Some exercises of Chinese writing

It’s my forth lesson of Chinese but I am already very excited about this language. Even if I wouldn’t be able to ask for help in Beijing, I learnt how to say basic stuff: 我是 Pietro!
The thing that really impressed me is how structured is the writing: there is a precise order of the strokes and you have to know it in order to write complex signs. Since I am left-handed I am having some troubles with it (I tend to write with a inverse path) but I could appreciate how this language has been thought and designed: every stroke has it own turn and combines perfectly with the others in a sort of chain of movements.

I have created a Google Spreadsheet and I am crowdsourcing a list of mobile situation i.e. various examples of contexts + activities in which mobile design has a key role. The aim of this operation is to give and get inspiration to mobile designers. Knowing the context and the activities, in fact, is a good starting point and it’s very inspiring t00!

You can see it here: list of mobile situations. If the experiment works I will open it to more people

As they taught me at  La Sapienza one of the billions of model of communication is based on sharing values, cultures, point of views. I like this idea of it because it implies that both of the interlocutors put part of their background in the middle, on the stage of a critical and hopefully constructive comparison of things.

Business is global and the comparison between different cultures it’s not just a matter of passionate anthropologists anymore. On the other side, it is not possible to have a personal expert that gives advices on the go when different parts are communicating to find an agreement.

A while ago I had an interesting idea with some of my former university colleagues (namely Adam Bognar, Andrew Simpson and Layda Gongora): a table designed to making the closure of an agreement evident to the talking parts. Let’s suppose that the table is able to analyse what it is being said and compare different talkings in order to calculate a degree of agreement between them. Let’s also imagine that the table would lengthen if the parts do not agree on the topic and that it would shorten and draw up them as they become closer to an end.

The corrispondence between situation, interaction and the very physical modification of the interface has something spectacular. Especially because of the little effort the table asks when the situation is channging (moving your own position back and forth).

I have been trying the whole 2008 to receive a WIRED issue from the US and now that they sent me the first (January 2009 – Wired, your subscription service for international customers really sucks!), Wired Italia first issue out!

I brought it with me at work and after a while we noticed that it was full of nice pictures of big faces. And I remembered of how cool it to make fake portraits and playing with perspective. Click on the pic to see more!

I have never been such a mobile guy, mainly for two reasons. The first that I am born in Italy, a country where mobile devices are highly diffused (we are one of the most important market in Europe) and, paradoxally, the infrastructures that should support them suck. And I am not taking into account the network operator competition that only recently has seen the entrance of the virtual ones).

The second reason is that mobile has always been associated to limited and essential. Small display, tiny keypads, limited amount of memory made mobile devices the perfect device to accomplish simple but yet important tasks: calling., text messaing and taking pictures. The advent of “smartphones” had the consequence of pulling me even further away. With smartphones my idea of mobile devices just turned into platforms stuffed with buggy applications that offered everything but working interactions or, better, interfaces. Even though Symbian and Windows mobile have changed mobile world a lot, they haven’t made the real difference: the feeling was that the PC had been transferred on a different platform that was even more uncomfortable: why? For years, mobile phones have tried to emulate the personal computer world without any success. They were just adopting things that worked nicely on a desktop computer but could not work on a mobile platform.

Moreover, there were other two important factors being underevaluated in designing mobile applications (and that probably still are): context and users.

Read all»