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This stencil contains reusable shapes and elements for sketching wireframes or wireframing sketches whatever you prefer. This was done after realising that the sketch tools out there where quite closed in the elements they have and also its quite difficult to share your sketches digitally. You probably know what I am talking about. Enjoy

“Antony’s artworks open up dream landscapes: often fragmentary in appearance, these images map his dreams and liminal states; polymorphic realms give way to indicated spirits; pen marks and scratches conjure archetypes and invite conscious and unconscious visions to emerge.”

All inviting so far. Next thing to do find the gallery opening times. After not being able to get that information from the site a call will clear the situation. After that I discovered that the Gallery was closed on Sundays. Due to the uncertainty of my location my interlocutor kindly ask me if I wanted the pictures of the exhibition to be sent to my phone. I was amazed and perplexed. Not having the opportunity to go to the exhibition having the pictures in the mobile phone will be definitively a way of seeing the exhibition in miniatures. So I said no.

This attempt has something of paradoxical and still today makes me think about it. From one side reflects the current mobile culture, always-on, everywhere you go, right now. The transference of existent communication needs and practices seems obvious - but it isn’t. On the other side as well as a very unexpected approach to that kind of content and service delivery could be a very effective form of distribution throughout highly connected individuals.

Receiving the art pictures in the mobile phone touches one of the common attempts of transferring existing content to another platform as well as transfering the same mindset, interaction and capacities.  In the case of the Mobile phone it means the miniaturization of desktop metaphors, methods and tools to interact with content on another device. the problems are in purpose, usage and form of interaction that those platforms don’t share. Having the exhibition pictures and seeing them is actually possible but that doesn’t make it a good experience at all.

But there is always the possibility of sucess for such idea. Receiving those art pictures in a highly connected individuals phone could mean viral distribution and a form of social recommendation for connections in the search for something to do/see in London. Systems like Brightkite would let that happen.

Brightkite uses friending, public feeds filtered by location and search possibilities to discover what people are sharing while on the move. Till know as been used to share interesting things people find wherever they are than as a recommendation system for the city. Any application with this possibilities could be attractive for brands to try reach their audiences and in the case of art galleries to reach those tourists who might want to visit an exhibition or attend an event using their mobile phones right from where they are.

Back from the use8 conference on the new frontiers of social media I was curious about Ken Thompson research into turning virtual business teams to work in a more effective way based on group patterns learned from nature - bioteams.

The problems that lead to this research also found in the bioteams manifesto encompass: a) technology adoption issues b) lack of effective communication approaches c) reliance on old traditional work methods d) absence of strong team motivation e) effective cooperative workflows.

The fundamental question that seems to support this research is the recognition on what teams are, between the mechanical approach where teams are predictable and controllable behaving “more like clocks or engines that are assigned to specific tasks and assignments” and “the open recognition of the dynamic and living nature of the team itself as a separate entity from that of its individual members”. As Thomson argues the “Interpretation of the team as a whole, living entity, allows a more insightful interpretation of the most efficient courses of team action.”

“The team is in itself a super-organism and as such it needs to be treated in ways that enhance and support its complex and interconnected nature. If you can see the team as a whole and not as the mere aggregation of the individual parts that make it up, you can discover how much more productive, reliable and efficient a virtual team can be.”

His concept of bioteaming “consists of the research, mapping and identification of such key behavioural traits from nature’s most effective biological-teams and in their re-definition within the context of new human-based business team workflows.” Bioteams have 4 common behaviours:

Any group member can take the lead - the right leader for the right task at the right time.
Pheromone-style Short messaging - Nature’s groups use short instant messages Instantly broadcast & received “in situ”
Small is Beautiful & Big is Powerful - Natures teams blend large group & small group dynamic
Reach the ‘many’ through the ‘few’ - Nature’s networks are clustered. Members have extreme connectivity. Some group members have many more connections than the average and provide very effective channels for engaging the whole group
Ken’s Presentation was mainly targeting the Swarmteams system where we could actually try it during the presentation. Swarmteams was designed to promote bioteams principles in terms of communicating information not orders, Mobilise everyone to look for group threats and opportunities, achieve accountability through transparency not permission, provide 24*7 instant “in-situ” message hotlines for all team members, treat external partners as fully trusted team members and nurture the team’s internal and external networks and connections.

The main functionality of this system, one knows all know, ask the network, instant engagement and community forwarding can also be found in many other systems (thinking in Twitter off course) but perhaps not with the enphasis on how effective a tool is to group coordination and engagement with specific goals in mind. This principles are in fact a great form of supporting campaigns and actions based groups.

More info on Swarmteams and bioteams at Bumble bee.

Rather than replacing cash and coin, or arriving at one new general-purpose form of money, these changes in ICTs and multiple agendas for innovation in money are accelerating its pluralization. Quasi-moneys and para-currencies operate alongside bank-based electronic moneys as well as telecommunications-based currencies that may have only a tenuous or indirect link to state-issued legal tender. These multiple currencies commingle in people’s wallets, restructuring people’s experience of money as well as their everyday practices of budgeting and accounting.

Not that money is an interesting subject but the experience of earning, using and loosing money without seeing it is the existing reality. In Japan paying a burguer with a mobile phone is already in use: “Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo is teaming up with McDonalds to offer electronic payments and special promotions for mobile users.” Several behaviors will emerge from the use of the mobile to pay for goods. Plastic money is in this sense substituted by a form of personal connection to friends, family, acquaintances and the rest of the world in the daily coordination. And this in fact will produce change.

Workshop page

In the beginning of a project prototypes are useful to bring together the exploration of concepts with the definition of the system’s behavior. Working with low fidelity prototypes at this stage is a way of empathically understanding a user’s experience of a specific system; in terms of service design it means prototyping the touchpoints so to understand the user journey (or customer experience, if you prefer) and provide a tangible view on what is going to happen. In the case of starting production design it means prototyping existing ideas and designs, test, gather feedback and improve.

Low fidelity prototypes are relevant at the beginning of a project when many ideas or directions need to be tested and discussed. For the team this is an opportunity to experiment with ideas by making them tangible and for the client to have a clear understanding of what the product is going to be right from the early stages.

Prototypes are as much about the solution as they are about the problem. Prototyping a possible solution reflects one’s existent knowledge of the problem. As prototypes start to be tested the problem unfolds and the team becomes more informed about what to think about and the brief to design to. In this learning by doing practice - creating, testing and modifying - prototypes are a resourceful way to gather requirements and inform the next design iteration.

At another level, prototyping is a useful way of working around a user’s mental model and the mental model implicit in the designs. Don Norman elaborates on mental models in the “Design of Everyday Things” as a way to understand how users develop an idea of how a given system works, by what it affords to, what are the patterns of use, what is the outcome of actions, where to go next while doing a specific task.

Alternatively, sketching is also a common approach but in terms of defining the user experience different outcomes will arise in the design process from using sketches or low fidelity prototypes. Bill Buxton refers to this, saying: sketches present questions, prototypes provide answers; sketches suggest, prototypes describe; sketches explore, prototypes refine; sketches propose, prototypes test; sketches provoke, a prototype resolves.

also posted here

designarama, originally uploaded by dpereira.

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