I do not understand China. Of course, I would have to first go there to try to understand it, but I don’t understand how it can work the way it works based on the information I read about it. I happened to read this article on Techcruch: Why China Isn’t “The Next Silicon Valley”. It gives a very comprehensible analysis of the current state of technological and commercial development in China, stating that the phases through which the US went gradually (”…the television and media studios build out of the 1950s, the greed of the 1980s, the dot com bubble, the build out of physical and IT infrastructure, current Web 2.0 and CleanTech innovation”), China is now going through at once. Which inevitably forces the Chinese, who are a very adaptable and inventive nation, to find ways of earning money within multiple constraints and develop models that work in that - for us - crazy world. “No one assumes anyone will buy a CD, so they just look for other ways to make money. ” They don’t have the luxury of insisting on the old ways, as big Western studios do. They don’t have the old ways. There every way is new.
But this is not what makes China incomprehensible for me. It is this (also thank to Techcrunch): China shuts down Twitter and Bing in lead up to Tiananmen anniversary. Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Bing are inaccessible as of yesterday. The government chooses to shut them down to avoid access to and spreading of information on politically sensitive matters.
These two notions, one of a wildly flourishing capitalism and the dictatorial communist structure of cutting off the information arteries, what makes China incomprehensible for me. You see, I am from the old paradigm. Roughly half of my life I spent in a communist country and the other half in highly developed democratic European countries. For me cutting off Web access and advanced economical development just do not go together. For me openness equals economical growth and closeness equals economical stagnation, brain drain and suffocation.
Once I had a chance to ask a Chinese colleague this question. She replied that she and the people she knew concentrated on economical development (and their personal one) and ignored the political context. They went about their business and let the government be what it is. I suppose this is the only way to survive - for now - this schizophrenia.
One thing I always liked about Google is that, as an outsider, I can see that the company is never betting on a single horse, but develops many different things by many different groups, trying, playing, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but then again, a failure is never really a failure if you learn something from it. They also let the users play with their products as they develop them and this gives you an impression of being let into their play garden. The consequence is having different interfaces, with different visual styles, coming from different hands, but this is exactly what I like. Now, with the Wave, it looks like Google did not resist the temptation of making an application to “do it all”. In the startup world this is probably the worst thing to do, but Google is not a startup and with the mountain of things they have tried and proved worthwhile so far the Wave will probably become a success. And it is a very logical step. If you had Gmail, GTalk, Picasa and YouTube already under your roof, it would be silly to not at some point merge them all in one seamless whole for the user. This is, in short, what Wave does. Besides, it somewhat resembles Facebook newsfeed, incorporating also the social aspect. And add to this Google Docs and voila, you have covered most of online collaboration.
I think they hit the target with the word “Wave”, because hardly any term describes so well what the world around us is about: ever-changing and ever-moving. The screenshots looks still somewhat overwhelming visually, but let’s wait and see.
Highly recommended: this article in New York Times In South Korea, All of Life Is Mobile. It describes how the younger - and also less younger - generations in that country use their mobile phones for… well, practically anything. Identification, pocket money, payment in stores, television set, book reader, magazine, music player, internet, yellow pages and so on and so forth. The number of things they can do with phones is dazzling. I especially like the example of sending your friend a gift, a pre-paid Starbucks coffee, which she then can pick up by showing the gift icon on her mobile at any Starbucks. Paying by mobile instead of cash or credit card is called T-Money.
A university lets their students use mobiles as ID cards, because, as all students, they would much sooner forget their ID card than leave home without their mobile. No need for a wallet (a relief for those whose wallets, like mine, have been stolen) and I am quite sure they have inventive solutions for stolen phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if a stolen phone becomes useless by itself, or engages in self-destruction, or takes the thief to the closest police station because it knows exactly the thief’s location - and that of all the police stations in the city.
The fact I found most fascinating is that a young person in South Korea changes his or her phone once a year. I don’t quite see it happening around here. Yet.
IDEO’s Bill Moggridge made a comment last week after a screening of Objectified that hit close to home. To paraphrase, he said interaction design has become pervasive, that anyone and everyone can be an interaction designer, and so the role of professional interaction designer is (or is becoming) unnecessary.
A Yahoo survey conducted in Italy shows that cellphone (affectionately called “telefonino” in Italian), internet and e-mail are nowadays more important to Italians than coffee. 43% of Italians would not accept to live without a cellphone, against 24% who would not accept to live without coffee. 61% of Italians say to feel lost without a cellphone when traveling.
Having recently traveled to Sicily and back I could witness this mobile phone addiction of Italians. What is the first thing any person does after the airplane touches ground and the “fasten seat belt” lights go off? Correct, switch on his or her mobile phone. As I was waiting in the ail to go to the exit, with my mobile in my hand, I looked around me and saw an Italian women get not one, not two, but three different mobile phones from her purse. She switched them on one by one and then checked the messages and the missed calls - one by one. I turned to my left and saw an Italian man holding not one, not two, but three cellphones (all different, of course), which he was switching on and checking one by one. The guy next to him was not quite as advanced: he was looking only at two cellphones and feeling no doubt suddenly inferior to his neighbor. But definitely superior to me.
Si les interfaces tactiles permettent aujourd’hui une plus grande flexibilité dans le design des interfaces, elles posent souvent le problème du “toucher”, du retour physique. Je parle de cette impression qu’on a bien enfoncé le bouton, qu’on a bien tapé sur la touche du clavier.
C’est ce petit “truc” qui manque quand on tape sur le clavier de son iPhone (malgré les subterfuges de retour utilisateurs : son, lettre qui apparaît au-dessus magnifiée). Ainsi, des sociétés comme RIM ont commencé à proposer des solutions pour palier le problèmes avec le Blackberry Storm (qui “clique” lorsque vous appuyez sur l’écran).
Chris Harrison propose d’aller plus loin en recréant (sur un écran tactile), cette “sensation” de bouton physique, qui reste aujourd’hui pour nombre d’utilisateur la référence.
Bien que cela soit encore à l’état de prototype, le potentiel est bien là :
Shai Agassi, a former SAP Products and Technology President and now CEO of an Israeli startup Better Place, has a world-changing ambition: to liberate us from our dependency on oil. Better Place is designing the new electric car. The New York Times article Batteries not included describes the challenges Mr. Agassi is trying to overcome. The moment could not be chosen better: global warming, recent oil crisis, financial crisis leading to difficult times in the traditional automotive industry. And if Mr. Agassi cannot make us switch to clean cars, I don’t know who can.
One of the problems in owing an electric car is the need to recharge its batteries. But in an “aha” moment Mr. Agassi comes up with a paradigm change: “The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel.”
If you like reading novels by great Russian authors of the 19th century, you probably know that before the railroads Russia had a vast system of horse-powered coach traveling. Russia being a big country one set of horses was not enough to travel from, say, your main house in St. Petersburg and your summer house somewhere in the country. For this existed a large network of mail stations, where passenger and mail coaches could change their horses, which were state property. The horses were fed, allowed to rest and got to ride the next coach. This system was commonplace in the whole of 19th century Europe and already existed in Roman times, the changing stations known as “mutationes”.
A truly good idea never runs out of batteries.
Any interaction designer knows that there is really nothing new under the sun and that in our profession you should pick out the best from what has already been done. Now we have a very useful tool for this called, boringly, Product Planner. It’s a gallery of “flows” (workflow, user flow, interaction chart) from major successful websites for us to learn from. The flows can be used to build your own. The interface is clear, straightforward and fluid. In short, one of those tools that are a true delight. An interaction flow does not always explain why a website becomes successful, too many other factors are involved. However, a successful website “promotes” its flow, and the more successful a site is, the greater the chance the users will get used to its way of working and quickly recognize (and follow) its flow on a different website, thus making it first into a “best practice” and eventually a web standard.
