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.

I’m currently obsessed with the idea of exposure. That is, the emotional and intellectual exposure that blogging requires. Unless I really wanted to strip this blog down, I couldn’t really keep me out of it.

Still, it’s strange to me that blogs are compared often to diaries. I think they’re more similar to letters: directed outward to another person, writing and sending a letter is an extroverted act. A diary is a record of private reflection: it’s introverted, meant for the self.

So blogs are public letters, more than they are diaries, and they have the potential to be a volley of communication.

Trouble arises when private, diary-like blog posts are published for everybody to read. This arises in Penelope Trunk’s recent interesting blog post, which discusses the motivation behind blogging and Emily Gould’s fascinating story of writing for Gawker — another case study of “internet fame”. Note: needs a free NYT account).

When blogging for the public, what’s up for grabs? Personal relationships, evidently… if you want to risk that.

I’d say that a good blog is a mix of extroversion and introversion, or a balance of the public and filtered with the private and personal: combining the balance and veneer of a letter with the insight of a private journal.

On a dead serious note, blogging has been helpful to get over my ego. Self-consciousness and fear of error are the biggest enemies of action. In deciding to blog, I decided I’d rather do something and make certain mistakes, rather than not do it at all.

It was easy enough to do once I realised how many blogs there are out there (it’s such a huge number I won’t dare quote it, and the number is growing all the time). My blog is so tiny.

The gradual process of relaxing, being unafraid to make mistakes (they are just natural and human, after all), has freed up so much potential. Now I take myself less seriously, I take criticism less seriously.

Writing for an audience is scary, even if the audience is invisible (and tiny). For me, it was a battle between the desire to publish and the desire for privacy and non-presence. It might be true that bloggers are egotists, but first they were brave when they put their ego aside to press “publish”.

So it didn’t take long for me to make a decision (about 5 minutes after posting the speculative entry). This blog is now part of the Brazen Careerist blog network.

I couldn’t really imagine not taking advantage of this, as I’ve followed the community for a while, and have been consciously and unconsciously influenced by reading the posts. I think that my blog is worth more in a context of other blogs, just like any ideas I have are worth more in context of other ideas — and I’m really glad to have a chance to contribute advice about the design industry.

I just discovered Adaptive Path’s blog, which has some really good stuff. Chiara Fox wrote a post on The 5 Senses on Twitter, and discovered (through Twist) that it’s sight that is reported more often than the other human senses on Twitter.

That’s so strange to me. It’s understandable not everyone wants to report the texture of their sandwich, or the smell in their office. Hearing and seeing, if not smelling and touching, are quite central to interesting human experiences that other people can relate to, so I would’ve expected they’d be closely correlated on a graph.

Perhaps it’s a translation problem: Twitter slang includes “OH” which stands for “overheard”. So the word “OH” would be more common than “hear”.

So here’s the original graph showing a comparison of “smell, taste, see, hear, touch”, and here’s a graph showing “hear” replaced with “OH”. Considerably closer. I wonder if there’s slang for the other senses reported on Twitter? Here’s taste replaced with lunch.