July 2008

There were 6 posts published in July 2008 (this is page 2 of 2).

Some unformed thoughts on Ambient Intimacy for the next generation

My little boy is six months old tomorrow. I’ve been thinking a lot, since he’s been around, about what the world looks like to him now, what it might be like in the future, and trying to understand how his little brain develops and turns him into a real little person (incredibly quickly, as it turns out).

I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately and I’d love to workshop it with you…

For people born in 2008 (and probably a few years before) – ambient intimacy will just be a normal state. It won’t have the novelty that it has had for us. The ability to stay in touch with people that we have stronger or weaker ties with in this light weight way will be something available to them from a very young age and – in all probability – throughout their entire lives.

What do you imagine the repercussions will be?

For example, assuming that within the next few years, more and more people will have a social presence online, my little guy will have no real excuse to ‘lost contact’ with anyone he makes contact with. Can you imagine a kindergarten equivalent of Facebook? I can. Extrapolate from there.

What does that mean? Being able to ‘lose touch’ is, when you think about it, a pretty valuable luxury. How will we negotiate this I wonder.

What about ‘contact’ scalability. How many contacts could you accumulate over the course of a lifetime if you start really young? How will we manage that? If we get stressed about our mum’s friending us on FaceBook now, what do our kids have coming? We think Twitter gets distracting now – how will we manage all the noise that such a huge number of contacts will generate? Or will we all just shut up? (I doubt it).

How will we manage our identity online as our identity changes? Will this pressure that seems to be about to have an ‘integrated’ online persona (work, social, family, all in together) continue? If not, how will different personas evolve and how will the be related? Will we be able to re-invent ourselves? Will it be as fun? Will our kids ever forgive their parents for putting so many photos of them on Flickr when they were babies?

On the brighter side though, imagine how powerful and extensive these networks will be – the ability to motivate, research, refer, inspire, inquire. How distributed and trusted information sources will be.

Put on your future goggles and imagine what it would be like… what do you see?

Thoughtless design is going to cost me money… (or, why you shouldn’t ignore conventions)

BT Aqua Phone

Here is a new phone we got the other day. It’s our landline phone. Pretty cute huh? It’s called the Aqua by BT. Don’t buy it. I paid about £100 for a set of these phones. They are going to cost me a lot more than that in no time.

Here’s the thing. How do you end a call on a slide phone (which is what these are)? Simple – you close the slide, right? Well – yes, on every other slide phone that I’ve ever encountered, but not on this phone. Closing the slide does nothing… except closing the slide. So, when I went to make a call last night I discovered that, in fact, a call was still in progress. A call to a mobile phone, that had been connected for 8 hours. Ouch. I am *dreading* seeing this months phone bill because this isn’t the first time we’ve made this mistake. Although, this is probably the worst example.

We keep making this mistake because the slide-to-end-call convention is such a strong part of our model of how a slide phone works. We will keep making this mistake – despite the fact that we will be punished, seriously, by our telco.

As cute as these phones are, they’re going to be returned very soon because the experience of using them is so broken.

Moral to the story – if you’re designing something that has existing conventions associated with it – ignore them at your peril. Otherwise you’ll end up designing something that sucks as badly as this phone. And we don’t want that, do we.

End of rant.