Apple Watch Impressions

15.05.15 — Leeds

Just last week I finally got my hands on the Apple Watch I ordered back in April, and have been wearing it out and about ever since. I haven’t been up to all that much as revision has begun ramping up in preparation for exam season, but here we go…

Setup

I shan’t bother to go over the setup of this things, it’s been done many times before (and much better than I could ever discuss), but I found it relatively quick and simple, with the initial synchronisation taking just long enough to stop for a cup of tea.

Wedding Party

The first test was a drive down to a cricket club for a wedding party, where the tapping on my wrist as notifications came through from Facebook was subtle enough not too cause any accidents – that’s more likely to be my bad driving. I eagerly await Facebook’s release of a Watch compatible app, as having a tonne of messages come through and being able to read them without the ability to reply became frustrating very quickly.

At the party, however, it came in quite useful. Waiting in line for a hog roast gave me the chance to glance over my Instagram feed, and the queue for an ice cream provided the opportunity for some quick tweeting. A song came on during one of the dances which I liked the sound of, and it was only a couple of taps to get Shazam on the job identifying what the DJ was playing.

Afterwards, however, an issue was pointed out to me by my mother that has been well documented elsewhere – that it does indeed look incredibly rude to show up to a party and spend a lot of the night glancing at your watch. With all the excitement of trying out this new toy, I assume I was using it more than I will be doing in a few weeks time once the excitement has dissipated, but the issue still remains.

Travelling

The next adventure came the next day, when I journeyed back from Burnley to Leeds. Aware that I couldn’t accomplish all too much with the erratic mobile signal as I flew through the Yorkshire countryside, I took to using my laptop to keep me occupied instead. I did, however, make good use of it purely as a watch – that train journey can be very monotonous after nearly two years.

Lounging Around

Once I arrived back here in Leeds I began the strenuous task of not really doing all that much. I baked a cake, laid in bed for a while, glazed a cake, did a bit of filing and admin work and then laid in bed a while longer. The Watch came in useful whilst cooking – I had my iPad for my recipe – but the watch I found best for all my timing. The raise-and-speak function for Siri came in ridiculously useful as I lounged around the house, allowing me to make reminders as I remembered things whilst walking around, and send goofy emojis to any text messages I received.

Needless to say that the Activity App was going crazy at me for lounging around – every hour I received a polite tap and text reminder to stop being so sedentary – which surprisingly I have been obeying thus far. It even made me stand up on the train on my way over here!

Night Out

Just the other evening a group of us decided to head out to a Harry Potter quiz down in Milo Bar in Leeds City Centre, and of course I was wearing my new timepiece. Facing a barrage of notifications, I popped it onto Do Not Disturb and tried to ignore it as much as possible – however everyone wanted a go with the remote camera and heart rate monitor!

I did find that having tiny notifications appear on your wrist does the opposite of force you to pay attention to your incoming notifications all the time – rather it allows you to use your phone much less often as you immediately know which ones to ignore. I think it’s much better to occasionally glance at your wrist during social events than be preoccupied with pulling your phone out of your pocket at every (and most of the time irrelevant) notification.

Picnic Time

Just yesterday my close group of friends consisting of Izzy, Em, Rhea, Luisa and I (we call ourselves “Occupy Grass Studio” due to the amount of time we spend working in our uni’s design studio) met up at our house for an indoor picnic. After a worrying amount of Iced Gems and sausage rolls and a very unhealthy plate-sized cinnamon bun that I baked, we ended up lounging around and chatting with a bit of music on in the background.

Our picnic spread, including my cinnamon roll cake

My phone was on the verge of death and so was charging in one corner, I had a bluetooth speaker setup in another, and I was lying on the sofa in another – and so the Watch really came into it’s own. I felt absolutely exhausted, and so being able to control the music without having to so much as move my arms was a blessing. I was pleased to find that, even though it doesn’t have it’s own native app (yet), Spotify could be controlled via the Now Playing screen in Glances.

Then the remote shutter function was actually used as intended, and we gathered on the sofa to snap this group photo of questionable photographic composition…

After this we headed to the movies to watch Pitch Perfect 2, where a quick tap of the Do Not Disturb button silenced both my phone and watch simultaneously. I was worried about the watch lighting up every two minutes as I shuffled around in my seat (laughing, mostly), but I do think Apple have got the sensitivity of the raise-to-unlock function bang on.

Rounding Up

So do I like this watch? Yes – most definitely. It allows me to get important messages quickly, decide when not to bother taking my phone out my pocket to respond, and whenever I want I can ignore the taps on my wrist altogether without anyone knowing they even occurred. Is it worth the money I spent on it though? With the limited number of available apps and functionality, I’ve yet to decide…

Deadlines Down, Exams To Go

11.05.15 — Leeds

There comes a time in life when one looks forward to washing up, where human interaction is precious and rare, and when cooking even the most basic meal becomes a luxurious indulgence. Yes, it’s deadline time – but thankfully it’s all over now. Hey, just yesterday I ate a plate full of actual vegetables and almost wept with excitement.

But what are the fruits of my perhaps over-dramatisation of the work I’ve been powering through for 14 hours a day? Well, there’s a new piece for my portfolio which will be online pretty soon, which was my Pantone D&AD brief to reimagine my hometown – Burnley – through the language of colour. Here’s a sneak peek at one of the sheets I handed in…

I have also been busy reading, researching and writing my way to 3000 words for my typography essay. If you’ve been following my updates over on my project page here you’ll already have some idea of what it’s about, but now it’s all finished and you can head on over to read online, check out the research which lead up to its creation or download a copy. It is entitled “Modernism and the New Media: Constructing the Crystal Goblet Online.”

The essay deals with modernist typographic philosophy (clarity, simplicity and readability) and argues for the consideration of modernist principles when typesetting online. It concludes by providing some quick pointers for web designers for when dealing with typography. Here’s the cover – click here to download a PDF copy!

Other than that I haven’t much news to impart. I’m currently headed back to Burnley for a few days working at Burnley Arts Centre, but I’ll have a secondary role as house chef and baker and provider of moral support to my sister Ellie as she begins her AS exams. Good luck Bel!

Deadline Drudgery

07.05.15 — Leeds

My blog has fallen into another stint of scant activity on my part, for which I apologise, but as you may have figured I have a perfectly good reason – deadlines have arrived. Well, I say have – most have actually been and gone (hence why I have the time to be sat in bed tapping this out at a reasonable time).

Naturally I don’t have much to share, no tales of any particularly interesting travels nor any anecdotes from any outings, but I did think I’d share this photo of Hyde Park looking lovely in the springtime sun.

Today I also decided to take the evening off before my next deadline (a typography essay due on Monday, which I’ve been working on here), and I decided of all things to make a carrot cake for my house.

That’s all for now I’m afraid, but do be sure to keep a tab on my typography project, which I’ll be powering on to completion over the next few days. Once it’s finished you’ll be able to read and download the whole essay right here! The title of the essay shall be ‘Modernism and the New Media: Constructing the Crystal Goblet Online’.

Good luck to all with exams and deadlines and the such. I shall return from beneath a landslide of typography books next week. Peace out.

Sunny Leeds, Sunny London

25.04.15 — London

As you may have guessed, I have now returned to Leeds as Easter draws to a close, and have just finished my first week back – and what a week it’s been! It was lovely to see everyone again, and we kicked things off with a feedback session on our briefs.

My tutor suggested that I refine my target audience for my cookbook design brief, and I thought that the best way to do this was to pay the client’s restaurant a visit – which meant a trip down to London! I got straight onto National Express and booked myself a ticket for Thursday – but more on that in just a sec…

After the feedback session I had forgotten my laptop charger, but the glorious sunshine outside made the round trip back home less daunting, and also allowed me the chance to take a quick wander round campus snapping some photos.

Sassy red boots and some springtime flowers

On Monday, after talks from returning students on their year in industry placement experiences (which included a free lunch, which had no bearing on my decision to attend at all), I had signed up to a one-off workshop on Wednesday with Bruce Usher. It was a refreshing and enjoyable workshop, where we were set a day-long brief of developing General Election political posters, a welcome break from the same two briefs I have been working on since the new year.

After the workshop I had to be sure to get an early night in, ready for a 5:30am start to grab a cab down to Leeds Coach Station for the 4½ hour trip down to Victoria Coach Station. After taking the opportunity to read some design literature, and after an hour stuck in stationary London rush hour traffic, I finally found myself wandering the streets of our surprisingly sunny capital.

I first headed to the location where I wanted to do some visual research, and spent a while looking around the area and snapping as many photos as I could. Then, after getting lost on the tube, I managed to find my way down to the Tower Of London, whereby I decided to make like a tourist and grab an ice cream and sit by Tower Bridge for a while.

I then made my way over Tower Bridge, snapping plenty of photos on the way. Wandering round London alone was admittedly quite strange, but it was good to get the research done and then allowed me to wander round at my own pace and do what I want. Izzy’s local knowledge wouldn’t have gone amiss though, as once I found myself on the other side of the Thames I managed to get lost again…

All quiet by this section of the Tower of London

A lovely clear sky and the cyan of Tower Bridge

After I found my bearings, I headed off to Camden for a snoop around the markets, and grabbed myself some poffertjes (delicious Dutch style baby pancakes) smothered in Nutella. Needless to say they didn’t last long, and I was soon back on the tube to Victoria to kill an hour or so before I had to head back to the coach station.

And so what to do? For me, no trip to London is complete without a trip to Buckingham Palace, so I wandered down the aptly named Buckingham Palace Road and sat on the Queen Victoria Memorial for half an hour or so, soaking up the last rays of the rare English sun, sipping on some Oasis and offering to take photos for tourists passing through.

After a while though, it was time to head back and board the coach back to Leeds. After a huge holdup on the M1 and locking myself out of the coach toilet (don’t ask), I landed back in Leeds just after 1am, when needless to say I hailed the first cab home and crashed straight into bed.

So all in all quite an action-packed first week back, with no sign of giving up with our hand-in deadlines fast approaching. My summer is looking pretty packed too – with a trip with Rhea lined up to visit Luisa and co. in Germany for a week, the family holiday booked to Lagos in Portugal, more scholarship work to complete, and plenty of placement searching to be done.

Privacy & Anticipatory Design

19.04.15 — Leeds

An article recently posted in Fast Co. Design recently caught my attention, as it was entitled “The Next Big Thing in Design? Less Choice.” As the title of this post may suggest, it was indeed talking about anticipatory design.

This concept is not wholly new, and for those unacquainted with the term, I shall now attempt to summarise the concept as succinctly as possible. Anticipatory design, as suggested by it’s blatant nomenclature, is design which utilises a given knowledge base to anticipate decisions and choices so that a user has to merely approve decisions that a given system has made for them. Sometimes this may even mean that the user is wholly detached from the decision making process – leaving the systems to equate and decide instead.

As the article says, anticipatory design has been around for some time already now, albeit in less automated forms. Think about YouTube’s suggested video section which suggests videos for you to watch based on your viewing history, or Amazon’s recommended items which curates a selection of items which are frequently bought with products you have recently ordered.

The problem I found with anticipatory design when I first read the article was the one that Aaron Shapiro addresses within the article itself, that of whether the user should allow automated systems to make decisions for them, or whether a sense of more granular control is preferable.

Just today I was editing photos for my previous lifestyle blog post and found myself hitting Apple’s auto-enhance button in the iOS Photos app, which enhanced my photos beautifully as I’d have liked – but even then I felt the need to go and adjust each granular colour and brightness setting manually, just so that I could be sure I had the image exactly the way I wanted to.

But I do, of course, see the attraction in having a one-click enhance function. It’s perfect for people like my sister who want to take and upload good-looking photos on the fly.

Maybe, then, anticipatory design just needs to adjust itself to suit different user groups. Light users want quick and simple options, they want the systems to sweat the small stuff and do the hard work. Pro users, however, want access to every little option and setting that they can. What does this mean for UX? I could write a whole new post about it – and maybe I will – but for now let’s tackle an issue that came to me as I was clambering into bed the other night and which spurred the writing of this blog post: privacy.

In today’s connected world privacy is now very much at the forefront of public awareness, especially given recent events such as Snowden’s NSA leaks – even if the revelation of the existence of such widespread recording/monitoring activities came as no surprise to myself. People talk a lot about personal data and privacy, and web users are becoming increasingly aware of how their personal details can be used and abused.

So then, when we know that anticipatory design works on a system of analysing personal data, how can this invaluable privacy and the future of convenient design comfortably coexist? Surely if we allow such systems to amass such huge reserves of personal data, then we are effectively sacrificing our privacy and exposing ourselves to the risks associated with allowing the storage of such details?

Take Google for example, a company who’s interconnected network of services (YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar etc.) are already pushing anticipatory design forward. These services share a user’s data between each other to both make a user’s life easier (and yes, also to deliver tailored advertising), however when people realise that their data is being used in this manner, there’s uproar.

So we may be able to anticipate people’s decisions before they make them, but will they want us to? Having an algorithm work out the best adjustments to your image is one thing, having it know what you want to say and to whom before you do is definitely another.

The data to make such decisions is probably, in most cases, already collected and ready to be put to use. But if we do, will we scare users away? Will anticipatory design’s unintentional (and possibly catastrophic) secondary function be to reveal the true extent of data collection and how very little privacy we all really have?

And if it does, then we must really must ask: is the world ready for anticipatory design?