Versatile Amphibian

I read an amusing article in Forbes last week about Symbian, the world's most common and least interesting mobile phone OS ( link ). The journalist's contention is that by ' crowdsourcing ' (a repulsive management term that makes me flinch every time I hear it) Symbian produces an engaging and multifaceted product. My opinion is the opposite. To me, the wisdom of the crowd is a con that excuses lazy or untalented product designers from their responsibilities. The great leaps forward in human understanding have almost all come from the inspiration of a few individuals, not from some loosely democratic design-by-committee. Even giant technological feats like the Manhattan Project were driven by a core group of smart people who had the vision and ability to see and accomplish their goal. To take a more relavent example: Apple's design team consists of a small group, working out of California. Sure, they have great understanding of the needs of the crowd, but they certa...

Continuing the theme of future mobile design, stimulated by this link from MIT's Fluid Interface Group, this post is a quick look at some ideas for possible futures in machine-to-man communications. The screen of the future, if you like. First off, a confession. I love my iPhone. It's a great piece of technology that just works; well enough to get me excited about handsets for the first time in years. It's also led to a spate of people wandering around, head down in their smart phone, writing emails, tweeting, surfing the web, playing games or another one of the tens of thousands of things you can get an app for. This is a shame, because the iPhone has lots of next generation functionality that's exciting to use, but has lost some of the mobility that made cellphones compelling in the first place. The Fluid Interfaces Group device gets around this "heads down" problem by projecting an interactive screen onto a surface by means of a small projector (and presu...

A colleague recently sent me the following link describing a project by MIT's Fluid Interfaces Group, related to next generation interaction solutions. Besides being an interesting (and occassionally amusing) presentation, it reminded me of some thinking I participated in on a similar front, which I thought was worth sharing. For ease of reading, I'll break the subject into multiple posts, starting with image recognition . Wouldn't it be great if my computer could see what I saw, tell me everything I want to know about it? I'd look at a product on a shelf and know everything about it. I could look at a billboard advertising a film and instantly know where and when I could see it. I'd never forget a name... This might sound like something out of Minority Report, but in fact the "wearable webcam" concept has been around for some years now and I'm slightly surprised that its still not made it commercially. Microsoft have been very active in this space ...