As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Bryan Rieger has launched Mobile Design UK along with Priya Prakash.

Bryan has asked me to be involved too (yay!), so I’ll be writing up the first event on December 3rd at the offices of Flirtomatic in London. See full details below (or view the original post here):

“We’re happy to announce the details for the first Mobile Design UK event scheduled for Wednesday December 3rd, 2008 at the Flirtomatic offices on Great Marlborough Street. The doors will open at 6:30 and we’re aiming to get things underway by 7:00pm.

Flirtomatic
Europa House, 2nd floor
54 Great Marlborough St, London
[ view map ]

Seeing as this is our first meeting we’ve opted to keep things very casual and would like to take the opportunity to discuss what people would like to see from Mobile Design UK going forward and select a few volunteers to help ensure things do in-fact move in that direction.

That said, we have no intention of devoting an entire evening to bureaucracy and chit-chat and would like to kick things off with a few spectacular (no pressure) presentations by Mathias Dahlstrom from LastMinute.com Labs, Ali Driver from trutap and Jaseung Chang from Flirtomatic. If you’d like to present (refer to this happened… for guidelines) at a future Mobile Design UK event please get in touch either via comments on this site or the Yahoo Group.

After the meeting we’re likely to head out to The Coach and Horses for drinks nearby - if anybody has any other recommendations please drop and email to the list.

As we’ve actually had a much bigger response to Mobile Design UK than originally expected we’re going to have to ask those who are planning to attend to put their names on the sign-up list via the Yahoo Group - and we may have to either limit attendance or make other arrangements depending on the actual number of people planning to attend.

Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank Priya Prakash and the entire team at Flirtomatic for providing us with such a fabulous location.

To register for the event please sign-up at the Yahoo Group via the following link:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mobiledesign-uk/database?method=addRecord&tbl=1

Mobile Design UK is proudly sponsored by Flirtomatic and Yiibu.”

Hope to see you there!

I’m toying with the idea of “visual culture” of software. We have established basic affordances in software (the desktop metaphor) that haven’t changed vastly since the Graphic User Interface (GUI) was invented at Xerox PARC. Putting files into folders is something everybody understands: it’s intuitive and uses a metaphor we are all familiar with. The trend, or the noble aim, is to make software even more human, and that will be next achieved through multi-touch technology. Physically interacting with software is about as intuitive as we can get without making computers part of our brains. Multi-touch removes the barrier of using a pointing device to manipulate software.

If there is a visual culture of software, it is weird, meta, flexible, and subjective because of our power to control it, and because of the nature of how we’re viewing it. Nothing is really objective. (Sidenote: one could argue that nothing is objective anyway, as we’re using devices to view software through the frame of our own devices, our bodies, in a challenging mise en abyme of faulty hardware.)

With content aggregation, visual culture is superfluous. For example I read most blogs in my reader, where the content is taken out of visual context of the website it was originally published in. In print, content is inseparable from form. Tear up the paper pages of a book and you lose the content too, but even if you mis-link a stylesheet to an XHTML document you can still, hopefully, view the content.

The computer is just another layer of experience. Devices render websites or a programs in different ways, though designers strive to make the experience the same across devices. Another example of viewing flexibility: most software allows users to customize the placement of the elements (e.g. browser icons) if not the whole look and feel of the thing (i.e. skins, and alternative website stylesheets).

Don’t worry, this blog isn’t dead – just sleeping. I have no WiFi in my new home yet, which isn’t quite an excuse for not updating. I took a week-long break to move into my new flat, and have been amiss from most other social things too – with the exception of Playful last Friday. (See Roo Reynold’s excellent notes here.)

I’m very excited about version 2 of Trutap (keep an eye open for the launch announcement). Trutap has been taking up most of my time at Future Platforms since I joined in March. The new version was demoed this morning in the office at Future Platforms, and it’s looking great. It’s a great feeling to see all of our collaborative hard work pay off! Trutap has been a great project to work on, and is a real example of synthesis of content and digital tools. I learned a lot about visual design and interaction design in the process. I will write more about this later.

Apart from Trutap, here are other things occupying my mind and time:

• Writing. I’ve been thinking up possible proposals to submit to Eye Magazine. Writing is something I love doing and it has always been one of my ambitions. There was also a culture for writing about design at Reading University, and practitioners are also expected to be able to write and research: something I regard highly.
• Language. Stephen Fry wrote this great, meandering blessay on language, which got me thinking. I loved the introduction of translation: “English (Pirate)” on Facebook, which made me wonder if language used online is a little too sterile. Stephen makes excellent points. I’m not sure what my point is yet, but I’ll come back to it…
• Mobile design. Bryan Rieger, who I worked with at Future Platforms, and is now at Yiibu, has just launched Mobile Design UK. The aim: to be an “open forum for UK designers working with mobile technologies to share knowledge, encourage exploration of technologies, tools and ideas, and showcase the UK as an influential hub of mobile design to the world.” Exciting stuff, and I’m looking forward to being involved. If you’re a mobile designer in the UK, you should be involved, too!

Just a brief note: I’ll be cross-posting some posts to Glider Gun, which is a brand-new blog written by the dazzling cast of Future Platforms. The blog launched yesterday. We’re named after a pattern on Conway’s Game of Life: Gosper’s Glider Gun (see a longer explanation here).

Go and check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed!