Hand-drawn posters, part 3

Pulp Fiction (1994), Titanic (1997)

Marker and acrylic on newsprint.

Hand-drawn posters, part 2

Fargo (1996), Lost Highway (1997)

Marker and acrylic on newsprint.

Hand-drawn posters, part 1

Jurassic Park (1993), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

Marker and acrylic on newsprint.

Cameras I own: Yashica MAT-124 G

Aka, ‘this aint no instagram, buddy’. Part 3 in a series. Read part two. Part one.

This camera stands out on the shelf, and for good reason: it’s big, it’s old, it looks like a machine. And that it is. The Yashica MAT-124 G is a camera I picked up (for much too much money) when I was living in Tokyo and became ever-so-slightly obsessed with street photography and old film cameras (the camera was made some time in the 1960s). It’s my only TLR (Twin-Lens-Reflex), and my only medium-format camera. In layman’s terms that means it takes big square photos, not small rectangular ones.

A fountain at Zenkoji temple, Nagano

The evolution of cameras as mechanical devices is interesting to experience for yourself: the twin-lens system (where you look through one lens, and the photo is taken with the other) was a very simple mechanical solution to the problem of how to see what the camera ‘sees’, and made for cameras with very few moving parts. The lack of a mirror reflex system (as required in an SLR) made for a very quiet shutter as well. Focussing was a genuine mechanical action of turning a knob and moving the lens mechanism backwards and forwards. I could understand how it worked. It was a box for capturing light.

Akihabara, Tokyo

And capture light it could! Like many of my older cameras, its light meter was long dead, but I bought a small mountable light-meter from Voigtlander, because I wasn’t willing to take the risk of relying on “sunny-16″ or taking guesses with this one, partly because the film and developing was expensive, partly because I thought the camera deserved a little more respect. It was a worthwhile addition, particularly for taking shots in dark conditions. It took a while to line up a shot, focus, check the light meter reading and take the shot, but it was worth it: the quality, mood and depth of the images still beats any other camera that I own.

Shibuya, Tokyo

Its size meant that it also got all sorts of strange looks from passers-by, but because it’s a top-down viewfinder (you look down in the top of the camera to focus), it looks like you are fiddling with your camera rather than lining up a shot, which made it great for candid shots on the crowded streets of Tokyo.

I pretty much stopped using the camera when I returned from Japan (I think I shot maybe only one or two rolls of film in Australia). It wasn’t just that the novelty had worn off (fun as it was, it sure was cumbersome). I really couldn’t justify the expense, and had been overtaken by the digital camera mindset of “take hundreds of photos and edit like crazy”. Instagram on my iPhone is fulfilling my ‘old looking square photos’ needs for the moment, but I’m sure one day I’ll want to go back to the slow photography of the TLR.

Thoughtful Interaction Design

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology

Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman, MIT Press, 2004

Now here is a book that:

• a) I wish that I’d read many years ago
• b) I wish was required reading for every designer, programmer, and manager working in the interaction design industry today

This wonderful little book lays out, with great coherence, what interaction design is, and why we (as interaction designers, or practitioners working with designers) should care about how design is practiced and care about reflecting on our design work.

It seemed to coalesce the thoughts and feelings dissatisfaction that I’d been feeling with interaction design (as exists in the “design industry”) perfectly. We, as designers, need to be thoughtful, because what we design is used, what we design has implications for society.

I also recently got around to reading McLuhan’s seminal essay, The Medium is the Message. It’s arguments have become so ingrained, so pervasive, that it reads today like a series of empty platitudes. But what McLuhan actually says—that we are affected by the technology that we make—is somehow more relevant now (or at very least, not any less relevant). Here is Löwgren and Stolterman in 2004:

…it is not a feasible position to view technological development as independent from society or as a driving force in societal development. Neither is the naïve opposing position tenable: Technology is not merely a neutral instrument of our wills and desires. We understand the situation as one of mutual influence: We shape technology, and technology shapes us.

Compare to McLuhan, 50 years(!) earlier:

The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology

The thought I kept having reading Thoughtful Interaction Design: “yes, of course, we know that”, combined with “why don’t we practice that?” Over and over again.

I’m not going to go over all of the arguments here—just trust me, read it, it’s a short book.

Iterations

Five days ago I was feeling overwhelmingly positive about App a Week. Now, not so much. I’ve almost completed this week’s app (a time & event history tracker called “Time Flies”), but I’ve decided not to post a demo this week – in fact, I’m not going to try and complete the app in it’s current form. What’s the problem? The problem is that I am finding myself getting in to a rhythm of rushing, taking shortcuts, and discounting good ideas just to meet my arbitrary deadline. All these things are things which I disliked about my previous work as a flash developer in a commercial environment. One of my major goals when I decided to quit my job and learn iPhone development full time was to go back to practicing a measured, thoughtful, iterative design process. A deadline of 1 week, while highly motivating, simply isn’t enough time to do things properly. Sometimes it can be prudent to take shortcuts in order to release on a deadline, but this stage of my development is not the time. I’m counting my 4 apps in 4 weeks as a relatively successful experiment. I’ve been forced to do a lot of coding very quickly (which has improved my Objective-C skills dramatically), and coding to produce stable builds at every iteration (a really useful skill). I’ve been forced to practice rapid idea generation and rapid prototyping techniques. But I haven’t produced any great apps, because trying to produce a great app in 4 weeks is kind of ridiculous. So I’m going to call it off. One of the positive outcomes of the last 4 weeks has been that I’ve seeded some ideas that I think I will be able to develop in to viable, saleable apps. But they are not apps that take less than a week to design and build. So I’m going to take it more slowly for the moment. App a Week was worthwhile, it got me started, it was fun, but now it’s time to do things properly.

Create new

For the last 7 years I’ve been working as an “actionscript developer” or “flash developer” – a strange breed of programmer with a design background and no formal training. I became a programmer almost by accident – I was shuffled into flash development roles because I was looking for web design work at a time when flash was in high demand, and I had some skills in that area. The longer I stayed working in Flash, the longer I was branded as a developer, and in some ways, I just got stuck – it was to easy to keep working in a field where I could do well without struggling. For a while Flash was at the cutting edge of interaction design. For a while Flash was interesting.

But then I got tired. Over the last year I’ve begun to feel that Flash is a bit of a technological dead end. I’m no longer excited by the possibilities of Flash as a platform the way I am by iOS or HTML5. I think location aware technology is absolutely the way of the future and the iPhone is the perfect place to explore the fledgeling possibilities.

In my early graphic design and interaction design work (fresh faced and idealistic out of university), I loved the idea of designing small things and designing for small spaces – and what better small space to design for than one that you carry in your pocket?

I’m excited to be developing for new platforms. I’m excited to try and learn some real programming. And I’m excited to be desigining again.

Time

I resigned from my position at Flint yesterday. Major changes are afoot!

AS3 Library for the WordPress API

I’ve completed my initial work on an ActionScript 3 wrapper for WordPress XML-RPC, and it is freely available for everyone to use. Full details are here on the project page.