Found this on the BBC News site, interesting to see how RFID can benefit people that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7026753.stm

Oh how I wish I’d have known about this a year ago. Some really nice ideas here, and some not so nice ones.

http://www.gadgetcentre.com/news/article/mps/UAN/614/v/1/sp/

The icons I worked on for Paul Clarke of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the RCA are now being exhibited at the RCA, as part of the Vital Signs exhibition. It is on until the 4th October, go and have a look if you can make it.

 http://www.hhrc.rca.ac.uk/ne/ra_symp_07.html

I got given a late minute briefing for a big pitch I’m working on last week, and so this has had to be put to the side for the time being. I should hopefully have some time to carry on working on it next week, so expect some updates.

Seeing as this is meant to be about stuff I do, I thought I’d post a link to my Flickr page. I’ve been putting a few things on there over the last few days for no particular reason apart. Have a look:

Flickr

I’ve done a bit of scribbling today trying to get my head around what it is I want to achieve. Not particularly successful, but I can see some signs of a definate movement.

My thinking at present is to create a dynamic set of icons that change based on the current position within the menu. For example, the transition from ‘messaging’ to ‘create message’ to ’send’ would be an experience, and you could visibly see the transition between each sub-menu. I hope that makes sense. It would allow the user to move between bits of the menu quickly and easily, and obviously be aesthetically pleasing. I’m quite into changing the whole ‘menu’ thing entirely and making navigation a completely different experience, but it’s going to take a bit of work and I still don’t really know the path I’m taking.

I’m planning to write myself a brief tomorrow to get my ideas in check, and go from there.

Well, I’ve started to have a think about my own little project on mobile interfaces. This is quite a task - I’m no interface designer, and already I can see that this is a well examined subject with probably some pretty concrete solutions already.

What I’m debating over with myself at the moment is whether to investigate the actual iconography that could potentially be used within the OS of a phone, or the physical menu structure that is used within the phone and how to make that more appealing.

I have an N73 as my current phone, and my used theme is currently this:

… Psiloc Redium. I was amazed when I saw this because there are so many horrible themes for Symbian based phones that not only look garish, but slow the phone down a lot. The main reason I use this theme is to keep my phone running well, as it’s vector based.

But… (and there is a but), the icons are pretty non-descript. I tend to find myself reading the text next to the icon rather than looking at the actual icon to find my way around - in fact thinking about it now, if someone asked me to draw the icon for ’settings’ there’s no way I could do it. Iconography for phones is stereotypically very samey, nothing stands out for me here.

My initial thought is to try and create something in between the glossy drop-shadowed world of the iPhone and the solid, stereotypical, helvetica man icons. I’m also going to try and get some funtionality in there, or some kind of visual device that shows progression of menus so you instantly know where you are in the menu system of the phone with one glance. If I could create some kind of visual reference for a tree-structure style menu in the icon, that would be great.

I’m going to carry on scribbling and thinking, but this is my first blog-rambling to get my thoughts in sync.

I’ve got a week or so free, so I’m planning on beginning my own investigation into mobile interfaces. I should hopefully be updating the blog day by day with some visual references, sketches, or anything I find. I’m starting off by reading an investigation called ‘Cultural Difference and Mobile Phone Interface Design: Icon Recognition According to Level of Abstraction’ to lay some foundations. Have a search on Google if you want to have a read. I’m planning on designing some icons to work with the interface, how successful it will be - well, we shall see.

This is going to be my first real investigation on my blog. I came across this link while browsing Flickr today at work.

Mike Rohde has ‘hacked’ a Moleskine plain note pad to become an organiser, to replace his usual PDA. Interesting concept in itself, but it leads to a more complicated argument - in the world of syncing PDAs, mobiles, iPods and the like to a fully functional iCal / similar piece of software that allows multi-calendars, email and visual notifications and the like, why would anyone want to turn back time and create the ‘ultimate’ manual diary?

I, like many others, use iCal regularly, even daily. It provides me with an easy to use and functional way of managing myself (which I couldn’t do without), and also allows me to sync with my Nokia so I know what I’m meant to be doing ‘on-the-go’. For quite an un-organised person, iCal makes me quite organised. But, why would someone want to go back to paper after the rise of accessibility of programs such as iCal in the last few years?

I have loads of old sketchbooks sitting around, both in London and at my parents’ house. These are full of doodles, scribbles, note taking, things to do, and a lot of other stuff. I rarely look back at sketchbooks once I’ve made notes, in fact hardly ever. Most of the pages in my books are probably never re-visited. But the reason I have so many old sketchbooks is simply this - there is nothing more satisfying than starting writing in a new, crisp sketch book or diary. Whether it’s going to make me more organised or not, writing in the book makes me think that I’m putting some order into my life, that every mark I make on the page is done for a reason and that each mark will be beneficial to me as an organised person.

What iCal is lacking, is the ability to scribble, to sketch, to create completely unique references that work for each specific individual and not making them work with a formula common to everyone with a Mac. In this sense iCal is relatively uniform and unflexible, it allows no personalisation. I still have two sketchbooks in my bag even though I run everything I need to do through iCal, because I like writing stuff. I still write things I need to do in my sketchbooks rather than noting them down on stickies or another digital form - a) because it’s more accessible, and b), because of the satisfaction factor.

This leads to a possible investigation looking at organisation software and personalisation. If someone could strike a balance between ease of use and synchronisation, and personalisation, you could have a winning piece of software on your hands. I’m not talking just using a graphics tablet to allow scribbling - I mean full scale personalisation in terms of keys, legends, colours, tables, graphs - whatever.

I may look in to this further when I have a spare few days, it is a very interesting topic though.

Found this while browsing, the engineering involved must be insane. Very nice indeed.

Awesome Adjustable Table - Watch more free videos

Blackberry have patented some rather odd looking keyboard layouts. They’re not the first to use an unconventional layout… Nokia have used a number of irregular layouts before in the 3650, 7610 and a few others. I will be examining the logic of varying the traditional abcdef phone keyboard layout soon as part of my research into mobile phone interfaces. 

Music tracks on vinyls that when recorded to tapes and played back through a Spectrum, become games. Might just be an excuse to buy a Spectrum off eBay and give it a go! Reminds me a bit of ‘Data Diaries’, running the memory dump of a computer through Quicktime to force a visual output.

http://www.kempa.com/blog/archives/000053.html

Pretty amazing stuff, try zooming right in on the windows or the car number plates.

http://www.harlem-13-gigapixels.com/

This man has turned 2 etch-a-sketch units into a set of digital decks, controlling individual sound tracks.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/petehindle/sets/1585642/

Something I looked at while researching my ‘artofsound’ project. The organic resolution to seeing the object change in reaction to the sound is really really nice, as opposed to running it through a series of computer programs to see an output.