Time moves on

196 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes and 11 seconds
until my Churchill Trip - 11th May - 13th July 2012
Perth>SF>Seattle>Austin>NY>Boston>London> Heidelberg >Salzburg>Vienna>Singapore>Perth

Time keeps moving

Its always intresting to see how time seems to be slow when you are waiting, and then you get going and time seems to spead up. I started blogging about my trip at the 294 days point as so I am about to trip over the first 100 days. In that time I have secured my locations of where I am going and a number of good contacts to visit and talk with. That exercise is still progressing and become more interesting each day as I discover other opportunities.

My next milestone comes from my army days when we counted down from 100 days. That was during my time at the Army Apprentice School of Music. That point was referred to as "Crab Night" and we would go all around town painting pictures of a crab with a number in it which would represent our years intake. Mine at that time was 29th, the goal was to get the image in the most unusal spot. We I won't be doing that but maybe put one up on this blog at the 100 day point, which will be  the 1st Feb 2012.

As time moves on I am becoming more focused on what it is I hope to achieve. I have now brought it down to looking at the issue of interface design and usability from four angles. They are:

1. The user perspective: How they learn? What is good and bad in usability? What indicates to a user good usability?
2. The Developer: How does a developer consider usability? What are they trying to achieve? Is usability a consideration within the process of usability? Are they able to separate their passion to develop and take a user perspective in their work?
3. Manufacturers: How do they address this issue in their design? Is this a marketing issue or and engineering issue? Who defines the direction with usability? How is this defined?
4. Business: How do we re-engage business to be involved with the conversation of usability at the start of a project? Does business see a need or value? Why has business advocated this responsibility? Have they or is it a matter of an inability to communicate their needs? What can we do to engage and show the value to a business in being involved at the start and not complaining at the end?

These are my focus and I dare say I will not find all the answers but at lease I will be able to start the conversation towards a better user centric approach to the use of technology in general and specifically to mobile technology.

The other question which is highlighted with a recent patent awarded to Apple is should functional design beable to be patented? will this become an inhibitor to innovation? Many of the things we use today are built on the past.

A simple example is the mouse. Invented Dr Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute.

Dr Douglas Engelbart and the first mouse

Future Design Mouse

Imagine if that was patented to the extent that it stopped anyone from building and improving on it. These two mouse are basically the same. They plot on a flat screen the X ,Y coordinates of a cursor to a person to engage programs on a screen.

The other area is tablet computers and boy have they come a longway.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Star Trek the Original

Star Trek Next Generation

There is Kirk way back in about 1966-67 using a tablet computer with a pen device. Then Picard on Next Generation using quite a thin tablet. All well before the release of some of todays computer companies offering in this space. Admitidly they are only props but I dare say they were the seeds to some of the ideas that are presented today.

Where will it go, well you only need to look at movies like the Minority Report and Avitar. Then look at what Corning are doing. A good example can be seen on youtube, a video called the Day Made in Glass. Another good video is Microsoft's Surface 2 technology this is the future and it is on the door step of tomorrow. Only last year at CES Samsung display their Amoled transparent display technology.

To take it to the n'th degree check out the Mozilla Seabird Concept Phone. This is a concept but all of the technology is available today. So it is just a mater of time.

Transparent displays and devices that are aware of other devices to then transfer content. Recently a number of companies have released the bump technology to transfer between devices and MIT presented their research on transparent batteries so lots are on their way. Let hope this line of patent wars will not slow down innovation to see the world from one perspective. Its interesting to see the history of companies and where they have come from. The battles againt big corporates while they were small and the things they did to get where they are now, and to see that they are now the big corporates defending themselves and battling the small startup of the future. As they always say what comes around goes around.