It seemed Google has taken designswarm off of its index as they seem to be finding spam hidden in one of the pages. No idea what to do and I’m now invisible to the outside world…if you can help, please catch me on Skype!
One way to level up in European immigration as a foreigner is to have an italian parent (my father in this case) as since the mid 90s Italy recognises citizenship for people with parents or grandparents who were born in Italy. This now means I am pretty much free to live in Europe for the rest of my life if I wanted to which makes me extremely happy and makes customs a total breeze as opposed to a semi frantic experience peppered with little white lies.
Celebrating nearly 2 years as the CEO of a small and dynamic interaction design company I thought I’d collate some thoughts on starting up your own company in interaction design as this be useful for someone out there.
- SHOW ME THE MONEY
Money is important. When you start your own company, (i’m talking normal company here and not web2.0. There is no angel, VC or other convenient fluffy forms of funding here) you’ll realise how much cash flow rules your world and every decision you will ever make. Want to do r&d? Where’s the money coming from? Want to make stickers, buy a printer, pay people? Where’s the money coming from? Get an accountant fast and get one who cares about your business. If you’re around 10 people, get a part-time CFO, just a few days a month will do, you’ll need someone to be the bad cop with money, otherwise, you’ll end up spending your days chasing after people.
- EDUCATE & LEARN
Don’t fool yourself, the types of people who understand what you do are few and far between. You will spend 80% of your time explaining to people what you do and trying to make that come to life for them. Be prepared. The fact that there are over 50 schools around the world that teach interaction design and physical computing does NOT mean that there is an established industry to settle in. You’re the weird kid on the block. Hang out with people from the advertising industry, they will teach you a lot. Learn about what people who are high up in companies need to hear and what their comfort level is. Make yourself understandable and flexible enough to not seem too risky or threatening. Otherwise, people won’t know what to do with you.
- FORGET CHILDREN
When you start a company, it becomes part of you in (i’m assuming) the same way a child does. Weekends are a write-off, you’ll work every evening and time “away” will be hard as you try to grow a business that eventually doesn’t need you to feed it everyday. That will take years. I’m not there yet.
- DON’T GET BORED
Never forget what motivated you to do this, if you start sounding “bored”, then you’re doing something wrong, stop right now and get a regular job.
- PEOPLE MATTER
I’m blessed to be surrounded with the absolute most wonderful, talented, creative, weird people I could imagine. You’ll spend more time with these people than with your significant other, so choose them well and build a team you can rely on. This will be crucial when times get rough and you’re running out of steam.
- CHOOSE YOUR CLIENTS
Having a good relationship with our clients will matter A LOT. Choose them as carefully as you would choose a girlfriend/boyfriend and remember that good business is when there is a benefit for both parties. If you’re being bullied, something’s gone wrong.
- CREATIVITY TAKES A BACK SEAT
As a creative person, if you decided to be at the head of a company, you’ll have to quickly accept the fact that your creativity will only be required 5% of the time. The rest, you will spend paying bills, meeting clients, handling invoices, sending reminders, arranging meetings, going to conferences and other things that will inject life into your business. I spend more time on Powerpoint, Excel and Word than I do using any creative suite. It’s part of the game, and you’ll learn to enjoy it. It makes the creative times that much more intense and precious.
So there. I’m sure I’ll think of more later, but I these are probably the most important things I can think I’ve learnt in the past 2 years.
Having recently gone through a series of breakups both personally and with online services, I’m starting to re-frame how I think of the connections we make online. If there was any way to establish how close you were to someone purely based on your digital traces, what would that look like?
Would you count the amount of @s on Twitter, how many of their pictures you’d favorited? The number of times they called you, texted you? I’m not sure that would make an accurate picture but it would certainly be worth plotting out (maybe something for Stamen).
In times of breakups when people reframe how they think of you, it would equally be worth plotting out how many people keep in touch with you after. Communities and friends aren’t often the same and reconstruct themselves in equally organic ways.
Random theory on a quiet and rainy Saturday afternoon in the city.
Privacy exists only in the eye of the beholder and is more prevalent and easier to engineer than ever before. It’s all a question of audience. I’ll explain. The new standard in our ways of communicating (especially in the geekdom) is to publicly display, reveal and share all the time, whether its our location, our trips, our photos, our thoughts, our desires, our interests and what we go through and who we know. If we simply stop using these services, nothing in our actual behaviour changes, we still go places, we still take pictures, we still share them with who we wish to by “downgrading” to sending them directly to people, family etc but our public self-actualisation is decreased and our privacy increases. I find it intriguing that privacy isn’t explicitly part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs actually, perhaps its a given, perhaps we’re only making a fuss over it because of the past 5 years of rapid technology changes.
When everyone twitters about what they do all the time, the noise drowns out the signals doesn’t it? If you suddenly decide to stop using a staple means of communication, it’s like you don’t exist anymore. It’s far worst than if you decided to use it less. If you lost your cell phone these days and didn’t care to replace it, and went back to using your landline, you’d essentially be dead to most people. Wouldn’t be surprising if they called the police to check on you, after all who would want to do such a thing? Well maybe it’ll be the same thing if you wanted to stop using facebook. I closed my account long before it had overtaken the world in such a dramatic way. I suspect in 2 years time people will have moved on to using something else, but frankly, I’d rather observe and privatly self-actualise, write more than 140 characters, post up pictures when I really want to and generally concentrate on making my life something that is mine and not everyone else’s too. It’s hard enough as it is.
It’s a strange theory but I kindof like it, for today at least.
Following from what was a weepy post a week ago, I’ve decided to stop using Twitter once I reach 2000 updates (about 150 to go). I remember the evening I started using it, sometime in November 2006 when I was staying at Ben’s on Herengracht in Amsterdam. He sent me an invite and I looked at this thing and huffed and puffed (I would start working for Jaiku a few months later) going “I don’t get it”. He,of course knew better, he always does.
3 years down the line, I’ve had great fun, I’ve kept in touch with people I’d only met once, sometimes not at all. I’ve kept in touch with the latest internet memes, even the ones that only last half a day, I’ve kept in touch with the news, and more importantly I’ve kept in touch with what Matt does during his days at work in lalaland.
But I want more. Living in London, I’ve realised that I need to be much more active about meeting and seeing people in the flesh, remembering that there is a world out there, that I can just pick up the phone and call people and take news, have a coffee, have a great conversation, build real relationships, or at least ones that feel real to me. Twitter has made me lazy about those relationships.
My metaphor for using Facebook was bumping into an old friend in the street and not having anything to say to each other past the first 30 seconds. Twitter feels to me now like walking into a giant party full of people you kinda know, kinda not, some of which you’re only mildly interested in, but all of them speaking really loudly. Matt will tell you I hate those kinds of parties, they intimidate me, and now so does Twitter. So I’m leaving the party behind.
I’m glad the entire world seems to have hopped on the bandwagon, those guys deserve it. It’s just not for me anymore. I’ll try to come back to my blog, to writing and exploring an idea fully.
I won’t close my account, I simply will stop updating it and will only occasionally read it. I think I’ll make a lovely newspaper thing out of these 3 years of my life in a space that has evolved and changed so much, while I’ve been changing too. Maybe I’ll give it to my mom or something.
Is that you forget to build an actual circle of friends around you. Friends that you can get a drink with after work, friends who want to have coffee with you on weekends. I want friends to have a chat with.
After nearly 2 years in this city, I don’t think London is a very good for friendships, makes it difficult to get up and see and meet people easily. Most of my friends don’t live here.
Matt is gone for 2 weeks to New Zealand to talk about the fabulous things he does , and K is touring Europe showing off her great work. I’m here alone.
A little sadness on this rainy Sunday in London. I opened yesterday’s Guardian to find that Douglas Keen had died. I didn’t know him personally nor did I even know his name, but his work is a key part of my childhood. He was the one to teach me english, or to be perfectly accurate Peter and Jane, the main characters of his books, did. I was about 7 living in Kuwait and suddenly parachuted in an American School, having previously spoken only french at home. His books helped me in so many ways as I learnt about western ideas and culture while living in a very different country and environment to the Paris of my youth.
I’m happy I grew up with his little people.
I also feel I’ve suddenly entered that phase in my life where companies are trying to cater to a sense of nostalgia. In the same Guardian, there was an advert for the Ladybird Vintage book for Girls and I have to admit I feel really tempted to add it to my Christmas list.
I just came back from a sort of really stupid back and forth on 6 eurostars in the space of a week…but the friends i got to see again, the meals i got to eat and the events I attended made this a really beautiful week, with the real satisfaction of just traveling by train. The level of exhaustion is really quite different than if i had taken planes.
I hardly had any internet access, haven’t opened my rss reader in weeks and generally enjoying doing some real thinking about my current adventure. I need to do this more often.
I hope you’ll excuse me for the lack of new content, in light of this…I’ll come up with something witty soon, I swear!
This is a little project of mine that was born over a year ago in Amsterdam but went into hibernation for a while for obvious reasons. I’m happy to consider this is my first actual contribution to the web2.0 conversation.
I’d like to thank D’arcy Saum, Richard Groenendijk and Nicholas Land for helping me out on this project.
Communications technologies allow us to be connected globally but there is nothing more deeply moving than the natural and uncontrollable motion of the day. Every hour of the day, somewhere in the world, Mother Nature offers us that symphony of color, and we take pictures of it.
Constant setting is a simple website that displays in real time, any sunset images taken and posted to Flickr as creative commons that correspond to the cities where the sun is setting at the moment.
You can see the city where the image was taken (which you can click to be redirected to the Google maps location, if you don’t know where in the world that is) as well as its geographical information (long / lat) and the local time in that city.
You can also see who took the picture and get redirected to the original picture to add to your favorites! There’s a little timer to let you know how long to the next one, and because this is crowdsourced in a way, it might go back to the same image, until it finds an image tagged with “sunset” for the next location.
Enjoy and do let me know what you think! Consider this version1.0 :)
So I feel I’ve neglected this site long enough, I really should update people about why on earth I’m hardly in touch with the world. January is always a good month for announcements anyway right?
Firstly I am now CEO (or chief slave driver as I prefer to call it) of a small technology and design startup called Tinker.it. My partner in this being non other than my former IDII professor Massimo Banzi. So that’s taking, oh about 90% of my time now.
I’ve also been spending the last few months doing a bit of work for Blyk the free mobile network for young people funded by advertising. Often referred in my twitters as Finland2.0, it’s been really interesting as I’ve been running workshops with their target audience. Call it a user-based Applied Dreams if you will.
Then, well I’ve been working on a little project of mine with some great friends. More soon I hope. Let’s just say my dreams of getting something weby done are finally coming true.
And to top things off, Karola and I will hopefully be selling Topoware china to the world in a few months. I’ve been having fun dealing with real manufacturing constraints and old world communications with this one.
So there, it’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that I’m trying to die young :P
I shall try to have more free time to finish books, knitting, personal projects.
I shall attempt to get back into shape by taking a much lusted after flamenco class.
I shall attempt to make new friends in London, the kind that likes to have coffee and a rant once in a while (seems difficult here)
I shall attempt to travel more with Matt rather than waving goodbye or vice versa.
I shall try to not be the only working during the holidays next Christmas.
I’ve been working a lot and I admit, more than is probably required by your average human. I barely keep on top of email, check the odd flickr photo, haven’t opened my RSS reader in weeks, haven’t done my Xmas shopping and barely managed to squeeze in a haircut after 2 months without one.
I think I need a new generation of portable technology that let’s me keep up with the world when I’m on the go (what do you mean cell phones already do that?).
Give me till saturday and I’ll be back on track I promise!
