I joined Future Platforms in March. It’s a lot of fun working for a small, innovative, mobile-focused software company, and I’m learning a lot, especially from Bryan Rieger. Amongst other things, I’m learning about prototyping, wireframing, project planning, working with clients. I’m hoping that I’ll get a chance to master Flash, and perhaps some other new skills: a perk, for me, is having one day every two weeks (or half a day every week) to take time out to learn what I want, or work on an independent project.

The company is small: at the moment there’s about 10 of us. As you might expect, the atmosphere (the pressure of completing client work to deadline notwithstanding) is very relaxed. Coffee, beanbags, Nabaztag bunnies abound (bunny count: 3)!

It goes without saying, but I really like working with tech-savvy early adopters. Quite a few of my coworkers are on Twitter, and it is a great way to keep in touch during work.

I hadn’t always been interested in mobile. In fact, I approached the sole mobile project I did during my degree snootily, thinking it wouldn’t be as fun as designing, well… something larger.

But I really enjoyed it. From a design point of view, designing for a mobile screen is challenging and interesting. Designing for interaction forces the designer into uncharted territory, away from the convention of, for example, book design (which hasn’t changed, much, since the first manuscripts were painstakingly penned by scribes).

Designing a complex application for a tiny screen, and for screens of variable sizes on different handsets, is a challenging problem to solve. It involves designing for a sequence of events, or even a narrative. Like good writing that leads the reader through a narrative, good application design should likewise be an interesting, seamless, and intuitive experience. A bad application experience, like bad writing, really stands out: you might put the book down, and you might exit the application.

Apart from the attraction of working out complex design problems, a big draw to mobile, for me, is the momentum growing around the mobile web. Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted in a recent interview that “mobile will be a larger business than the PC-Web”. Working in an industry which is undergoing so many changes is exciting, and there are many people keen to push the limits of mobile technology further.

The iPhone impressed me when it debuted in the UK. Before that, a friend showed me mobile maps, which I thought were brilliant. I have always disliked cumbersome paper maps, and love that we can now pack the whole world into our phones. Even better, we can track our location automatically using GPS. Locomatrix, one of Future Platforms’ projects, is doing some very cool stuff with gaming and GPS, and is showing that gaming can be brought back into the real world.

Every project I’ve worked on so far has held different challenges, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next project will teach me.