Serendipity Book

Impossible is nothing

This unintentionally funny video CV was sent to UBS by a Yale student called Aleksay Vayner as an application for a job as an investment banker.

You may be suprised to learn that he didn't get the position. It's so bad that you instantly assume it is a Sacha Baron Cohen style send up but a number of Yale students have sworn blind that it is for real.

More here and here.

Cadillac Since 1902

New work on Cadillac from Modernista!

Some controversy about plagiarism on that endline though it seems.

Orange Predicts a Dark Future

Orange have published an interesting if somewhat dystopic vision of the future in partnership with the Henley Centre / Headlight Vision.

Called The Way to Work (.pdf), the report explores four potential scenarios for the way in which technology will have impacted on organisations by the year 2016.

The four scenarios emerged from exploring the crossing of two "axes of uncertainty": the nature of working relations and the control of data.

The four scenarios are:

1) Disciples of the Cloud
2) Mutual Worlds
3) Electronic Cottages
4) Replicants

Go read it.

Love The Maccabees

Spent a bit of my evening trying to hear a bit of new music on MTV2. My fave was a track by a band from Brighton called The Maccabees. Think The Undertones crossed with Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys...

The song is called Latchmere and it's an ode to a swimming pool.

Love the lyrics, especially ...

"Came out of the changing room and absolutely sod all had changed."

Fantastic Animation: Mr City Men

Check this series of animations out. They are all character animations set against cityscapes which have been created by a student by the name of Eric Lerner. Enjoy. Oh and meet Mr Deja Vu ...

A lost future?

I often find myself mourning the magical urban future that I felt I was promised as a child.

You know the one: Cars that fly over houses. Monorails. Streets in the sky. Bold colours. Curved white concrete buildings. Space travel.

Y'see I was always a sucker for Walt Disney (pictured above at the opening of Disneyland in 1957) and his Tomorrowland vision of the future. I once even recreated Walt's Autopia (below) in my sandpit with Corgi cars and LEGO trees! I finally got to ride on the (actually rather sedate) Autopia ride myself in 1980 at Disneyland and I wasn't disappointed.

 

Professional Staredown

Take a look at this trailer for a free and fascinating feature-length documentary film called Unflinching Triumph about the professional sport of staring!

It reminds me of a training course I went on recently where we were told to pair off and stare at each other for 10 minutes without laughing or flinching to built up our awareness of the importance of eye contact in pitches! Try it, it's really weird.

Dancing Liquid Jelly Babies - a Science Experiment

Loving this Japanese TV science experiment. Forget Coke & Mentos, try creating jumping and dancing Jelly Babies on the surface of a liquid using sound waves...

Making mobile phones simpler

Sadly, most mobile phone user interfaces are sub par. Their designers are faced with the challenge of squeezing ever-increasing levels of functionality into ever-smaller devices.

I would argue that frustration with the user interface is the main reason for the recent backlash against the complexity of these devices. Anecdotally it seems that many people, and not just luddites, are now considering trading down to devices which offer less functionality, arguing that they do not need the features that they are being offered.

In a recent critique of the increasing complexity of mobile phones in the International Herald Tribue, Alice Rawsthorne commented:

Styling is only part of cellphone design, but is, or should be, the easiest bit to get right. Designing the software with which we use the phone - the user interface, as the industry calls it - is more difficult. As bandwidth has expanded and new types of network, like Bluetooth and WiFi, have emerged, the cellphone has been transformed from a phone and phone book, into a multifunctional mobile computer.

No one could fault cellphone manufacturers for the zest with which they have embraced these changes. But by redesigning their software to incorporate each new function on a piecemeal basis within the same small box, many companies have ended up with incoherent user interfaces. That's why cellphones can seem difficult to use, and why you have to relearn how to perform basic tasks whenever you buy a new one.

Samsung (a client of ours) tried to solve this dilemma in their recent E900 slider phone (right) by changing the functions of each of the buttons depending on the mode  (call, camera, music player) that the phone is in. The clever bit is that the images on the buttons actually change depending on whether the user wants to take a picture, make a call or listen to music. This dramatically simplifies the user interface because it reduces the overall number of buttons they need to use.

Whilst many manufacturers have been offering context-specific and even customisable menus in their user interfaces few have been able to properly integrate this into the design of the device in the way that Samsung has with the E900. I am convinced this is because in many companies the operating systems are developed independently of the phones - either in a separate corporate silo or by external designers. Where the iPod succeeded was in being able to deliver a simple user experience via the tight integration of UI and hardware.

Another company that appears to be thinking along the right lines is BenQ whose Black Box User Interface Communication concept (left) picked up a prize at the IF Design Awards in China this year. As you can see, the BenQ concept has no buttons. The entire surface is a dynamic context-specific touch screen. In many ways this is similar to the way a PDA touch screen menu works. Unlike a PDA however, the user interface appears to be designed around specific functions to ensure that the user experience is optimised.

Given all the rumours about Apple's iPhone, their multiple touch screen patents and their partnerships with Asian manufacturers along with the poor performance of the BenQ brand globally, I wonder if this might not be the kind of leap in UI and hardware design that will arrive one day under the Apple brand instead?

Or maybe we should be looking to the KDDI Corporation in Japan whose R&D has provided a number of interesting concepts this year including the Neon (right) from Naoto Fukasawa which offers a similar buttonless contect-specific dynamic interface.

What all of these concepts have in common is that they are trying to offer simplicity in user experience whilst continuing to offer the complex functionality that many of us would like to make use of.

Permission to produce complex communications

Great post from Jason Oke of Leo Burnett Toronto on the subject of media-neutral planning which builds on the model that Naked presented at the APG Battle of Big Thinking.

Jason presents a critique of how media neutral planning is currently being executed (taking a communications idea and trying to shoe-horn it into multiple media vehicles). His dismissal of media neutral planning as media-neutered made me smile.

He discusses the Naked transmedia planning approach and moves on to focus on ways of building detail and interest into individual executions in a way that tries to prevent them being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

It's all good stuff and I love the way his model gives us permission to build complexity into communications.