Key things in 2008:

• Joining Future Platforms; especially working with Bryan Rieger on the design for Trutap version 2.
• Making a Twitter acount. Honestly: I can’t imagine my life without Twitter. It is an invaluable tool! And after a two-year infatuation with the service, I’ve come to realise the problems with Facebook. This must signal some kind of personal digital enlightenment.
• The first half of September was pretty heavy going life changing. It was the month of dConstruct, BarCamp Brighton 3, both in Brighton, and Nokia Open Lab, which took me to Helsinki, Finland. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone in several ways: going to a strange country to an event based on an email invitation; and at BarCamp, voluntarily engaging in public speaking(!). I am really thankful for all the kind words and support for the latter, else I’d likely be scared out of ever doing it again.
• Mobile Design UK started! It’s organised by Priya Prakash, Bryan Rieger, and myself, and its aim is to build a community of mobile designers (as opposed to development and business) in the UK. Having seen the power of inspiring people in groups I realise how valuable it is to start and organise these things. Stay tuned for the next event.

I’m incredibly thankful for all the amazing opportunities I had in 2008.

Apart from SXSW Interactive in March, the new year is a blank canvas. I’ve never been to Austin before, so I’m really looking forward to that, to say nothing of the parties, panels, and talks at the event. I’ll be catching up with lots of people I met in September, and naturally, blogging the panels until my fingers bleed.

Just a recap of what I’ve been up to:

• Mobile Design UK’s inaugural event was held on Wednesday 3rd December. (Expect a brief recap post soon.) We’re extremely happy with how it went and 25 people turned up to see presentations from Nokia, Trutap, Lastminute.com Labs, and Flirtomatic. Photos are on Flickr. The next event will be in February, so watch this space! Meanwhile, subscribe to the Mobile Design UK feed.
• RCA Open Day. I’ve been following the design interactions department at the RCA for a while. They do a lot of cool stuff and I’m really glad I went: the students are quite brilliant. Check out Nelly Ben and David Benque. It is always nice to meet interesting, creative, talented, passionate people. As well as being all these things, I found that everyone I spoke to was very friendly and approachable, and patiently answered my questions.

  As for the course itself: I absolutely love everything it stands for. Some of the projects students are working on are quite out there (see James Chamber’s “Blowout” project). The RCA wants to encourage “skeptical fascination with technology”, for students to “play a part in shaping a technological future”, to “have skills for making ideas tangible”, and to “think about implications as well as applications”. Fantastic, right?

  At the end of the day, though, I felt strongly that I want to stay within the industry and continue to work on great commercial products. So for now I am resisting the siren call of academia.

Some personal milestones since moving to Brighton, in no particular order:

1. I live in Brighton.
Very fast and spontaneous decision. Zero regrets. It wasn’t easy, but I made it work: moving to a new city, jobless, and without ties or contacts, is something I thoroughly recommend.

2. Started, and actually maintained, this blog.
Scary, for lots of reasons. I’m Googleable. I’m making my thoughts tangible. Blogging has helped me to understand my job better, and it’s helped me to understand the whole industry better. Thinking, understanding, writing, sharing are all good things. I would encourage every single person to have a blog, if you can read, write, and have a brain. Just make a Wordpress blog and start writing about something that interests you. While I’m at it, I’d encourage you to use Twitter as well. Life is fleeting. Publish!!

3. Got a job doing something I love and am genuinely interested in.
Really glad I’m no longer in the shoes I was, post-graduating: flung out into the real world clutching a bit of paper. I was lucky to fall on my feet and figure things out.

4. Met some great people.
This isn’t really an ‘accomplishment’, but luck, and a side-effect of living here. Brighton is teeming with quite a number of smart, talented, inspired, inspiring, passionate people. It’s helped me to understand how important it is not to be an island, but to be part of a community. Islands don’t develop, they just get smaller. Great people help you grow.

5. Attended a BarCamp and actually did public speaking.
Kind of a big thing, for a girl who contemplated breaking her own leg to get out of it at school.

–

Some future goals:

1. Write more and write better.
But at the same time, relax about writing: I think I automatically slip into a formal essay style, which actually constrains directions I want to go.

2. Do more public speaking (BarCamps)
And become more confident about it. My first BarCamp was pretty much baptism by fire, as James Aylett put it: my audience included someone involved with BarCamp’s founding, and several other muses.

The best way to think about BarCamp is giving back: sharing what you know, in exchange for learning more about what other people know.

Ah yes, and not entirely unrelated to the rest of this post: I’m going to SXSW Interactive (March 13–19th) in Austin in 2009, and can’t wait to catch up with the great people I met at dConstruct and at Nokia Open Lab.

I’m back from the first Nokia Open Lab which was held between 11-13th September in Helsinki, Finland. I had a blast meeting excellent, passionate people from all over the world, many of whom I’ll no doubt stay in touch with. I left Helsinki with my head buzzing with ideas which had been catalysed by conversations with other participants throughout the workshops and parties.

Conversations were focused around location-based/aware services for mobile, future business models for music and entertainment, ways of motivating the community to assist environmental causes, and more. One idea I really liked was mentioned briefly by Micki Krimmel / Mickipedia. To paraphrase the idea loosely (I don’t want to claim accuracy after several glasses of champagne): when technology is useful and widely adopted, it is invisible. Invisibility signals adoption. We lose interest in it: it’s there, but we no longer notice it, because it’s part of the unexciting, essential fabric of everyday life. Invisible technology is the kind of stuff that’s been around for a while, like a telephone or a vending machine, that no longer seems like magic. It’s a human-invention that is so commonplace, that is so developed and evolved, that we can’t change it any further. It’s the kind of technology that nobody would hold an open lab about, but we’d really miss if taken away.

Everyone is paying attention to mobile at the moment because we’re just beginning to understand its full potential. It’s exciting, nascent, and new; and in combination with the internet, ubiquitous computing – a theme which Adam Greenfield presented on Saturday – is no longer exciting theory, but very real. Nokia Open Lab is an excellent way to stimulate conversations around this kind of technology, which is a real-world equivalent of what they are already doing on their blog, Nokia Conversations. I got to meet Charlie Schick, the guy behind the blog (and who is also, apparently, the most likely one to get fired for what they do). I think it’s great that they’re doing that.

Prior to the event, I was sent the Nokia E71 to try out. I’m going to give my impressions without writing a full-review: there are great reviews here and here. I was given a SIM card on arrival to test all the functions of the phone. I felt sheepish about also taking my iPhone with me on the trip. Despite having full access to email and internet on my E71, I often found myself resorting to my iPhone.

There are two reasons for this. First reason, (1), my mobile phone is the most personal technology I use, and it takes a while to adjust to using a different phone. It’s also a pain to set up email, Twitter, and so on on a different phone, and to adjust to an entirely different experience. So it’s unfair to compare them. But there’s also the other thought, (2), that the E71 is an inferior experience to the iPhone, and I was less frustrated using the latter.

Here are some of the frustrations I had with the Nokia E71:

• The icons on the home screen took up about 15% of the space. Too small!
• Using the internet on the E71 is frustrating.
• Some of the terminology is confusing. For example, what’s the difference between ‘Tools’, ‘Installations’, ‘Downloads’?

And some of the things I liked about the Nokia E71:

• The handset embodied elegance. It’s possibly the most physically beautiful mobile phone I’ve seen, and I really wanted to like its user experience, too.
• The tactile QWERTY keyboard.
• The notification light on the home button: a nice touch.

If there’s a Nokia phone I like most, it’s the N95. The experience is superior to the E71 – perhaps the screen orientation of the N95 (which is portrait, not landscape) has something to do with that.

I really admire Nokia for holding this event. My view is that times are changing: Nokia must re-address their products from the point of view that they’re now considering Apple, Google, and Microsoft as their competitors. Some radical change must happen. I think they know this, too, which is why the Nokia Open Lab happened. Flying 35 bloggers/social media types from around the world to Helsinki for conversational workshops? Pretty radical, if you ask me … and symptomatic of change, forum, progress!

Just as things started getting really interesting the event was over, and I was on the plane to London on Saturday evening. If Nokia holds an event like this in the future (and I really hope they do, again, next year), I’d suggest that it be a day longer. It’d also be good to present ideas individually, in perhaps more of a BarCamp-like setup. More time, and more opportunity to focus on a topic, and more opportunities for every attendee to really add value to the event, would make it even better. So, to make it better: longer. More specialised focus on topics. More practical, tactile ways to add value.

So, thank you Nokia and WOMWorld for a fantastic few days in Finland! I’ll be putting photos on Flickr soon.