Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

Pleasantly surprised by these new adverts of ours.



Gone are the cheesy grinning yoof models gleefully living the ‘mobile lifestyle’, and instead we have a languidly expressive line sketching the form of the new phone.



It’s the archetypal ‘back of the envelope’ sketch that captures the essence of the design, communicates it to another with casual power.



I like that the ad is not covered with ‘features’, ‘benefits’, acronyms or tech specs either. It’s confident enough to say the clear, simple design of this object will sell it to you, or not.



The fact that this can now be the primary image in the advert also shows the iconic status of the clamshell as the shape of mobile telephony in the popular mind.



Which is going to be an interesting challenge for all the mobile device manufacturers when they want to innovate beyond that – not just Nokia.


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p.s. I hate those pompous “disclosure” lines that people use when writing about companies they work for, but as you may know, I work for Nokia, and usually I hate their adverts, so was prompted to write this, the views here stated may not be those of my employers, yadda, yadda.

Filed under: Mobile, Nokia, Visual and graphic design
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A nice thought from Will Davies:

“...once one is reduced back to fivers and coins, the city feels very different all over again. One moves from a post-pay to a pre-pay world, in which anonymity is won at the expense of convenience, something the government is convinced ‘the public’ don’t want (William Heath has queried this repeatedly). It is a pain in the arse in many respects, but you do also get that bizarre, slightly retro feeling of being able to wander off into a crowd and be anyone you want, like the first time you go to the shops on your own to spend your pocket money. The flaneur, for instance, would surely have to use real pounds and pence (alright, francs and centimes) rather than an Oyster card or Visa. There is something rather wonderful about cash, in that if money talks, then nothing else has to.

Privacy arguments too often revolve around Big Brother vs libertarians, with extreme examples being bandied around by both sides. The ethical experience of privacy – or disconnection from the network – is that of a different type of freedom from the one being offered by the network. It’s the freedom to embrace contingency and inconvenience, rather than the freedom to get what you want. I propose a ‘Leave Your Wallet and Mobile Phone at Home Day’, in which once a year, individuals hit the streets with nothing other than twenty quids worth of low-tech, Victorian cash. Then see what happens.”

I’ve done this a couple of times myself, both intentionally and unintentionally. It makes for a different flow of time, and thoughts than you have when instantly connectable to your bank account or your friends.

Further thoughts on the art of disconnecting from Rajat at Rootburn.

Filed under: City magic, Sufficiently-Advanced Lifestyle
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Found by Simon Roberts, this FT article on the futility of trend-watching:

The future is unknowable because it depends on people and because people reflect, have will, make mistakes, co-operate and change their minds and ways. The past turns into one of many possible futures through human agency. The way to understand what is happening in the world is not to draw trajectories on paper but to ask what people are thinking and doing in their own lives and collective endeavours.

I think is what most teams that think about ‘futures’ for a living do, however. The outputs of processes such as scenario planning explicitly create ‘many possible futures’ as navigational aids, not pre-plotted courses to be slavishly followed.

Filed under: Misc.
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If this is what you get when you search for London.



I love that there are places called “Sublimity City” and “Deer Lick” neighbouring the great metropolis.

Filed under: Geography, Maps
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A partial list:

• An understandable guide to the intricacies of aliasadm
• A ‘delete all from spam folder’ button in gmail
• the phone number of the gmail product manager to: (a) ask for a ‘delete all from spam folder’ button in gmail (b) ask them to delete all 380849 spam emails from my spam folder for me so I don’t have to do it 100 at a time, and sidestepping the resulting 7616 clicks necessary to do so

I’ve mailed gmail support already, before you ask.

Argh.

Filed under: Interface, Lazyweb, web 2.0
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Apollo 11 landed at Tranquilty on this day 36 years ago. Moon.google.com commemorates it nicely.

Filed under: Space, Sufficiently Advanced Technology
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It’s taken a while this year for there to be a ‘sound of the summer’, but for me it’s got to be Hard-Fi’s “Hard to Beat”: poppy, danceable, tough, rough and sweet – with an obligatory reference to ‘rocking the city‘:

Can you feel it?
Rocking the city,
Ah yeah,
Straight out of nowhere-ness,
Like a fist,
Can’t resist you, oh no

Winner.

Filed under: Music
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I appear to have broken things.

Look! Over there! The Goodyear Blimp!

Fixed. I think.

“Next on Discovery Channel: ‘When designers try to use .htaccess’“

Filed under: Site info
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I’ve just managed to fairly painlessly import five years of writing into wordpress. Lots of pictures are missing though, and I’m not sure I have copies of them. Also, the effortless import process brought in all my typepad categories – which has created a librarian’s nightmare in the sidebar.

I realised this month that I will have been working on the web for 10 years, and speaking my brains at /work for 5 of those. No wonder I’m knackered.

Filed under: Site info
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0wnzored “Start The Week” this morning.

This week’s edition has been a cracking listen – with the good Dr. Miller taking over the interlocution from Andrew Marr, effectively.

A great exchange with Laurie Taylor, on the death of, well, Death in consumer society – is topped by a quote during a discussion around George Pendle’s book about John Parsons and early rocket science – on why rocketry attracted occultists (Parsons, as well as co-founding the JPL, was a leader of the O.T.O.!) and iconoclasts in the early 20th C:

“The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about – into it, vacant minds expand…”

Very, very good.

Filed under: Nonsense, Space
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As an addendum to the previous post – although there appears to be little written on blogs about TED Global, there are a whopping 254 pictures tagged as TED Global on Flickr.



The attendees, while too engrossed to write, were still able to snap away… Including this one of extropian anti-aging beard-king Aubrey De Grey on a punt!

Filed under: Conferences and events
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I’ve become so used to being able to read about conferences and events online via the flying fingers of bloggers, that it’s a mild shock not to be able to find anything from TED Global in Oxford.

There have been a few reports by actual reporters, especially on the talks by big hitters like Dawkins, but little of the warp and weft of the threads of an event which the unstructured event notes of bloggers excel at capturing.

By coincidence I ran into Jyri, who had been in the UK attending TED Global, while waiting for my my flight back to Helsinki.

We spent the flight back chatting – and he told me that people with laptops had been asked to leave the front rows of the TED audience, as their LCD-bathed faces were disturbing the illustrious speakers.

How quaint!

In fact, all of TED seems like a quaint throwback to the mid-1990’s – from the lack of blogging/online participation to the wildly hubristic theme (‘Ideas big enough to change the world’) to the $4k price-tag.

Of course, all these factors are connected – the lack of online participation, the high-concept theme and price tag adding to the allure of the conference equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

And, all this of course, is just sourgrapery from someone incredibly envious of those who could attend – and someone who rather enjoyed the mid-1990’s…

Filed under: Conferences and events
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Jan Chipchase, a colleague of mine in user-research at Nokia has started a new blog called ‘Future Perfect’, wherein he posts snippets of his experiences travelling the globe studying the use of technology.



Jan has a great eye for the unexpected detail in the everyday, which makes him fantastic to work with as a designer, and will be fabulous to read has his blog develops.

From this post on the culture of mobile phone repair shops in India (where he took the excellent photo above):

“a lot of the hyperbole surrounding western hacker culture makes me smile compared to what these guys are doing day in day out.”

Filed under: Culture, Experience, Friends, Mobile, Nokia
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The Mayor of London:

“Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others – that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”

Momus:

“I suppose this will just click more locks on the manacles of the “security state”. The tedious bag checks, citizens treated as potential criminals, the erosion of the civil justice system, queues and paranoia, the compulsory carrying of ID cards. We’re all now guilty until proven innocent, and especially those of us who look like strangers, who look like people who think differently. Higher suspicion means higher anomie and higher stress. The delights of the high density city are displaced by the stresses and (still largely imagined) dangers of the high density city. The high density city is always poised delicately between heaven and hell; this tips things over to the hell side. And yet I still believe in the utopian potential of big cities.”

Filed under: Humanity
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London, ten years my home – and soon to be home again – got hurt today.

For what it’s worth, my thoughts go out to those who have also been hurt or have lost someone.

One reflection from far away in Helsinki, and quite a selfish one I suppose – that I’m glad all of my friends are wired-for-context through things like Flickr, mailing lists, moblogging, community sites or posting their status on their sites.

I have a folder in bloglines called “Friends” which reassuringly filled up with “I’m OK” blog post titles through the day.

Glancing at each other across all our little networks that lit up with “I’m ok, you’re ok” – the basic transaction, the best thought.

Filed under: Humanity
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From a blistering K-punk on Live8 (which includes a reference to “Teleo-Marxism”- awesome!), comes a line that I plan to pull out of it’s current K-punkian context and transplant to the field of tangible/embodied interaction design to drop as much as possible:

“In addition to anything else, to ignore the crucial functioning of the meat in the machine is poor cybernetics.”

I want to be invited to a college design crit as soon as possible just to be able to say that.

Filed under: Culture, Interface, Late Capitalism, Nonsense
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July 4th is important of course in some parts of the world, but the front page of the wikipedia tells us that on July 5th in

• 1687, The Principia was first published
• 1951, Shockley invented the transistor
• 1954, the first TV BBC News bulletin was broadcast

A good day.

Filed under: Nonsense
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Liz’s notes on the recent O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, even though she says they are sketchy, give a lot of food for thought (and they are funny, but it probably helps if you can imagine Liz recounting them, arms-a-waving) – I’m looking forward to her promised post-4th-of-July reflections.

Overall, it sounds like it was a fascinating carpet-mindbombing of the state-of-the-art of geographical technology and it’s effects on business and society. Wish I’d seen Nathan Eagle, and Kevin Slavin in particular.

One line in her notes will be thought about (and probably written about) much more by me:

“as always, they [O’Reilly] think that the difference between the desires of early and late adopters is one of size, not kind”

Crossing the Chasm was first published 14 years ago. Pre-web, pre-mobile. And yet the tech industry is still set in it’s belief that the mainstream will inevitably, steadily, globally – follow the alpha-geek early adopter. Surely it’s about time the Valley’s “Whig” telling of technological progress is tempered with the wiggly nature of human desire.

Filed under: Conferences and events, Geography, Humanity, Mobile, Sufficiently-Advanced Lifestyle
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So far, according to media reports, the business-end of Deep Impact that has been launched to hit comet Tempel-1 is the size of

• A wine cask (NASA)
• A washing machine (The Guardian, CNNi, News.bbc.co.uk*)
• An oil-drum (BBC Radio 4)

I will keep this list updated with more popular-media-sizing-analogs for space probes (half-a dolphin!).

* In keeping with other white-goods in North America, are US washing-machines bigger than their UK equivalents?

Filed under: Nonsense, Space
5 Comments