One mans trash is another mans treasure (or womans of course....don't want to be sexist)

Recently whilst shopping for some 'bins' I came across these amazing products. These are waste paper baskets made out of waste paper (intriguing asian newspapers to be a little more specific). Who ever came up with this idea was a genius. Cool items made out of cheap/free waste material, sold back to people who have a guilty conscience about killing the planet. Although they were nearly double the price of their plastic equivalent, i just felt compelled to buy them. Another brilliance to this product is that when their lifecycle is over, i can just unravel them and place them in the paper recycling bin.


so what did i use these intriguing products for?.....sorting my recycling :)

Small green interactions

My girlfriend is a environmentalist and has recently finished a masters in environmental management. Recently i have been wondering what i can learn from her expertise and bring into my own profession of interaction design. The environment and interaction design instantly brings to mind a quote by a guy from Cooper (if only i could remember the guys name) at business to buttons in malmö 2 years ago.

"Just remember, while you are fiddling around with the details of your latest widget design. The earth is burning"

There is a broad scope for interaction design within the context of environmental issues. My thoughts have clutched hold of the idea of 'Small Green Interactions' within products and how the sum of millions of these interactions all over the world could impact the environment. Lets take a hypothetical example, i know mobile phones....let's go for that. Let's take the example of sending an SMS.

So, I am typing a message to my friend on my mobile phone. It takes me about 3 minutes to type the message. During the message the word prediction was often wrong, i made mistakes because the keys were too small for my thumbs and sometimes punctuation marks were never where i expected to find them.

Then extremely talented text input specialists come along (probably Sofia Broström and Anna Jacobsson at Sony Ericsson) and design the perfect typing solution. When using it the same message takes only 2 minutes to type. Now i am a happy user because my messages are quicker to type (one third quicker), send to my friends and i don't make many mistakes. Now here is a interesting question.....am I now a greener user?

Everything on a portable device relies on its battery which is charged regularly. All of these devices have a mode for saving power. They switch to this mode when they are not being used. Now with the new interaction design mentioned above the device would go into power saving mode a whole minute before the other solution. Now this may not sound like much but consider it on a worldwide scale. The USA alone sent 1 trillion(i don't even know how many zeros that is) text messages in 2008.......How much electrical power does that equal???

Now imagine other tiny interactions that could be made slightly more efficient and collectively save energy. Now imagine a polar beer running around happy on his iceberg.

Pixelmania

Absolutely brilliant......This filled me with a strange nostalgia that made me crave the classics, so i googled 'atari'. Surprisingly enough came to atari.com, where i have been wasting a good portion of my time playing asteroids :)

Keep your seat back and tray table in the upright positon

Recently i took a trip to Prague. During the flight the captain bombarded the passengers with information about altitudes, temperatures and wind speeds. Why do we need to know that the temperature outside is -38 degrees? oh yes, so we don't forget our coats when exiting the aircraft at 37000ft.

Meanwhile once landed i spent the first 10 minutes in prague airport looking for a clock. Why? Well i didn't really know what timezone the Czech Republic was in. It would have been a far more pleasant experience if the captain had just said "Welcome to Prague. The Czech Republic is in the same time zone as Sweden, so there is no need to change your watches........" That would cover the needs of most passengers.

It just shows....interaction design principles can be applied in all areas of life.

Grey clouds please rain on me

For those that do not know the future is all in the cloud. So what does this mean. The idea is simple. All your digital content (music, videos, photos, word documents, pdfs, psds.....everything) in one place, on a web server. So why do this? The easiest answer is convenience. There was a time when we thought our devices would all converge into one super device. One device which is our computer, phone, games system, media station etc. The reality is that convergence is DEAD!!!!

In our highly mobile society we have different needs depending on the task we are performing. These needs heavily influence the size of the device. For example a business person fine tuning a presentation might want the luxury of a 15 inch screen to view material. When s/he goes for a run they might want a small music player. So why converge into one device? Doing the presentation on a small mp3 size screen isn't suited to the task and running with a 15inch screen strapped to your arm is not really going to improve your personal best. So i repeat, Convergence is DEAD!

The future is Divergence, many devices! and that is where the cloud needs to come in. Why should my mp3 player store a copy of my music collection, my laptop store another copy of my music collection and my media TV store yet another exact copy of my music collection? I then have 3 copies of my music collection to maintain. The cloud can allow me to have just one music collection that all my devices can access via a high speed data connection.....Clever huh?.....

Well yes, but there are obviously challenges to overcome. Now i don't want to go into privacy and security issues of storing all your content on the web. I want to to accelerate the death of another technology that is holding back the progression of this use of the cloud.....SYNCHRONISATION. Yes back to this idea of having multiple copies of the same thing on all your devices. Some people think this is great because you don't have the privacy/security issues of storing on the web. However the simple fact is that synchronisation just cannot provide the same experience because devices are limited by the amount of data they can store. Consider this, I have a macbook with 120GB hardisk, an Ipod with a 32GB hardisk and a mobile phone with a 4GB memory card. Simple physics dictates that i cannot keep these in perfect sync. The data on my macbook will not fit on my ipod, and the data on my ipod will not fit on my phone. Therefore it is quite common for me to get angry when i want to show a friend a cool music video on my ipod, and realise that it didn't fit on the device and it is instead on my macbook at home. This would work if all devices had the same hardisk space...but that is just never going to happen.

So let us all dress up in funny clothes and do a little rain dance. We need clouds!

Curious displays

Back with a dose of inspiration for you. Check out this interesting concept on curious displays. I find the opening part where nothing is playing actually quite hypnotic and entertaining. I am really enjoying the exploration of movie viewing that moves around your living space according to the motion in the film.I am not to sure about the reminders to pick up dirty underwear though! Thanks to Magnus 4 for sending the link to this one.

Curious Displays from Julia Tsao on Vimeo.

Sinister people will one day rule

This one is less about design inspiration and more a rant. Recently i have heard a lot of poor design ideas being justified with the phrase:- "It is designed for right handed use because there are more right handed people in the world".

Now i am goofy, southpaw, cack handed or whatever mildy offensive term you want to use to describe a lefty. However this is not why i get annoyed. I get annoyed by the ridiculous idea that even though a person has 2 hands, they only use 1. Granted there are a few things you only do with your dominant hand. These are tasks that require great precision, for example writing. However for non precision tasks i argue that we are all lefties (and all righties).

Consider the following example

You are a righty. You are travelling on a very busy commuter bus and didn't get a seat. You are holding the only hand rail you can gain access to and you can only reach it with your right hand. Your mobile phone rings. The design team at Nokia have designed the device for right handed people (because their are more of them in the world). What do you do? 2 options: Let go of the handrail (and potentially lose your balance and fall) or answer the call with your left hand (with difficulty because it was designed for right handed use).

Now there are hundreds of situations like this in life and they are not uncommon occurances. If you are a designer reading this I urge you to think about how you use your own products. Do you always use them with your dominate hand? or do you actually switch them between hands depending on context. I argue that you use your non dominant hand more than you realize and that modern men and women in many cases are actually lefties and righties. By not realizing this and designing just for the righties you are not just failing the lefties of the world you are actually also failing the righties.

Just to point out some irony in this...creative industries have an unusually high percentage of lefties compared to other industries.

Oh, and the word sinister comes from the latin word sinistra, which means left. Hence the title.

Life created on the moon

Not so long ago i was at a party with group of people very interested in environmental issues. During the evening the topic of rising sea levels came up. So what did i propose?.....move the ice! Then i started rambling like a mad man. My basic idea was to create rocket ships that could carry icebergs to the moon. When on the moon these could be melted to form lakes and begin a process of making the moon habitable. Consider it a noah's arc for if we finally do destroy the earth.

Of course i was pushed to the corner and shunned. That was until i suggested an alternative solution. Why can't we grow walls to hold back the rising sea. Crazy? Well not as crazy as you may think.....

There are some interesting ideas in this clip. It is just a shame she is such a bad presenter

Humanizing products

I have been involved in several discussions about humanizing products. An important and often overlooked aspect is how we as humans should feel about machines that show characteristics of life. Take this test and see how you feel.

1. Watch this youtube clip from the movie office space.


2. Now watch this clip






So how did you feel about the office space clip? Satisfied, overjoyed, happy
.......and the Elmo clip?

A true human interface

If only we could put tiny people in our digital products, hang on wait a minute.


Hi from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Dabbling in the dark art....Typography

Yesterday i was dabbling in the dark art of typography. Eventhough i am not a master sorcerer i now have a better understanding of the craft, and a lot of questions. One that keeps bounding in my mind (and it might be really silly) is why can't i control the size of ascenders and descenders? Take the following example. I am working on a headline that is a mix of 2 different typefaces garamond and myriad.



I have scaled them so the centres of the letters align (sorry i am not down with all the terminology)



But as you can see the ascenders and descenders (getting more down with the lingo) don't align.





Why don't i have the possibilty to align them? Just a click of a button. I realise that it alters the typeface but shouldn't it be an option for the designer? Surely this is easier that hunting down typefaces that have been designed to complement each other.


As i mentioned earlier, i am not a sorcerer of the dark art and this may just be a ridiculous suggestion.

The x10 mini twins have landed

Ok, like many other Sony Ericsson designers i am going to shamelessly promote the x10 mini twins on my blog. These devices went down a storm last week in Barcelona. For those (like me) who are lucky enough to already have one, it is no surprise. The Sony Ericsson x10 mini and mini pro are amazing devices. I take my hat off to everyone involved. The hardwork and determination really paid off. Well done!

There is no place like home: TAT home

The guys and girls from TAT do it again. Sleek graphics, nice transitions and a funky beat. Great inspiration. Well done!

Darwin was an aquatic ape

Could it really be true. I am not to sure about the argument about streamlining. I slip through the water like a greased up otter, but down my local pool others carve the water like stampeding elephants.