iancollingwood

The death of commitment. Or is it responsibility?

So several million people failed to make it into work yesterday after the snow. And the newspapers are whipping it up into a big, juicy "Broken Britain" story for their own, rather obscure, reasons. The blame, apparently, seems to be falling mainly on the local authorities. Or is it the the bus companies? Or the tube? Or Transport for London? Or Boris? Or his health and safety advisor?
 
But what about looking at ourselves? People seemed to think that what happened yesterday was some kind of crisis. Some people failed to make it into work, even though they lived within walking distance of their offices. Some people called 999 because they couldn't start their cars. At first, I thought this was because most people actually couldn't care less about their jobs and so look at the first hint of an excuse for not turning up as something to be grabbed with both hands. (The number of people who stay home at the slightest sore throat is testament to this). 
 
But then I started to wonder if what we're seeing is something else - something more than a simple lack of commitment, depressing though that is. I wonder if, really, what we're seeing is a complete lack of any kind of personal responsiblity or commitment to overcoming anything that might be difficult. Anything that might require a little effort. It's also manifested in the converse - a refusal to deny ourselves anything that might possibly cause us to miss out on indulging our desires.
 
It reminds me a lot of the reaction to the financial crisis. The papers and media were full of finger-pointing. Who's to blame? Is it Gordon Brown? The regulators? The banks? The hedge funds? The traders? The property developers? The estate agents?
 
What about us? What about the people who actually took the loans? Who signed up to interest only mortgages far bigger than they could realistically afford to service? And not just once, but over and over, as they remortgaged their houses again and again and spent the proceeds? What about the people who made more from the rise in the value of their homes than they did from their wages, and instead of saving, just blew it on gadgets and holidays? How can these people blame anyone else when it all went wrong?
Did they really believe that this could go on forever?  Surely anyone stupid enough to believe in an endless boom should have been denied a mortgage on the grounds of mental incapacity. And, of course, anyone who didn't believe it could go on forever, but bought into it anyway, is as surely guilty of speculation and short-term greed as any Maserati-driving hedge-fund guru. The only difference is that the guru is more honest and more competent in attaining his goals.
 
So next time we blame the government, or the politicians, or the banks, let's try being grownups for a change, and work out how much we, ourselves, contributed to the problem.

Yesterday

Grassroots innovation at DirectGov

This is interesting... it seems that DirectGov are opening up their various information feeds so that developers and nerds can mash 'em up into new stuff.

This is a fascinating (and I have to say, far-sighted and laudable) ambition. Pretty radical for Gordon Brown, too, given his traditional lack of anything approaching openness.
 
I can imagine some very interesting ideas, but I wonder how much of this will be constrained by the format of content and the metadata attached to it. I'm not familiar enough with the kind of information and data that DirectGov might churn out, but I intend to start looking more closely.
 
It would be good to apply some proper user-centred innovation to this, rather than leaving it only to the geeks. (Not that UCD people ain't geeks, but hey...)

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Apparently this was launched st BarCamp. Good on 'em, they pretty much threw it out there and said damn the consequences... Apparently Tom Watson, the minister who is in chrage of Transformational Government thought it was great. He heartily approved of the mash-up solutions that various taleted geeks created to show which schools were closed during the snow day.

Snowboat

Design is a tool, not just a deliverable

Great comment from Henning Fritzenwalder, a User Experience Architect based in Germany. He's talking about design and visualisation and the power of creating tangible, visual artefacts to help frame discussions about development and functional specification

"All development lifecycles based on the waterfall principle have a common shortcoming: The moment of truth, when all stakeholders can check the visual results with their expectations comes at the end / too late to change anything big.

There's a way to overcome this situation and improve the design results. First, you need to agree on this: Design is a service that transforms logic concepts, expressed in flows and ambiguous words into a clear, non-ambiguous, tangible visual vision.
Second: If design is a service that helps to turn something ambiguous into something clear and well-defined, it can help stakeholders to agree on a common vision and is no longer only the result of the process, but a part of it.

 Third: If design can help stakeholders to agree on strategy and requirements, each step of the lifecycle needs to be accompagnied by a visual draft that visualizes the strategies and requirements. So that along with the final requirements you'll have a final design"

Beautifully put.


Here's Henning's Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=8565500&authToken=K0f3&authType=name

In praise of a real knob...

Check this... It's a fascinating integration of physical and digital interfaces.

Audio programs like Reason and Logic have long used the "knob" metaphor to control levels and manipulate sounds, and it's always been unsatisfactory; most producers worked this out a long time ago and map different knobs and dials to keyboards and other midi-control devices. But this new tool, called SenseSurface seems to sit somewhere in between - you basically attach a plate to the back of your laptop screen and a seriies of magnetic knobs to your screen and use them to control virtual knobs on the display.

God knows if it's any good, but I like the idea and technical execution.

 

This is what the manufacturer says:

SenseSurface can be used with most laptops with a USB input. The sensing knobs have a custom designed movement sensor to determine position within a range of 180 degrees with a 10 bit digital output, linearity typically 1%. The magnetic knobs can be removed and repositioned immediately by picking them up and moving to a different part of screen. A unique sensing x/y matrix is attached to the rear of the laptop screen to detect the control’s position. The distance of the sensor from the screen can also be detected. The rotary controls are low friction and there are no screen finger prints as with normal touch surfaces. Linear sliders and switches can also be used on the lcd surface. For audio use, a logarithmic response can be programmed. The system is multitouch and scaleable , the number of controls on the screen is limited by the size of the screen. The screen can be at any angle.

Thanks to Nicholas Nova at Pasta&Vinegar