aspire to enquire

GOV.UK

I bloody love what's going on with GOV.UK at the moment.

The scale of the challenge is ridiculous - bring all Government services into one place, unify content structures and make the information useful for the public rather than Civil Servants, all whilst setting up to be futureproofed for a more connected and device neutral web.

It's amazing that even with all of this, there still seems to be an intrinsicly craft-let approach to the project. I just read Ben Terrett's blog about typography, and you should too. 

I think even the beta releases are shaping up to be what would consider to be the best website in the World. In all seriousness. It's completely focussed on the experience, being developed by an awesome team who (appear from the outside at least) have the time, breadth and depth to cover all the aspects of the site that effect that experience. And the project's being developed, communicated and shared in exactly the way a project like this should be.

Truly inspiring.

 

Design for the good people

I'm finding my current workplace incredibly inspiring at the moment; not just because of the amazing Dare people, also because there is a whole heap of awesome on the floor below in the shape of agencies like Identica, Your Studio and thinkpublic. 

It's not too often that we really collaborate though, due to the usual reasons. So it was entirely refreshing to be able to help thinkpublic in a workshop over lunch on Friday, especially as it moves towards being a year since I left Public Zone.

For me, the internet's best moments have been when an offline/physical experience has been enhanced by connections or knowledge gained through a digital channel. Brighton council has an email list of residents with 4x4s who have volunteered to deliver meals on wheels in case of snow. I have more than once discovered a quaint new back street bar off the back of a foursquare notification from a friend. The amazing breakaway discussions at conferences initiated via twitter.

All that stuff that takes the empowerment of a one-to-many publishing medium to inform action or change in 'real life'. As we see more things with their own personalities online, these interactions are likely to become more complex, but also more open to amazing innovation. It's kind of what's motivated me to get involved with The Brixton Society.

So I'm totally inspired by the possibilities of this new project 'Impossible.com', which we talked about on Friday. It's quite a long video, but it's worth sticking with it:

There are so many challenges ahead for impossible.com, but it's exciting hearing people so truly committed to a cause. All those obstructions and contraints that face a project must still be there, but there's so much positivity in the answers they give in the video. If they approach the whole project in that way it's likely that they'll make a whole heap of progress. I really hope they do.

Plus everyone involved so far happens to be world-leading in some way, which probably helps.

I'm going to see about doing my bit by making my own wish, to help out in any small way I can.

When will the internet look like this?

See from 4:58.

That's the internet, right?

I've made a new blog

I've been talking about this for ages, so I set up a tumblr of people jumping into water, like, 2 months ago. I thought I should probably share it here. If you see any good shots to add, let me know!  
 

Fashion forward

Fashion. At one end of the spectrum it's a sense of the popular now, what the average person on the street is doing or wearing. At the other, it's an unobtainable aspiration, a super-glossy exploration of colour, pattern and look that fuels a global industry of designers, journalists and store owners.

Image by Lara Jade 

I've been getting a little confuddled recently as I've tried to consider the digital landscape and fashion media. The confuddlation has been based a little bit on my own experiences as an intern at both a fashion magazine and a fashion PR house, but mainly on my personal consumption of magazines and blogs and on my experience now as a designer of website front-ends. 

I've been trying to work out if there's a future for the unobtainable face of high fashion. Obviously all media is changing and has been for some time, but I can't decide whether the trends to comment, share and appropriate online media are severe threats to fashion, or whether they're actually powerful opportunities . 

Picture by Ivan Rodic

Either way, how can the industry react in the long term?

It's been amazing the past few seasons to see fashion week live shows streamed, the street-style shots of the show guests, and the resulting chitter-chatter on blogs and twitter. If I'd wanted to, I could probably watch a show and post a write-up quicker than the actual journalists there, share photography with my friends and make the brand in question an extension of my online persona. And much like the way it's seemed to go in online design circles, maybe I'd become recognised for choice fashion finds and my unique perspective on them. 

But isn't that the complete antithesis of the way the industry is currently set up? In an interview with a bunch of flowers on SHOWstudio's website, Mandi Lennard (Fashion PR guru) says "it's all about getting your clothes in W magazine". One of the staff at the place I interned at said clients worked with them because "we just know".  

There must be something in SHOWstudio's belief that "showing the entire creative process - from conception to completion - is beneficial for the artist, the audience and the art itself", but I don't see yet how the established world of specific, strategic and nonchalant placement for artistic and commercial motives will adapt to the world of enthusiastic personal oversharing and appropriation. 

It seems that to try to seed anything in either space will be counter-productive in the other. A glamorous high-concept idea (and its price tag) will be commonplace once it's spread across tumblrs and ffffound the world over, and any innovative grassroots fashion movement will become irrelevant once it's been taken up by the mainstream media and redistributed back across the internet. 

This is all before you consider what the internet has done for production itself, in terms of allowing greater numbers of photographers, designers and writers to publicise their own semi-professional efforts outside of traditional avenues. 

I don't really know what my response or outlook on the situation is, except to say that it seems a lot foggier than the music or news landscapes, and decidedly less clear than the fundraising and charity spheres that I'm working in at the moment. 

It's a shame, as it would be nice to mix them all up somehow. Isn't that what the internet's for? 

Maybe it's just a challenge. 

Location on the internet

image by Aram Bartholl
 
Some people find it a little scary, but I'm quite into the way location is being used in a lot of new apps at the moment. I have my foursquare account, I track my cycling to work through runkeeper, I keep track of my travels through dopplr, and I can find a wifi spot in London using Free Wifi London. 

A lot of these things are very successful because they play to the strengths of a mobile device - the immediacy, the spontaneity and the kind of content that their small screens are suited to. It's generally contextual information which helps you interact better with the real-life space around you, which lots of smart post-digital types talk about a lot.

We built some location-based functionality into MyMP, the MP iPhone app I worked on, to enable constituents to see what their MP had (or had not) been doing in their local area. In version 2, we'll probably be making a much bigger deal of this.

Can any of this location-based learning transfer back on to the traditional internet? Most websites access information that is relevant more broadly than to a user's specific location, but there must be a lot of cases where it would be quite cool to tailor the content more locally.

I'm not really talking about things like iGoogle and BBC homepages, which use your postcode to bring up local info. That's nice, but you have to ask the sites to do it.

What if you checked out a charity campaign site and the front page used your IP address in some way to bring up a list of local campaign events you could get involved with? 

I think that would be quite cool.

Websites that should exist #2

So it turns out there are quite a few shopmarking tools already, for things like wedding lists and the like, I guess the opportunity there is to make a web2.0-y one that integrates nicely with all the other tools de jour. 

This one came up when we were looking at pitching for a city tourism site earlier in the month. Wouldn't it be great, while you were researching your holiday destination, if you could just collect all the things you'd seen that you wanted to do, and arrange them into an itinerary, with maps and everything? 

Dopplr does something similar, but I think something between dopplr and delicious would be lovely. You could bookmark any gigs, restaurants, streets, landmarks, galleries, and then arrange them on the map based on how long you want to spend at each one, and then maybe send your itinerary to your mobile device.

Websites that should exist #1

It's my birthday this coming friday. 

Like most people my age with excessive credit card debt, there's not really anything I really need or want right now, I seem to be doing well without those things anyway, so it's all good.

But I do have an amazon wish list. 

The problem is, out of all the things I'm not too bothered about receiving, the things on my wish list definitely top the pile. One of the paradoxes of amazon is that it's the absolute best place for buying functional, plastic, consumer goods, without putting too much thought into the process.

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a wish list for the whole internet?

Then I could add:
Present and correct
Ink Posters
This poster from Monocle
 

So, websites that should exist #1: A shopmarking tool. One that isn't rubbish