Sony Magic Cap (via Mike Kuniavsky).

Most operating systems today are using a metaphor and a paradigm introduced over 40 years ago. The “desktop” metaphor and “paper” paradigm with folders, files, black text on a white background, etc. have been two of the key enablers for the democratisation of personal computers. First it allowed laypeople to easily operate this technology and make it familiar. Second, it created a bloodline of consumer devices (desktops, laptops, PDAs, mobilephones, smartphones, tablets, etc.) that infiltrated, over the years, every workplace, school, home, and coffee shop.

But as Mike noted, all metaphors eventually fail. Sometime in the late 90s when the Internet, mobile phones, and personal digital content (photos, music tracks, emails, etc.) exploded, the desktop metaphor failed. It failed to serve its most basic purpose by making the operation and manipulation of new devices, new content, and new usages unnatural. With the myriad of devices now forming our connected environment, the evolution of “computer/mobile phone” literacy and usages around the world, and the maturity of the discipline of interaction design, the last obsolete bits of this metaphor and paradigm should be relinquished.

People First UI © Nokia, 2007.

During the Homegrown project, we attempted to do just that with People First UI, which replaced the desktop metaphor and other levels of abstraction with a singular vertical list of content settling over time into a personal history of events. Designed for those of us who face literacy challenges, the user interface has a limited and precise interaction vocabulary (6 nouns and roughly 20 verbs) that reflects how people think and speak. The nouns (or content) – people, messages, photos, places, calculations, and alarms, are connected by verbs – make, call, write, and share. Content comes first, abstract hierarchical menus and applications are substituted with a simpler and universally understood question: what can I do with this? I know this is terribly obvious and not terribly new and yet, so important.

On October 3rd at Remix in London, Nokia unveiled the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, a mobile device for music and social media consumption with a touch-screen. The Nokia 5800 is among the first devices to support Comes With Music, the Media bar, and the home-screen Contacts Bar widget.

I had the opportunity to participate briefly in the early phases of the product development. The product program team and Nokia Design addressed together a number of physical and digital design themes, and very quickly the large 3.2″ touch-screen emerged a great opportunity. In any product, the home-screen is a prime piece of real-estate and mind share, and more often than not, it is the least useful – except to show off your dog, cat, kid, wife/husband/gf/bf, etc. and see what time it is.

The aim was to provide the best music and social media experience possible right from the home-screen by executing on our brand promises: Very human technology and Feeling close, and insights Nokia Design had gathered along the years of observing how people consume media and communicate with their most important people.

People communicate through media.
People access content through people.
The future of media is social.

Simply it was about designing a social media experience that is as human and natural as possible by making multimedia communication reflect the way people think and feel.

Photo © Nokia, 2008.

We wanted to be literal about People Connecting and offer the most explicit representation of human technology and feeling close. We designed a home-screen widget, named Contacts Bar, that shows at a glance the faces of your most important people, your recent activity with them – texts, calls, emails – as well as their latest online media activity from sites such as OVI, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

A picture is worth a thousand words… the myriad of digital photos, music tracks, and videos being shared daily is a clear demonstration that people communicate with more than words . Media allows people to vary and fine-tune the intensity, emotion, and intimacy of their communications. The Contacts Bar is about giving people additional choices on how they explore, live, work, and connect with their most important people.

The press release and additional information can be found in the press section of Nokia.com.

This is the video of my presentation for the session “Aiming for a better society” at the Lift Asia 08 on September 5th. Knock yourself out!

I would like to thank the Lift team Laurent Haug, Nicolas Nova, Sylvie Reinhard, and all the others for the invitation and the opportunity to share the Homegrown story with such an amazing audience in a breathtaking setting.

Thanks to the Nokia Design Homegrown team and extended contributors who made all this happen.

The slides are available here.

“Global issues cannot be removed from the business world, as we only have one world in which to operate.” – Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

A few weeks after unveiling remade in Barcelona, we are excited to share the context in which remade and Homegrown came into being.

Our goal with Homegrown, the umbrella project, was and still is to work towards the most sustainable, ethical, and desirable communication solutions for Nokia. We’re not interested in sentimental greenwash, but the cold hard facts. If the intangible human benefits of communicating through our devices are the rewards, it’s the physical things we produce and consume that are the costs. Why are we doing this? The numbers tell the story – it’s our responsibility, it is everyone’s responsibility. And how? Principles in action – we are simply placing sustainability at the top of our design list.

Homegrown nurtured four case-studies: Zero Waste Charger, remade, Wears in not out, and People First.

“At present, phone chargers waste 300mW of standby power when left unplugged.”

There’re roughly 3,000,000,000 phones on the planet which means there’re also 3,000,000,000 chargers. The average charger consumes 300mW on standby. You can do the math. The waste is tremendous. In addition, most mobile phones take only ~60 minutes to fully recharge these days. Yet most of us keep them plugged for hours… while resting at night.

Nokia chargers are energy-star rated and some consume less than 40 mW in standby… but this is still not zero. The design and engineering challenge is not to bring the consumption as close to zero as possible, it is to leapfrog to zero. And the only way to achieve this is to change our ways.

How can we be more energy intelligent? By contextualising and understanding energy usage of the appliances and devices we are using.

Already devices like Wattson are showing us the energy our home is using (visualised in graphs and charts) and help us figure out ways to save electricity. But eventually, appliances and devices will have to be energy smart by nature. The Zero Waste charger is a true power-down charger with a recognisable branded element – the push-button. When pressed, the push-button reassuringly starts glowing, the charger delivers a 1-hour charge cycle and then shuts off. Off as in 0mW. The push-button symbolises Nokia’s commitment to energy saving while reinforcing conscious consumption in the user’s mind.

Contrary to Bruce Mau’s Massive Change, this case study shows that Small actions x Big numbers have a Big impact.

“426,000 mobile phones are retired in the USA daily.”

In remade, recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tires are used beautifully; whilst helping reduce landfill and preserving natural resources. The concept also addresses cleaner engine technologies, and energy efficiency through power saving graphics. It is about turning waste into beauty.

Previews blog posts on this site: Nokia remade, More about remade.

“After 25 years, mobile telephony is considered an established commodity.”

How do we encourage people to keep their products longer? So much so – they might even pass it on…

Created with good design and noble materials, it becomes a phone you want to keep – one that sits comfortably alongside your most trusted possessions. With design decisions driven by sustainability first such as shrewd long term manufacturing investments, timeless design, and no colour variants – this truly is a phone that wears in not out. Inspired from Jan’s work on repair cultures, repairable and replaceable components reduce Nokia’s environmental dust-to-dust footprint and keep pace with your needs. Whether redefining a “voice classic” or supporting enduring features such as SMS, internet, and clock – these devices are grounded in mature technologies, open standards, and simple durable execution.

In this context, personal digital content portability and software designed for decades of consumption are an integral and key part of the offering. A suite of services and physical doors enable to safely manage one’s growing digital lifetime. I will return to this topic later since it deserves more than a few lines.

“50% of a phone’s energy demand is backlighting.”

How can we clearly prioritize people first? If we begin designing for those who face daily challenges with current technology, we soon find communication solutions that benefit us all.

With a focus on human universals, the “People-first” experience strips away the complexity of applications, folders, and unpredictable navigation with simpler universally understood organizing principles: time, lists and faces. Content comes first, navigation is shallow, and there are no metaphors or abstractions to confuse. New content is generated at the top of a singular vertical list settling over time into a personal history of events.

A dual layer display allows the user to balance energy efficiency with rich visuals. The user interface graphics are optimized for low-power and high-contrast B&W graphics. When an item is highlighted, a second full color display is partially activated in lieu of, or in combination with the first.

In an effort to increase local relevance, dynamic keymat graphics, based on a low-power bi-stable display, allow a greater number of language variants at little to no extra cost and on-screen actions are presented in textual and iconic form making the system accessible to a larger audience.

Out of the box, People First allows simply to connect synchronously (voice call or push-to-talk) or asynchronously (sms or email), capture a moment with the camera, schedule an appointment with the alarm clock, and manage money with the calculator. These are what we believe the mobile essentials – features that are relevant everywhere for everyone. These essentials are however sometimes insufficient. Instead of second-guessing additional features, we are encouraging personalization, hacking, and entrepreneurial ventures with widgets support, accessible native programming language (as simple as html) and freely available hardware and software specifications. Locally produced or crafted components and software provide relevance, while simultaneously reducing production efforts and the amount of atoms that need to be shipped around the globe.

Homegrown is primarily Andrew Gartrell, Rhys Newman, Duncan Burns, Pascal Wever, Raphael Grignani, Pawena Thimaporn, Tom Arbisi, and Simon James.

Additional words and pictures are available on Nokia Conversations, the press section of Nokia.com, and Julian’s blog.

The intent was to create a device made from nothing new, distilling utility from the materials already circulating above the earth’s crust. We drew on a simple insight that in the not too distant future humanity will have extracted and worked much of the valuable minerals once buried in planet Earth. We will be compelled to reuse and celebrate what is essentially “above ground”.

We proposed the mechanical skin & bones be made from materials readily available in the lithosphere avoiding the need for extracting resources and reducing landfill.

• Major structural elements are crafted from recycled aluminium courtesy of soda cans with the knowledge that recycled aluminium requires 95% less energy than processing its raw counterpart.
• More intricate plastic parts are moulded from upcycled post-consumer PET from plastic drink bottles, with a lower carbon footprint than any other engineering- or bio- polymer.
• Whole & shredded rubber tyres are increasingly redirected to landfills, but contain a wealth of nutrients that can be extracted and for example re-employed as flexible keymats, dust/water gaskets, or impact protection.

A typical mobile phone contains approximately 44 of the 112 elements known to mankind. Through a principle of economy, we have reduced the number of components within the phone and considered more environmentally friendly technologies such as printed electronic components on non-toxic substrates.

The concept includes a number of features improving the energy efficiency. Drawing upon the fact that more than 50% of the energy a phone uses comes from backlighting the screen, we developed a new graphical look and feel that save energy without compromising style. Additionally, we have prototyped a series of no waste chargers, which power down once the phone is fully charged. This saves the typical 300 milliwatts of standby power wasted when we leave a charger plugged in.

The many small actions illustrated above, when multiplied by large numbers, can indeed change the world.

And most importantly, it works

Post co-authored with the remade team.

The intent was to create a device made from nothing new.

We drew on a simple insight that in the not too distant future humanity will have extracted and worked much of the valuable minerals once buried in planet Earth. We will be compelled to reuse and celebrate what is essentially “above ground”. Thus we explored the use of reclaimed and upcycled materials that could ultimately change the way we make things.

In remade, recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tyres are used beautifully; whilst helping reduce landfill and preserving natural resources. The concept also addresses cleaner engine technologies, and energy efficiency through power saving graphics.



Remade offers a realistic and beautiful interpretation of upcycling and a tangible starting point for discussion. A discussion we have already started a few weeks ago when two designers from our team joined Jan Chipchase and a few others in Accra to discuss, test, and improve remade with the help of the wonderful people of Ghana.


A local repair technician assembling a remade phone. Jan Chipchase – Accra, Ghana.

Our design team is very excited to join the conversation and have the opportunity to engage and receive critical feedback from all of you.

The press release, short video and additional images are available in the press section of Nokia.com – under the materials section and in the Mobile World Congress 2008 press site. You may also find the short video on Nokia Conversations YouTube channel.

*Andrew Gartrell, Duncan Burns, Rhys Newman, Pascal Wever, Tom Arbisi, Simon James, Pawena Thimaporn, Jan Chipchase, Anne Coates, Peter Knudsen and myself

The intent was to stretch each category language into new domains and experiences while maintaining Nokia design DNA and brand. During the creative process where people and content were prioritized above everything else, a set of common design elements emerged such as soft forms, tactility and gestures, simplicity and elegance, beauty and smiles.

Our ultimate goal: Simply beautiful communication.

Achieve

Our vision aspires to natural solutions which enhance collaboration a leap forward from today’s cumbersome implements. We are living in an age of virtual teams where people must work without the benefit of in-person sessions using video conferences and remote presentation tools.

Mobile video conferencing becomes easier and more productive when participants are able to visually identify who has joined the call and who is currently speaking, to mute speakers at the touch of a finger, or to start a private conversation with another participant. The dual touch-screen provides enough space to display at once large still or moving faces, documents preview, and contextual actions. The goal was to combine in one glance the people and get-things-done aspects of video conferencing.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

The approach to get-things-done is to provide flexible, natural, and powerful multitasking capabilities with side-by-side view, tiled view, messy desk view. Applications or documents can be left open, pushed to the background, tucked under other things or just minimised to support streamlined or disjointed workflow.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

Input is a critical aspect of the workflow – we all know how annoying it is to have a mouse or a pen that does not work. To afford complex and versatile interactions, we classified the most important workflow and optimised their interaction for either stylus or finger input based on parameters like accuracy, speed, most-likely context, satisfaction, and playfulness.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

Achieve is about what will become possible in the near future when the current limits of mobile communication are erased.

Live

Live looks at the devices we own and what they say about us. We choose our objects because they speak to us in a special way: surfaces are inviting to touch, interfaces are at once intuitive and beautiful, forms are pleasing to interact with. We choose them because they communicate something that we want to be known. The physical and digital blend seamlessly and behave like chameleon to match your many moods and desires. Appearance skins can be created from photographs, music tracks, usage patterns, or simply by sensing the environment.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

The influence of femininity emanates very clearly in this category where shapes and content blend in unique designs.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

All the little moments – gestures and glances that create an atmosphere and help people bond, have been distilled in these personalisable and socially oriented devices. Giving your number simply by touching the other device (near-field communication), inviting and guiding your friends to the next place (navigation GPS or otherwise), etc.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

Live celebrates good design as an expression of beautifully crafted artifacts which involve us in their completion.

Connect

Connect captures core Nokia values and what we value most as humans: staying close to the people that matter. Interfaces are kept perfectly simple in the service of human connection. Memories are collected and filed away to be savored later. Mobile technology is easy to use and available to everyone from the very young to the very old and all of the people who care about them.

People centered communication is the essence of connect, and faces are the portrayal of people. We felt that they should duly take a prominent stand in the design language. The interaction becomes personal and efficient since people recognise faces much faster than words.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

Connect is about facilitating communication with your most important people, all forms of communications. A natural extension to current practices is speech recognition where natural speech can be transcribed into a text message, a note, a task, etc. It lowers the threshold for features like text messaging and email to those that are not comfortable inputing text on a mobile phone keypad.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

It was also important to acknowledge the greater ecosystem of home and entertainment appliances which provides an great environment to share, explore, and consume content. We purposefully used “cliché” examples of the fridge and TV shying away from the much more compelling implementations coming soon.

Copyright ©2007 Nokia. All rights reserved.

Connect is the embodiment of Nokia‘s wish to connect all people.

A View of the Future was created in the spring of 2006.

Both in design circles and the press, there’s a lot of attention and enthusiasm for high-end multimedia products and user interfaces. It is all well but it’s all niche. Nothing wrong with niche products, but ultimately, it’s the less snazzy ones that happen to change the world for good. The Ford T comes to mind along with the Nokia 3310, VW Beetle, etc.

Inspired by an observation that globally 1 in 5 adults are illiterate, but not necessarily innumerate and that the digital divide will be partially closed in the coming 3 years; my interest in the past few weeks has been on understanding human universals. A simple question I have tried to answer and make tangible is how do we -all humans, organize things naturally? How do we all organize the most important moments of our life? My best answer, as simple as it sounds, is chronologically…

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part

(Tom Petty, The Waiting)

… Days later (12/15/2006)

The wait has been long enough!

I have always been fascinated by the “power” of the few milliseconds it takes between the key press and onscreen reaction. They are usually inconsequential, but every so often they are the most frustrating thing in the world like when you are expecting something really important ( e.g. email, sms, phone call) or have to make a time-critical decision (e.g. selling stocks, calling for an emergency, navigating). This unnecessary stress is mostly due bad design, and falls into two categories. The first one is poor architecture and system design which make the device slow and unresponsive. The second is clueless UI design e.g. you get an uninformative clue “1 new message” which forces you to stop your activity and react to know the sender and topic. I will get back to clueless design in another post.

What truly puzzle me is that these few milliseconds are a legacy “feature” since electronic devices have been invented. No one has managed to get it right, and it’s actually getting worse and worse.
What scares me is that my waiting tolerance is now of a “few” milliseconds… How’s yours?

That’s the current state of design and usability for mature adults :-/ With every book, philosophy, and principles, interpretation is critical.