I recently lost my mobile phone. It’s the first time I’ve ever lost my phone. I haven’t replaced it yet, because I’m intending to get an iPhone when it comes out next month. Losing my phone made me realise how accustomed I am to having it with me. Payphone boxes are useless to me: I don’t know most useful numbers. My mobile phone memorized phone numbers for me, so I never had to.

I feel vulnerable without my mobile phone. If I planned to meet a friend, and something came up, I could re-plan the meeting using my phone. Organizing, re-organizing meetings on the move is really useful. Without a phone on me, I’ve had to fall back on careful planning before I leave the house.

My dependence on my phone reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s fictional creation, Molloy, who is so dilapidated that he can’t move without the aid of a bicycle. Physical dilapidation the least of his problems. He can’t remember his name, if his mother is really his mother, or if his bicycle is really his bicycle. His dependence on technology to move around led the critic Hugh Kenner to describe Molloy as a Cartesian centaur: half man, half bicycle.

(When Molloy loses his bicycle later in the novel, he uses his crutch as a grapnel to crawl through a forest on his belly: again, he is reliant on tools.)

We have grown so dependent on our phones that we notice how helpless and incapacitated we feel when, say, the battery runs out, or we lose them. The mobile phone is an extension of our bodies. Like Molloy, we are Cartesian centaurs: the technological component makes up half of ourselves.

The mobile phone is different from most media because it is so personal. They are digital approximations of identity. The address book is a digital approximation of the people we know. It is highly personal: the handset we choose conveys personality, status, wealth, and taste; we can customise theme, wallpaper, fonts. Most important to us is that it helps us connect with the world.

Like Molloy who depends on his bicycle in order to move around, we depend on our phones to help us feel connected to the world.

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.

Tim Berners-Lee says the web is in its infancy. We have only just begun to see how the internet is being used to overcome distance, share information, and connect people together. The future web, Sir Tim says, will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.

Whilst desktop and laptop computers have defined how we experience the web, I believe that the benefit of the web is best when you can use it anywhere. McGuire’s law is that the value of any product or service increases with its mobility.

So, the mobile web…

Mowser

In many ways, I think Mowser was a great idea. I also think that in many ways, Mowser missed the point. This is aknowledged by its creator, Russell Beattie, in his leaving letter, which was widely and wildly misinterpreted after it was published. Beattie’s leaving note, far from being doctor’s autopsy notes for the mobile web, is actually full of vision and hope for what the mobile web should be like.

In a way, it heralds the death of a certain kind of aenemic mobile web, and one we didn’t want in the first place. Mowser’s failure, although sad, should help to guide others working in the shaping the future of the mobile web:

It’s not the mobile web, it’s the web…?

The mobile web should exist as a term. But it should not refer to a different web. We can’t deny that how we access and use the “mobile” web is different from how we might use it at home. This does not refer just to the device that the web is viewed on; it refers also to what we use the web for.

We need to make mobile web experiences better. To do this, we need to try and identify how we use the web outside of our homes; and how this is different from how we use the web inside of our homes. E.g., we might not want to do intensive research whilst out shopping; but at home, we might meticulously research and compare reviews for a restaurant.

Despite this, we cannot, and definitely should not, separate the web we view on our laptop from the web we view on our mobile device. Tim Berners-Lee is vehemently opposed to .mobi domain names for this reason:

I’ve just accepted a job offer at Future Platforms, a mobile design company, which I’m very excited about. I first met Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger at a Wired Sussex event when I first moved to Brighton, and I was delighted to be invited to an interview a few weeks ago.

As mobile has started to explore the spectrum of possibility, I have become increasingly interested in it. A mobile phone no longer does just 1 or 2 things. It does not even do 10 things, or 20 things. It does as many things as you can imagine and build. A mobile phone that can access web content and has a flexible and inviting platform for developers is unlimited.

One of the reasons I’ve been interested in mobile design is because it is a restricted format. I like restrictions because they are challenges you have to get around; in a way, restrictions are helpful guides. In the current state of play, anything a designer makes for a mobile device has to fit a small screen with a limited colour resolution. One of my projects in my final year at Reading University involved designing for mobile: specifically, I had to research routes from airports Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and then condense the route into a sequence of images which would guide a student from the airport to Reading station. You can see part of the project here.

Though new devices are bringing users richer experiences, the nature of the device, which is smaller than our laptop and desktop screens, can’t compare. The content needs to be designed differently. Even the iPhone, which in my opinion gives mobile users the best experience available right now, isn’t perfect: anything which requires tapping and zooming isn’t optimised in the first place. It’ll be very interesting to see the developments in this field in the next few years, and I’m very excited to have an opportunity to work in this field now.