a mainly ex-web person to get used to is the lead times involved in combining bits and atoms – but there’s some awesome stuff coming in 2007 which our little team has contributed to.

This is the longest I’ve actually spent at one place (even the BBC) and I feel like I want to spend a lot longer here. My original boss, who became a good friend has moved on and this week has seen him make new (very interesting) waves, like Jyri having taken the startup route… but I’m facing the possibility myself that I’ve found what I want to do for now, and so I guess this blog will just keep getting worse for a few more years!

Eloi vs Morlocks: Fictional Superspies Edition

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When it comes to the people saving the Earth, or just the UK, or even just Cardiff from peril – don’t you want them to have a little more technical savvy, than, say a bored teenager?

Take a look at what alien crimefighters and Gallifreyan-crossword-anagram-answer, Torchwood are using:
Torchwood are Eloi

Despite being a shadowy paragovernmental agency entrusted with securing alien technology – they are most comfortable something that resembles a bad Web2.0 site, or a dodgy trillian skin at best. They’re your Hotmail friends! They’re the people who send you that Ok-Go treadmill YouTube clip four months after you saw it!

They’re Eloi! We’re doomed!!!

Reassuringly, good old Five are staffed with much more CLI-kinds of guys…

Spooks are Morlocks

The Spooks, unlike their colleagues at CTU (who seem to favour the 45 degree angled corners of professional flash design circa 2002) are strictly on the command-line tip with the odd snazzy-but-useful bit of hardcore datavis.

MORLOCKS, THANKFULLY!

Bring on the peak oil.

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Audi_horseys
Audi_horseys

Today:

1) The UK government published a report stating we as a country need to make major changes in our behaviour in order to avoid certain environmental armageddon
2) Some bastard driving while on his cellphone tried to run me over. Actually pointed his car at me, and gunned it, once i gestured he should not be driving while talking on a phone.

Take all the cars away now from people under 50 without children.

Now.

Give everyone else horses or bikes.

Actually – just bikes.

The horses, while pretty, will fart us into greenhouse oblivion, and that bastard would probably have just trampled me.

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Link Locusts

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I’m not sure I trust a reporter looking for a headline and surveying one classroom in one school, but this made me chuckle:

“The relatively short lifecycle of a popular site is a terrifying prospect for companies like Google Inc., which this month spent $1.65 billion in stock to acquire the Internet’s latest grass-roots favorite, year-old YouTube, whose popularity Google hopes to harness as a loyal video audience.

“To a youth market composed of teens like Kim and Birnbaum, MySpace is just the latest online fad. Before MySpace, the place to be was Xanga, and before that, Friendster, MiGente and Black Planet.

“They’re not loyal,” Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic. Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They’re constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.

Consider the most popular teen sites tracked by Nielsen-NetRatings. Topping the list last month were Snapvine.com, PLyrics.com, Picgames.com — none of which appeared among the top 10 for April, or the list a year ago.

Madeline Dell’Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. “No one was using Xanga anymore,” she said.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend’s photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said.”

I like the idea that hordes of voracious kids with ADHD are moving like locusts from server-farm to server-farm, feasting on link-potential and feature-sets, then leaving them as quickly as they came – barren hosts to nothing but digital tumbleweed and middle-aged new media pundits.