I’m here. Where are you?

This rapid proliferation of position-aware devices, finding their way into the pockets and purses of people everywhere, has not gone unnoticed by the web and the consumer electronics market. Leading the pack, the Apple iPhone AppStore carries a raft of applications that explore the potential that comes with knowing your place in the world. For example Geocaching, an app that allows you to play a global treasure hunting game using the real world as a playing field and high-tech GPS gadgetry as instruments to find virtual treasures. Or try Urbanspoon, an application that uses your current location to offer you a restaurant or café in your vicinity.

On the web, free services like Brightkite, Loopt and Foursquare allow you to ‘check in’ to a location and share it with all your friends. ‘I’m at Thorough Bread and Pastry in San Francisco, writing an article for a magazine’ — something I just shared with the world on my Brightkite and my Twitter.

A great many people use their GPS enabled devices to check in at bars and restaurants, clubs and coffee shops, work and home. Others use the enhanced awareness of the device to see who or what else might be in their vicinity, something particularly useful when exploring new cities or countries. When in Rome, go where the Romans go. Get away from the beaten path and the throngs of tourists, and use the power of the internet in your pocket to see what else is available — things that are probably not listed in the Lonely Planet guide.

In just a few years, this location-awareness has transformed the lives of millions of people. Some more examples: just the other night, my friend was using MobileMe’s ‘Find My iPhone’ feature to check where his wife and son were on their 15 hour drive home. The car’s GPS had stopped working and while relying on Google Maps on the phone, they missed their exit due to heavy rain. Google was then trying to take them on a course that would have added a one-hour detour to the already long drive, but thanks to ‘Find My iPhone’ my friend was a able to pinpoint where they were and provide them with precise directions to get back on track.

Using that same service, a LiveJournal user named Kevin who goes by the alias “happywaffle”, was able to track down someone who had thought themselves lucky enough to “find” an iPhone in a bar one night. Chasing the culprit with the aid of a friend and a laptop and using MobileMe’s service to follow the device, Kevin was lucky enough to in fact ‘Find his iPhone’.

These examples illustrate how useful and valuable location awareness can be, but they are still relatively simple use cases on their own. They are enough to matter, but really only indicative of so much potential.

Tearing Down the Wall

On the web itself we haven’t seen too much movement in terms of supporting location awareness. There are some good reasons for that. For one, laptops don’t typically come with GPS receivers built-in. As well, web browsers currently need a plugin to work with Skyhook Wireless, an online service that keeps a database of the real-world locations of wireless hotspots found in almost every urban area. With an appropriate plugin, the user can grant websites and services access to the (rough approximation of the) computer’s position in the world. It’s not as good as GPS of course, but it comes pretty close.

But movements are afoot. At the time of writing the latest public release of Firefox, 3.5, comes with built-in support for the new Geolocation API specification from the W3C. This specification, currently still in Working Draft but soon to go into Last Call status, allows developers to use a native implementation in the browser — as opposed to a plugin that the user must first manually install — to access Geolocation data through a combination of services.

While Firefox is the only desktop browser at this time that supports the new standard, mobileSafari, the version that ships with the iPhone, does so as well. And while desktop Safari doesn’t, the just-released Snow Leopard OS contains built-in functionality to determine the location of the device, so there’s some reason to expect that it will eventually support Geolocation, too. With two of the four main browsers supporting it on the desktop, developers will be more wiling, not to mention more able, to explore the technology.

And then what happens?

Let’s look at a couple of ways in which websites could make use of the Geolocation standard.

One of the first things that springs to mind has to be geo-tagging of content. It’s already a fairly common practice to geo-tag photos, so why not other types of content? While it may often be less relevant to know where a blog post is written, compared to a photo where the location also helps identify the contents of the photo itself, it’s still meta-data that can be of interest, even significance.

Location-oriented web services could do all sorts of things a lot easier, faster and automatically with this technology. Services like Brightkite and Foursquare could almost power themselves with it. A website’s design could be made to include photos from a photo-sharing site like Flickr that are geo-tagged to be at or near the visitor’s location. Or perhaps you’d want your own blog to include one such photo with each blog post you make while traveling.

Websites like Ebay and Craigslist could tell you about everything that’s up for sale within a ten-block radius from where you are, and Yelp could welcome new visitors with the latest and greatest shops and restaurants nearby. The opportunities for brand extension, design and marketing, as well as communication with your visitors are open ended. When these technologies become widely available, the truly innovative implementations will start to emerge.

We’re living in a world where ‘home’ is becoming more and more the place where we open up our laptops. The new home is the screen through which we communicate with the rest of the world; it’s about time we let the real world remind us where we are, and to take in our surroundings.

There’s a whole new world to explore—again.

It’s curious how easily this question rolls off the tongue in the context of a conversation with a stranger. It’s a simple, socially acceptable question that we often ask without a second thought. Sure, it’s an easy ploy to fill the void in a conversation or move it along. However, why that particular question?

Why are we humans so curious about where people are from? And why does the knowledge of where someone is ‘from’ feels like a gift of familiarity? Suddenly, we understand something very important about them and who they are in the world.

The power of place

I believe hidden in the heart of that question is the undeniable power of place. More than a postal address, a GPS coordinate, or a spot on a map, any geography is embedded with a rich collection of histories, cultures, values, politics, languages, shared expectations and dreams. We social creatures inherently understand how place can shape and influence our lives. We use that implicit and unspoken understanding in profound yet intangible ways to forge and deepen our relationships with each other. ‘I’m from Detroit’ provides a world of information that’s distinctly different than ‘I’m from Mumbai.’ Eerily, though, this fuzzy information about place lies largely dormant and hidden in most modern technology experiences today.

Maps as the go-to solution

Maps seem to be the panacea solution to communicate place. It’s the clip art solution for a breaking news article on the BBC News web site or the Facebook application we use to brag about all the places we’ve traveled in the world. Maps are like a Mondrian painting — a logical abstraction that strips away the messiness of a place. A map is a highly recognizable but hopelessly unexpressive birds eye view.

Maps prove useful, though. They help us navigate the known elements of an ever-changing world. Despite the subtle visual dialects, there’s a coded visual language to maps we all know and understand. Maps depict the tangible stuff – roads and highways, cities, landmarks, trails and mountain ranges; maps express the well-worn paths we can use to get somewhere.

Maps are only one piece of the place puzzle

While I like maps, I think they’re only one piece of the place puzzle. There’s another side to place – an important piece of the puzzle that’s yet to be explored. Places are much more than a point on a map. Like memory, place is associative. We all carry a personal atlas in our minds of places we’ve lived, places we’ve visited, places we’d like to go, or places we’ve heard of – and these are landscapes that have no maps or paths – these places are personal, historical, metaphorical, and emotional. This is the heart of place, where it starts to have real meaning and become reflective of our true relationship to geography and sense of place. Shouldn’t the technology experiences we create reflect this?

The web is great at things, not places

We can think of the world as made up of three basic noun-types: people, places and things. As web developers and designers, we’ve spent the majority of our focus on creating sites and systems that help understand the things. Search, the most popular and one might even argue the universal interface for the web, uses words or language to find things – books on Amazon, a song on LastFm, a movie on BitTorrent, a pair of Hush Puppies on eBay. Things own the web. We’ve also devised clever ways to unlock the power of things on the web with features like peer reviews, associated product recommendations and price comparisons.

The web is undeniably great at things, and some might argue it’s pretty good at people, too. While most lack the grace, subtlety and dimensions of human relationships, social networks have provided glimpses into how to begin to grapple with the complexity of people on the web.

Place is the web’s Achilles’ heel – at least on a computer – simply because information is locked in the desktop or laptop context. Restaurant reviews are tough to access unless you know the exact name or address, bus timetables are read minutes or hours before you actually catch the bus.

Mobile is great for unlocking the power of place

Mobile is a different story. Mobile is a technology experience that’s well-suited to unlocking the power of place because we carry our mobile devices everywhere. Even the revered map experience is infinitely more useful on a mobile device than a computer. Mobile applications like Google maps on an iPhone leverage our spatial relationship to place, providing us with highly relevant and timely data.

There’s movement afoot, and people are beginning to make human expressions of place possible.

Technology is allowing landmarks to speak to us like a person, such as the Tower Bridge in London, communicating to followers via Twitter.

Location-aware mobile applications like Twinkle enable conversations to happen between people using the common ground of place as the starting point.

Applications like Urban Spoon add a dose of serendipity to dining by using location as a starting point for a host of restaurant options.

Finally, RFID is making it possible to connect things to place in interesting and meaningful ways. Countless mobile applications make it possible for users to find the best price on items based simply on a bar code or RFID tag and their current location.

What has always excited me most about designing for mobile devices is the new opportunities for people to interact with information. Unlike a lot of ubiquitous computing scenarios, mobile phones are tangible, practical platforms to experiment, prototype, and frankly, play around with new possibilities for information access. I’m excited to see how this mapping, orienteering, and the general sense of ‘I am here-ness’ unfolds over time – how designers and developers will bring the human elements of place to digital experiences. There seems to be no platform more aptly suited to unlock the power of place than mobile.

I first heard this story from Edward Storcher, a wonderful storytelling ICT consultant who also grew up in Africa. It’s a story of outsiders talking about and planning for a village that had no idea it was the center of the world’s attention back in 1898. He says, ‘Everyone else is talking about them, everyone else knows some of the issues they’ve got. Quite often, they’re the last people to find out what’s going on.’

You can find the full talk by Edward at http://vimeo.com/2752747. It’s well worth listening to for so many reasons, only one of which I will highlight here: communication. Specifically, the lack of communication that brought about the birth of a new platform, a web and mobile application for crowdsourcing crisis information from the people on the ground who know what is happening around them.

The birth of Ushahidi

Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, is the organization I co-founded with a number of other Kenyans. It was born out of the turbulence that ripped through Kenya in January 2008 in the wake of a botched election. In the midst of the madness and destruction we quickly deployed a website that gave every Kenyan a voice. Using their mobile phone or the internet people could report incidents of violence, or peace, happening around them. These incidents were then placed on a map at the Ushahidi site, so anyone could quickly see what was going on, and where. Ushahidi was a way for everyone to tell their stories when the media was silent, or looking elsewhere. A way to tell the world what was really happening.

In the very first week of deploying the new site, we had stories coming in from places well out of the normal context. Stories like the game ranger who was hiding a number of women and children in the forest and who needed food, water and other relief (and who we heard was eventually helped by someone who found his report on Ushahidi). There were other stories, not all of murder, mayhem and burning buildings. Some were of peace efforts that were taking place such as the story of Rachel Kung’u, of Peace Caravan, who used her extensive network of youth activists around the country to make inroads and start negotiations where not even the big NGOs, like the Red Cross, could go.

Near the end of February, about seven weeks after the violence had started, things started to settle down. Though we hadn’t built any major tracking mechanism into Ushahidi’s original prototype, we had served over 120,000 page views and collected almost two hundred reports. Most importantly, we had raised awareness, and helped to make sense of, the situation on the ground in Kenya.

As everyone knows, the mobile phone’s entry into Africa in the mid-90s set off a firestorm of change across a continent primed and ready for a way to counteract the rampant inefficiencies brought about by corruption and bureaucracy. What Ushahidi does is to provide a way for a web of information to grow outside the status quo, using those devices that everybody carries in their pockets.

Through examples like Ushahidi in Kenya, you see this phenomenon at work in the political and humanitarian space. However, it’s not just in that sector where we see mobiles enabling extraordinary changes. We can also look to mobile banking and payment services like Mpesa (Kenya) and Wizzit (South Africa) and see quantifiable changes in the way businesses are operating. When I was growing up in Kenya, it used to take three years to get a phone line into your residence or business. Now, all anyone has to do is walk out to the street corner and purchase a $20 phone and a SIM card. The fundamental communications model has changed, and it effects everything.

Ordinary Africans, be they small town rural villagers in places like Kodok, or urbanites in a bustling metropolis like Nairobi, have access to tools that are creating a sea-change in the control and flow of information. It no longer matters that the government creates a media blackout, as they did in Kenya during the post-election violence. Ushahidi has shown that Africans themselves can continue to connect and communicate over vast distances, thereby better understanding the bigger picture of what is happening around them. We are only at the beginning of this change, but the future is starting to make itself clear.

Ushahidi, Africa and the changing world

To truly understand Ushahidi, you have to understand our roots in Africa. The challenges brought about by bad governance, poverty, low-bandwidth (all the negative things you associate with Africa) also provide an incredible opportunity. The developers who are coming up with solutions in Africa, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. We live by this mantra: If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Our challenge is to get people to realize that there is a real competitive advantage to developing and testing software in Africa. The development conditions are unreliable and the environment is harsh. It isn’t fun to work off slow internet connections or deal with expensive and poor mobile phone networks. All of these things, and more, make just the technological side of developing in Africa a challenge, which is why it’s also a particularly good place to try new things.

If we embrace these handicaps, we might find that there’s a silver-lining inside. Africa turns from being a place to avoid, to being a great location to test new ideas and applications, and build for robustness and real-world use.

This means that we should focus first on mobile phones, then on the internet. From the beginning, Ushahidi has been about letting ordinary people use what’s in their pocket, their mobile phone, to send in reports happening around them. The mobile phone is the default device. We’ve focused on mobile-only interaction as a basic tenet, and created a platform that serves the developing world first. But we want to offer that platform to the West as something that they can use too.

Recently we have seen an increased discussion of the mobiles vs PCs debate, but I actually see this as a false dichotomy. We know what people are using right now in places like Africa — mobiles, and we also know what can be done when we build database-driven services for high-bandwidth internet connections. Both these things are needed and both are good. And Both will be used in Africa eventually. However, as Steve Song of the Shuttleworth Foundation states:

I think there is a temptation to pick one technology that is going to ‘save’ the developing world but the reality is that there are going to be many solutions. The only thing that we need to be absolutely clear on is that everything should run on the Internet Protocol (IP).

Mobiles, even simple SMS only phones like those found in Africa, are already being used to get the word out during tense times. We saw it with Ushahidi in Kenya. Then we saw it again in Zimbabwe’s election, where ordinary Zimbabweans were capturing pictures of the count tally at polling stations. And now we have seen it most recently in Mumbai, Gaza and Iran. These were all hot-flash political emergencies, and mainstream media is troubled, as are many experts and government officials, by how empowered ordinary people have become in gathering, disseminating and amplifying information in ways that just weren’t possible before.

If anything, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai has brought home the fact that we are all part of a sea change in news and information flow and transparency. The barriers are now so low that anyone can tell their story, and the whole world can see it live – in real time. There is no stopping this change in information dynamics, there is only harnessing it in ways that make it a level playing field.

What we’re seeing is that it’s no longer a one-to-many mass broadcast environment, it’s now a mass-broadcast to mass-broadcast environment. In Kenya, rightly or wrongly, the government wanted to shut down the mobile phone infrastructure so that messages inciting violence couldn’t be sent. They eventually saw this couldn’t work. How do you stop 6 million SMS messages without crippling your own businesses, infrastructure and ability to get work done?

The answer is not to take it down or make people share less — that will never happen and it’s a short-term solution at best. Instead, we need to figure out ways to harness information from an even greater number of people, and make this information even more useful.

Ushahidi is here to make this whole process more open, with a platform that anyone can get started on. Using what we’ve learned from building Ushahidi, our goal is to do one thing very well: create an engine that makes it easy to crowdsource crisis information.

Turning the tables

Ushahidi is now a free and open source software project, with developers scattered all over the world, but with a strong central core working out of Africa. It’s Africans developing for African needs and exporting that product to the West. Its programmers in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda that are shaping the way the world will interact with location and information in times of emergency.

How does this apply to those in Kodok? It’s the beginning of something new, a better way for these people to understand their place in the world. A way to pierce the veil of information that never makes it to their village, and a way to influence the world around them in a way that wasn’t possible before. Changes in mobile phones, mapping and web technology are beginning to show what happens when ordinary Africans are empowered with not only information, but the knowledge that they can do something with it.

But it’s not just Africa, and it’s not just Ushahidi. In a way, we were all our own Kodok prior to the internet and mobile phones. We were at the mercy of the traditional media talking about us, about large organizations setting the agenda and running our lives. New tools are changing how information flows, who disseminates it, how we find out more about what we’re interested in, and who we trust as we gather information to use in our daily lives.

Feynman worked on the atomic bomb and developed the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He didn’t agree.

“I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty,” he said in an interview, telling the story of his response. “There is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting — it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.”

A double view

This double view of a flower doesn’t fixate on its beauty. When you see two scales simultaneously — the flower in your hand; the atoms and processes of nature at a global scale — your consciousness ricochets between them, producing awe and enlightenment both.

Stewart Brand, pivotal in the creation of the earliest electronic communities and the culture of the internet, is another hero of mine. In 1966 he started a movement in San Francisco, distributing buttons with the message, “why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’ He campaigned for Nasa to turn its cameras back on the planet and show it to us, laid out.

In the early 1970s Nasa obliged and published the Blue Marble photo. You will have seen it: the Earth hangs as a crystal sphere of white, blue and precarious brown, alone in a black cosmos.

You see yourself and the planet all at once, two perspectives overlaid. We’re hardened to such images now and it’s hard to imagine what it was like, a generation ago, to have the God’s eye view of the Blue Marble for the first time.

Brand later spoke about why he’d campaigned. “People act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilization right.”

The macroscope

Feynman’s flower and Brand’s whole Earth are, to me, scientific instruments. Biologists have microscopes. Astronomers and peeping toms have telescopes. The instruments we have here, to use the designer John Thackera’s term, are macroscopes. Thackara gives a definition: “A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.”

A macroscope will focus ideas as a microscope focuses light. A designer’s job is not only to fulfil their craft, in graphics, or furniture, or silver or whatever it may be. And it’s not only to understand all kinds of context and produce objects that are aesthetically and functionally pleasing. A designer’s job is also to invent culture.

I make that addition, to the designer job specification, prompted by my business partner Jack Schulze. In a recent interview he attacked the view that design is about solving problems: “Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.”

Schulze points out this feature of design because otherwise design is not distinguishable from others of the many processes of creation. Great products can come out of processes such as ethnography, market analysis, opportunistic use of the cheap products of the Chinese manufacturing industry, and luck. Design is but one approach. Design’s differentiation, says Schulze — and I concur — is its obligation to participate in and invent the world. There is an obligation for designers to push culture forward, and because of that, to be relevant.

Since I’m being pedantic about the definition of design, I could easily be as pedantic about the definition of culture. Happily Bruno Munari, Italian designer and author of “Design as Art,” supplies a working definition of “culture” which is both adequate and profound. Culture, he says, is “the things that make life interesting.”

The world is changing at pace and at scale. To remain relevant, let alone interesting, is a struggle if culture is too large and too broad to apprehend. Take, for example, the global financial system, which in late 2008 almost collapsed and took civilization with it. The cleverest people in the world by any measure you can name — cannot tell a cohesive story about the near collapse of the banks. We can’t say why it happened. It is too big to see.

Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole financial system yet?

A new kind of map projection

To see the banks and, by extension, all of culture on a human scale, we need a special sort of instrument: a macroscope. A macroscope could show us the personal effect of debt and finance on a human scale, and the globalised system together. It would help us make connections and to make human connection. And from there, act.

Such an ability to feel the human scale and the grand view all at once seems like a superpower. Recently, at BERG, we attempted to visualise this superpower as it would change the way you navigated a city, the urban environment being the archetypal human creation which is lived in but also too large to comprehend.

The result is a new kind of map projection, and a map of Manhattan named “Here & There.” The projection warps the city grid, showing the top-down and street view in one. Now, looking over conventional photos of the New York skyline, I notice the absence of my new power to see here and spy there together, and being able to plot a path between them. A macroscope of the banks would have the long zoom power of Feynman’s point of view of a flower, and the visual clarity of the map of Manhattan.

I believe our job is the creation of Here & Theres for all sorts of matters of cultural importance. Macroscopes give all of us sight of our place in the world, and the power to participate in it; and, as designers, they help us understand culture more directly, in order — ultimately, and simply — to better engage in our craft with integrity and relevance.

In his article “Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998″ long-time usability specialist Jakob Nielsen would have you believe that the idea of ‘one web’ is incompatible with universal access and the mobile web:

“Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions.”

In one regard Nielson is right; browsing content on a mobile or hand-held device brings a myriad of barriers to access that are not such big issues on a desktop, or don’t exist at all. Varying viewport sizes, problematic keyboard input, walled garden platforms, poor scripting and plugin support all conspire against the mobile user. A mobile user’s experience is not dissimilar to that of the user with a disability on a desktop computer. This in turn leads many designers to build platform or mobile specific websites such as iPhone and .mobi, just as Nielsen suggests.

That browsing on mobiles and hand-helds is more difficult is a fact. That designing separate versions to cater for the needs of users on hand-helds is, however, questionable. To understand why let’s bring web accessibility into the equation.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) from the World Wide Web Consortium draws parallels between making a website accessible for people with disabilities and making it accessible for mobile devices. While there is no direct mapping between the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Mobile Web Best Practice (MWBP), there is a significant overlap which means designing for mobile goes a long way to supporting users with disabilities and vice versa.

So far so good but this raises the question: if WCAG and MWBP are implemented will a website be both mobile ready and accessible to users with disabilities? This is where the equation ceases to be quite so neat and tidy. One does not guarantee the other just as building a site strictly following WCAG will not always guarantee it is usable by people with disabilities.

So what are the highlights and cross overs between accessible and mobile web design? Are there potential conflicts of interest? And how feasible is it really to create websites which are universally accessible across devices using today’s technologies?

CSS

CSS is an obvious candidate for supporting both accessible and mobile web design. Separating content from presentation and flexible layouts are core to this. To accommodate users with different output media it is standard to support media types — style sheets or styles tailored for different media such as ‘print’, ‘screen’, ‘aural’, ‘braille’, ‘handheld’, ‘print’, ‘projection’, ‘screen’, ‘tty’, ‘tv’, and ‘all’ as defined in CSS 2.1. These can either be linked in separate stylesheets or declared in sections of a stylesheet using the @media attribute.

CSS 3 introduces “media queries” which extends the functionality of media types by allowing you to define what type of output devices a style sheet applies to using media features such as ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘device-width’, ‘device-height’, ‘orientation’, ‘aspect-ratio’, ‘device-aspect-ratio’, ‘color’, ‘color-index’, ‘monochrome’, ‘resolution’, ‘scan’, and ‘grid’. The most frequently used are ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘device-width’, ‘device-height’ which are widely supported while others have varying support across browsers. Using these, content can be tailored to a specific range of output devices and screen sizes without resorting to separate versions of your website for iPhone, .mobi and so on.

Media queries can be used in linked stylesheets or delivered using the @import at rule or @media attribute. A typical format for the @media attribute is as follows:

The above gives instructions to the user agent on how to render the page depending on viewport size. Currently support for media queries on devices is still evolving but does include Opera Mobile, Opera Mini 4, Opera on the Nintendo Wii, iPhone, Bolt, Iris and the Nokia s60 browser.

Device independence

Device independence aims to make — as far as is reasonable — the same information and functionality available to users irrespective of the device they are using. This does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same way, but importantly, it is nevertheless available.

A staple of good web design is clear navigation and never more so than for mobile web users and users with disabilities. Clearly described and unique links, well worded succinct headings and well-written alternative text for images are all fundamental to good navigation.

Occasionally however, what may work on the desktop to enable accessibility might work against users on different devices. Using CSS to hide text that is intended to be invisible on screen yet available to screen readers is a prime example of this. Often this is used for hidden “new window” warnings or for news sites that have a series of short summaries of stories followed by a link that says “full story”. To hide text a CSS selector rule is set as follows:

Then <span> is used with a link to hide text within the HTML:

The benefit for a screen reader user is they hear the heading to the news item when they tab onto the link. This is important when you have many links to “Full story” on a page. On the other hand mobile users don’t get this information which can result in costly download charges from seemingly small digressions clicking on unclear links. This is especially annoying when you don’t get the new window warnings as back buttons don’t work.

Such vital navigational information cannot be communicated via CSS alone and must instead be visible text or icons to warn users of new windows. As a basic rule content should always appear in the document object and be available with CSS disabled. Text generated via CSS is not part of the document source and is therefore not available to mobile users.

Proprietary versus open technologies

Proprietary technologies such as Flash are a huge challenge to universal access. Support on mobile platforms as well as alternate devices such as the Wii is not robust.

To further exacerbate the problem on the desktop most modern browsers aside from IE suffer from poor keyboard support of Flash. While Flash content itself may be navigable the Flash object can not be tabbed into or out of from the browser as there is no standardized support API for plugins. This is currently being addressed by plugin vendors such as Adobe and browser makes such as Opera, Apple and Mozilla but until the issue is fixed universally fallback alternatives need to be provided in the form of captions and transcripts.

With video an essential and growing part of today’s web, proprietary formats lock out many users unless appropriate alternatives or fallback are provided. While HTML5 and the <video> element could rectify ongoing issues with codec support on the desktop, lack of <video> support across browsers and then the additional work to bring this to mobile mean we are certainly not there yet. This is not to say that striving for a standards based approach that HTML5 will eventually offer should be ignored in favour of proprietary formats.

What about the screen readers?

Perhaps the biggest question that comes to mind with mobile accessibility is support for users of screen readers, the poster child for accessibility. Rightly or wrongly screen reader users are considered the most extreme users to accommodate when it comes to accessing content, an issue that is magnified when it comes to mobile browsing.

On the desktop screen readers are able to access web content via the browser using hooks provided by accessibility API’s such as MSAA, IAccessible2 and UI Automation. Unfortunately the walled garden nature of mobile platforms means that no such shared API’s exist across mobile platforms. The AEGIS project (Open Accessibility Everywhere) has set out to create a shared API but there is no scheduled release for this, or indeed an outline of what it would entail and how it would be deployed across platforms.

For now mobile screen reader users are restricted to platform specific screen readers such as Voiceover on iPhone or Talks on Nokia and Blackberry. This is a start at least and the key thing to know is that if you accommodate for screen readers on the desktop you will be building in access to content on mobile whatever screen reader or platform is used now or in the future.

Looking ahead

As we’ve seen there are some significant challenges to universal access across devices for diverse users. However by building two versions of one site we are in danger of making the same mistakes we made on the desktop in the late 90s.

Back then separate text-only websites were considered a one shot accessibility solution that in reality failed dismally. Many text only websites, while technically accessible to screen readers, forfeited accessibility for users with other needs such as people with cognitive problems who need colour, layout and images in order to comprehend layout. Additionally, content was not always equivalent between the two versions. The same issue happens today with mobile only versions of sites, where links or content are often stripped out to make the mobile version lighter.

Separate versions means that accessibility becomes compartmentalized: a bolt on rather than built in feature. It also means that people without accessibility needs don’t benefit from the additional usability that an accessible site gives, and mobile users fall neatly into this group. Emerging technologies may still be variously supported across desktop and mobile browsers but building to open standards will lead to ‘one web’; an easier place to navigate whatever your browser, platform or assistive technology and in the long run an easier web to develop for.

While standards support on mobile may seem more variable than on the desktop the positive side is that baseline mobile browser capabilities are improving fast. In addition to this people tend to upgrade mobiles every year or so whereas on the desktop many web users globally still use older less standards compliant browsers such as IE6 which came out 8 years ago.

With that in mind key things to think about when building websites for diverse and mobile users are:

• use CSS media types and media queries to accommodate different devices
• design for device independence
• ensure all information is accessible via HTML and not CSS
• use existing web standards over proprietary formats

With the web quite literally everywhere we have a bigger obligation than ever to ensure people have access no matter what their platform, environment or personal needs. If we split the web now we are in danger of losing this shared framework and true universality across devices.

As traditional audiences, the (expensive and often difficult to use) media technologies narrated stories on our behalf. These stories were made for us but not necessarily about us: look at the ‘whiteness’ of Australian TV until reality TV exposed non-white folks onto our screens.

But Twitterville is made by and about us. We have the luxury, and a responsibility, to be identified for who we are/want to be, not for what others (TV personalities, cinematic characters, comic book heroes etc) want us to identify with. Unlike Hollywood, where the audience (as though it is a single being) gazes at the desired ‘stars’ on the exclusive screen, Twitterville gives us the opportunity to exchange the gaze and recognize our diversity via our individualized screens. It is a powerful space to be part of. Jean-Paul Sartre was well aware of this phenomenon long before the web came to be, stating: ‘As I am under the gaze I no longer see the eye that looks at me, and if I see the eye, the gaze disappears’. In Twitterville the equilibrium of power shifts as collective awareness of each other’s presence changes our perceptions of our selves and our space.

Hollywood’s impact on Twitter is clearly significant as some of the most followed twitterers also happen to be celebrities. Where would Twitter be without those well known personas? And what is their agenda? Is it the same as yours? Both Twitterville and Hollywood are everpresent entities – but which is mimicking which?

Sometimes, Twitter seems to act as filling a void that we all recognize in our lives: the need for attention, to belong, to matter and to be recognized. Those needs can be expressed in many forms: sharing information, asking questions, offering answers. But some tweets feel like botox: unnecessarily injected, forced from fear of disappearing in the crowd, fed by a need to belong. Trying to enhance your appearance can be an ugly thing.

Through its ongoing self-described personas and actions, Twitter exposes to us, more clearly than any other technosocial space before it, that humans are social beings and isolation is not a desirable position. We want to be visible. Twitter is a space where the Hollywood culture of “content for the people” clashes with the a culture of “content of the people”. How we see ourselves in Twitterville is still, for better or worse, bound together with Hollywood – they both represent and feed popular culture.

The really fascinating aspect of Twitter is observing how important its space becomes for our deepest, unconscious and intimate desires to be shared amongst ourselves. Twitter is part of our ongoing search for utopia – its space is accessible and harmonious, but it exposes unintentionally(?) many ugly truths about ourselves. It is our choice to Tweet – we all embody those messages. And just like Hollywood’s celebrities, we must recognize their power and impact beyond Twittterville. You have desired and actively constructed this gaze. Remember, your spectators manipulate their image, and yours is under a constant collective surveillance.

Those in the Einstein camp are faced with problems of time when getting from star system A to star system B: characters age at different rates, the plot moves at a set speed, time passes.

Those who ignore Einstein’s theories simply circumvent the light barrier, pass through wormholes and other creations, warping space and time.

We can think about this second approach more practically. Take a piece of paper. Mark an A on the paper. Then mark a B somewhere else. Getting from A to B usually involves travelling across the sheet of paper. The superluminal solution is to fold the paper so that the points are touching. If space can be warped like a piece of paper then travel becomes meaningless. Not only are points A and B connected, every single point in the universe, from A to Z, are potential neighbours. Distance collapses. This is how the internet works.

The conceptual metaphors of the web

The internet is a physical thing. It is made of machines. Distributed across the planet, it is laden with the baggage of mass: resistance, latency and lag. The internet is the physical vessel of the world wide web. But our consensual hallucination is not hampered by the restrictions of space. Cyberspace, like hyperspace, collapses distance. Hyperlinks are the wormholes that can potentially connect every single resource on the web.

Our brains have evolved over thousands of years to deal with the physical world. Our thinking is bounded by the spatial dimensions of our environment. When we are confronted with theoretical constructs, we employ conceptual metaphors to map them onto physical space. Time, for example, is intangible. But we talk about time as if it were a physical thing: we take it, make it, and save it.

We have used conceptual metaphors since the birth of the web. We talk about web ‘sites’ and information ‘architecture.’ We use verbs of movement like surfing, browsing, and visiting. Faced with the limitless potential of an unbounded medium, we use language to erect our own boundaries.

Disrupting the metaphors: Ajax

Occasionally, a technological shift is so great that it requires a corresponding change in our conceptual metaphors. Ajax is a linguistically disruptive technology. The traditional web is ‘navigated’ by the user, moving from location to location. But with Ajax the metaphor needs to change because the user’s location remains constant. We apply verbs from the world of the desktop: creating, editing, deleting. In a faint echo of Ted Nelson’s ideas of transclusion, in an Ajax space it is the information that now moves, called up by a stationary user.

My definition of Ajax is fairly broad. Anything that can communicate with a server without refreshing the entire document is Ajax in my book. It could be JavaScript-driven but it could just as well be implemented with Flash. Every time you embed a YouTube clip on your blog, you are opening a wormhole to the YouTube cosmos. A visitor to your site can peruse content from YouTube without moving from your URL.

Many of the design challenges thrown up by Ajax aren’t technological problems. Instead, they are caused by a clash of conceptual metaphors. Why doesn’t the back button return me to the previous state of the current page? Why can’t I bookmark the changed state of the current page? The back button and bookmarking both rely on the browser’s history stack. But the history stack is an artifact of the conceptual metaphor of the web as a place. It is a map of your travels. If, thanks to Ajax, you no are no longer travelling, you don’t need a map. There are no maps for these territories.

Conveying “presence” on the web

The web is not a tangible place. Without physical dimensions, there is no way to convey presence. Presence is a by-product of location. In our everyday three-dimensional world, our senses are attuned to notice when others are sharing the same space as us. We are aware of their presence. We can further subdivide presence into units of proximity: near, far, and everything in between. That subtlety is lost in the dimensionless realm of the web.

There have been quite a few attempts to attain presence in non-dimensional space. Virtual worlds like Second Life go to great lengths to replicate the concepts of near and far. Most of the effort involves producing a three dimensional environment on the two-dimensional plane of a screen. The more convincing the graphics, so the thinking goes, the more realistic the environment.

This same thinking drove development in another area where ‘virtual reality’ has historically been chased as the ultimate goal. The gaming industry has spent years aspiring to more advanced visual realism and graphic complexity. While Microsoft and Sony were locked in this battle of the polygons, Nintendo took an entirely different approach with their Wii console. Despite the comparatively weak graphics, the experience of wielding a wiimote as a tennis racquet, a guitar, or a steering wheel can be incredibly immersive.

Immersive online experiences are not necessarily going to be found in virtual worlds like Second Life. The feeling I get when I check Twitter is the closest I’ve ever come to jacking in to the Matrix. Twitter isn’t graphically rich. It isn’t even textually rich; communication is limited to 140 characters or fewer. Yet those nuggets of text convey more presence than I could ever get from the Metaverse. Where Second Life seeks to reproduce the physical boundaries of the ‘real’ world, Twitter is making good use of the distance-collapsing nature of the web.

The recreation of barriers on the web is often held up as the very paragon of innovation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the creation of so-called Rich Internet Applications. Rather than making use of the limitless nature of the web, many of these applications seek to recreate the confined boundaries of the desktop. Is this the limit of our imagination? Faced with a medium that has literally no limits, we seek to impose the limitations of other environments; the fixed dimensions of the printed page, the single user model of the desktop computer. The desktop environment may have rich surfaces, but as Nintendo and Twitter have shown us, it’s the experience that counts.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic.

You’ve not heard of Yiying? Well, unless your only exposure to Twitter is the near constant reference to it in the mainstream media, you’ll have seen her handiwork, the now iconic ‘Fail Whale’, which rears its head whenever the wildly popular service goes offline, an occurrence less frequent now than a year or two ago, when people the world over piled on and began following the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey. But more of the whale later. How exactly did a woman growing up in Shanghai in the 1990s end up living, studying and now running a design studio in Sydney, Australia?

Without a hint of irony or self consciousness, Lu says it was Australia’s furry animals which drew her here.

“The reason I wanted to study in Australia was, firstly, I was very much interested in seeing koalas and kangaroos”. She got off the plane and went “straight to the zoo, and…”, she adds a little apologetically, “they are really smelly…and enormous”. Though she hastens to add she still feels the same affection for them — a sinus problem at the time blocking her sense of smell mightn’t have hurt.

Such a fixation with cuddly animals would seem a contradiction for the graduate of a prestigious, selective mathematics and sciences focused school, where design and art simply weren’t on the agenda. But apparent contradictions are central to Yiying’s approach to the world. A ‘left brain’ child by her own admission, the drawers under her bed literally bursting with Japanese and Chinese manga comic books, Yiying chose to pursue a technical education, recognizing the ‘right brain’ shortcomings in her youthful outlook. She says now of that education, which was something she had to work hard to keep up with, that the ability to think mathematically helps her with the more technical aspects of design — from using sophisticated software, to determining the complex folds for her recent ‘Aussiegami’ project — a dozen origami pieces depicting those furry (and some not so furry) Australian animals that you can fold yourself.

The ‘Aussiegami’ project perfectly captures Yiying’s “yin yang” nature: born and raised in ‘the east’, but with a ‘western’ higher education. Yiying strives for simplicity — ‘less is more’ as she puts it. She admires the formality of papercut, watercolor and other artistic traditions from Japan and China. But at the same time she acknowledges that she is something of a magpie ‘collecting the shiny things that she sees’ as inspiration for her work. When people have observed to her that her Fail Whale, for instance, seems influenced by papercut techniques, with its small palette of contrasting colors, and very distinct shapes, Yiying acknowledges this but observes that these techniques aren’t so much conscious, but embedded in her, coming out naturally as she works.

How did Yiying end up being a designer? Perhaps demonstrating that Generation Y is indeed a generation without borders, she says “I never had a serious thought about exactly what I was going to be…I was interested in visual communication, and wanted to go down that pathway”. As with many of her generation, not for her grand plans and schemes, it was rather the constant exploring that made her realize she wanted to be a visual designer. The furry animals (and it must be said, having family living there) brought her to Australia, and the University of NSW. Here, in her foundation year — her first formal exposure to design education — she was awarded the Outstanding Student in Design. In what was clearly a prescient decision, a professor at UTS recruited her to that university, on the basis Yiying says that “they had the best coffee, and they all dressed in black”. A copious coffee drinker, the colourful Yiying is however the opposite of the cliched black wearing design student. These days she returns the favour by teaching design at the UTS part time, along with a huge workload of professional and personal design projects.

What sets Yiying apart from other hard working, creative designers is both something of a complete accident, yet seemingly inevitable. Yes, that whale. Originally designed as an eCard for a friend whose party in Ireland she couldn’t attend, Yiying put the work, among others, on iStockPhoto, a well known stock photo and artwork site. Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter found it here nearly a year later, and licensed it for use on a page that displays when Twitter crashed. Such was users’ affection for Twitter that the whale became something of a mascot for Twitter itself, with Twitter’s outages almost part of the character of the service, a little like the absent-mindedness of a beloved great aunt. Indeed, the whale was named by the Twitter community, and had its own fan club and web site, before Yiying even knew of the service and its use of her now iconic image. When she did hear of it she was initially concerned that her defining professional achievement would be associated with failure, but she’s put that thought behind her. Rather than reacting negatively, Yiying has embraced this viral community of ‘fail whalers’.

Yiying has also embraced the hundreds of derivative works in homage and reference to the whale, from 3D models, to animated versions, games, cocktails and beers, even tattoos, to the tribute to Michael Jackson that appeared hours after the singer’s death depicting the singer in the place of the whale, lifted up by birds. No crude copy, Yiying says of this work that so good was the illustration, she felt she might have done it herself. It was a particularly apt reworking, she observes, given the original title of the Fail Whale was ‘Lifting up a dreamer’.

Will Yiying Lu turn out to be a one hit wonder like so many viral phenomena? Unlike manufactured sensations, the combination of clearly great talent, with a refreshingly relaxed attitude to others borrowing her work (she only draws the line at others simply selling reproductions of her original work) stands her in great stead in an age where as Kevin Kelly puts it “the digital economy is … run on a river of copies.” One only needs to compare her attitude with that of a previous generation’s wunderkind, Damien Hirst, who has reportedly demanded payment for the use of an image of his £50 million diamond encrusted skull artwork by a teenage graffiti artist.

Presently Lu mixes part time teaching at UTS with work on branding, illustration, art direction and much more, with her own side projects, including her first ever individual exhibition as part of Australian Web Week and Web Directions South, where she’s collaborating with Australian Augmented Reality pioneers MOB. Having been privileged enough to have had a sneak look at this and some of her other upcoming projects, if you were a betting person, you’d be tempted to put a few dollars on Yiying Lu being a name you’ll hear more from in the coming years.

Until now.

These days, people (especially web people) are jumping on the content strategy bandwagon faster than hippies catching the bus to Woodstock. I know what you’re thinking — web pundits have been annoying everybody with this ‘content is king’ business for 15 years and it never mattered before. Why should you care now?

What is content strategy anyway?

Before we go too far, let’s define content and content strategy.

Content is anything that informs, instructs, or entertains people. Text, raw data, images, games, music, lectures, videos, flash widgets, a good joke, roadside signs – it’s all content.

A content strategy is a plan for creating, sharing, and governing content effectively.

Content strategy isn’t just a web thing. In fact, it’s been around for thousands of years. Content creation and sharing began when our earliest ancestors started telling each other stories. By the time the Paleolithics were painting on cave walls in Lascaux, there is evidence that content had rules. So content strategy was happening in 16,000 B.C., if not before.

Since then, the amount of content has increased exponentially with each generation. Today, more than half of the workforce in industrialized countries is paid to create or share content. Advertising people create ads, product people create spec sheets, lawyers write complicated policies that no one reads. A content strategy ensures all of the time, effort, and money invested on content is well spent.

What’s the web got to do with it?

Before the web, if your company didn’t have a good content strategy, it wasn’t a big deal. Every department or business unit created content for their own audience. Press releases were only sent to the press. The finance team gave reports to the investors behind closed doors. Consumers may have received a sales brochure and an instruction manual – but rarely at the same time. Because pieces of content weren’t seen or used together, there wasn’t a lot incentive for organizations to make content cohesive.

The internet changed all that. Online, disparate content is (literally) linked together in ways nobody expected. The press releases are right next to the investor information, which is right next to the customer information.

In addition, all of the communication channels are integrated with the web. The print brochures say ‘learn more at our web site.’ Then, at the web site you see, ‘Stay informed, follow us on Twitter.’

When done right, a corporate web site or intranet project brings all of the business units together – sometimes for the very first time. But as web veterans know, it can get ugly. Web projects expose all of the organization’s content inconsistencies, inadequacies, and inefficiencies. Fingers are pointed, politics get petty, and passions run high.

Negotiating the content minefield can be challenging. But, unless the content issues are addressed, internal teams won’t be satisfied, and more importantly, the user won’t be satisfied. And we all know, if the user ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Why now?

If web has been around for more than 15 years, why hasn’t content strategy come to prominence before now? Let’s face it. Content strategy is hard. It’s not particularly sexy either. Technology, usability, graphic design – even SEO – all sound like more fun. It’s human nature that people tried everything else first.

I like to compare the web’s evolution to a human life cycle.

The mid-nineties were the web’s childhood. Web sites were full of all sorts of toys like splash pages and flaming gifs. Big business didn’t take the web seriously, so no real substance was necessary. When we did attempt to put content online, we did what kids do – we imitated our predecessors: older forms of communication like brochures and catalogs.

Around 1999, the web entered adolescence. Like a teenager, the web industry became obsessed with what other people think (the user experience) at the expense of all else. Companies were no better. They acted like university students with their first credit cards – blowing the wad on trendy CMS systems and changing their online ‘identities’ every few months.

In 2009, the web has become a young adult. We still like to have fun and act like kids sometimes and the lessons we learned as adolescents will always be valuable. But, now it’s time to prove our mettle. We need to grow up, join the business world, and start making money. Businesses now want the web to prove ROI, and technology and design can only get us so far.

At the end of the day, the web is about sharing content. We have no alternative but to focus on content strategy. It may not be sexy but it is rewarding.

Why you should care, part one: content strategy works

Good content strategy has many benefits. But, primarily it helps organizations ensure content is useful, usable, purposeful, and profitable.

Since content strategy is a relatively new business concept, the effectiveness of content strategy hasn’t been measured very often. But there are a few famous successes.

In 1988, ‘Just do it’ started as an ad campaign but quickly turned into the core of Nike’s content ecosystem. It was on every shoebox, product label, promotional pamphlet, and web page. Whether you saw story about Michael Jordan or a job description on the Nike career page, the ‘Just do it’ message came across.

Dan Wieden, the guy behind ‘Just do it,’ explained why they chose to use content to hold the original ad campaign together.

We were doing so many [ad] spots and the look had to be different, but we felt we needed to have some cement to the thing.

Between 1988 and 1998, Nike boosted its share of U.S. athletic shoe sales from 18 percent to 43 percent. Worldwide sales increased from $877 million to $9.2 billion. (Source: Center for Applied Research)

Not bad, eh?

Why you should care, part two: you’re already a content strategist.

No matter who you are or what you do, you’re a content strategist. You probably created content before breakfast this morning – maybe you updated your Facebook status or sent a text message to a friend. Actually, you created content before you even woke up. By simply continuing to exist, the data in your medical and government records changed.

We each create, use, and publish an astonishing amount of content. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we need strategies to deal with it. We intuitively

• filter the content we share: you might tweet about your personal life, but personal hygiene, not so much.
• tailor content to our audiences: your arrested-at-16 story is legendary to your friends, but your mum has never heard it.
• choose a content delivery method for each situation: you begin to write a sarcastic email to your brother, but then choose to call him instead.

Content is one of the things that makes people human. Why is this important to your career? Every colleague you have and every client you’ll ever meet is a content strategist, too. Finally, since interactive media are primarily designed to deliver content, if someone hires you to help on an interactive project of any kind, you are part of their content strategy.

You’re welcome to stay.

As a web professional, you’re in the right place, at the right time to become a content advocate. We’ve got plenty of room here on the content strategy bandwagon. You’re welcome to stay.

…it was held that in a unilateral contract i.e. one where the act of acceptance is also consideration of the promise offered; that there is no general proposition that once the offeree commences performance of the act of acceptance, the offeror is not at liberty to revoke the offer. There may, however, be an ancillary contract not to revoke, or an estoppel against deprivation of the chance of completing acceptance…
— Some lecturer in Cameron’s law course

When I fell asleep listening to this lecture I convinced myself I wasn’t cut out for law.

Still, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do otherwise. But who really does when they’re at university? Luckily, I’d somehow managed to get the local student publication to become reliant on my Photoshop skills, developed late at night in my secret dojo/bedroom. That tiny morsel of experience gave my resume enough gravitas to distract someone who was looking for a desktop publisher from the fact that I wasn’t actually in desktop publishing (does that even exist now, or is it just called publishing?) And from there, it was just a hop, step and a jump into web design.

What I’m trying to highlight here is passion. Pretty much everyone I know who makes stuff for the web has a similar story. Army recruits who became front-end coders, zoologists who are now search engine optimisers, dive instructors who design. We’ve all chosen to be here because it excites us. Sometimes it excites us so much that we go home from our jobs and do exactly what we’ve been doing all day at work. We are where we are because we’ve found our (professional) passion – the thing that makes us happiest.

But even after you’ve found a job you love to do, it’s still a lot of hard work to keep it that way. Before you realise it you can be neck deep in accounting or mired in management and you’re back at square one – a job you hate. You know that excitement you had when you first discovered web standards? When you had no idea about floats, but you read that article about how to make two columns without a table and suddenly it just clicked? Well, now that’s turned into a potential client, a 23 page proposal to win their project, which you did, but they took four months to actually decide that you did, and they didn’t bother to change their six month deadline, so now you’ve got two months to do four months of work.

Breathe.

Why were you excited again?

What excited me – still excites me – about the web is its combination of discovery and creativity. Discovery of this new world where there are no rules, just people making things up as they go along; finding new ideas and new ways of doing things. Alongside this are the creative possibilities of design – making something from nothing, crafting an experience. It’s these elements which keep me passionate.

Passion isn’t fixed in stone. I have a knack for CSS and JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean they excite me as much as they did five years ago. People mature, and change, and naturally the place you belong to changes with you. It’s not the tools you use that define you, it’s the motivations you have for using the tools.

Most people don’t know my motivations, they know the product of them. Clients couldn’t care less about whether you want to explore the use of Perlin noise fields for the particle simulation of flocking behaviour. They just want you to deliver on your promise of making something cool and/or useful. And that’s the problem with work. It has a tendency to be one step behind you.

“Can you make me a logo like the one you did for BizzyCorpSoft?“
“I really don’t want to do another … How much? Well, if you’re going to give me that many truck loads of money, then …”

Just when you’ve packed your bags and are about to move onto the next place they pull you back in with money, guilt, laziness, or an irresistible combination of all three.

Staying passionate about your work

It’s often hard to stay self-focused when so many people are demanding your attention. Here are some tactics that I use to keep the flame alive.

1. #1 Do what you want to do

   You will become known for doing what you do.
   Jonathan Harris (creator of wefeelfine.org)

   People will ask you to do what they know you can do. There’s no point sitting there wishing that a client would come along and ask you to make that 3D underwater iPhone shopping application you dream of making, when you’re best known for converting product catalogues to PDF.

   So, if you want to be paid to make semi-submersible e-commerce sites then you’ll have to make your first one on your own time. Or you might be lucky enough to sneak it into an existing project. But you’ll still have to put in the hard yards because your client’s unlikely to pay you a premium for it. It’s a lucky thing you’re passionate about it.

2. #2 Don’t be afraid to change

   A period of economic crisis is probably not the best time to quit your job and fulfil your dream of becoming a yodelling portrait artist. Then again, maybe it is. I’ve always believed that you’re much better off doing something you love. However, you don’t always have to be so dramatic; sometimes it just requires a change of costume.

   Thankfully, in the age of the internet it’s quite easy to cast off the shackles of a previous persona. If you don’t think that your blog about web development is the right place to introduce your inner gourmet chef, then start a new blog! If your day job feels like 8.5 hours on the rack, cultivate your ultimate career at night. This immediately gives you the clean slate you need to start focusing on what you really want to do.

   The internet makes it easy to get attention. Once you start promoting your work and ideas, it feeds into point one above – you get known for doing what you do.

3. #3 Create something new every week

   This has a twofold purpose. It gets you into the habit of doing something that you’re not currently doing, and it gets you to make something tangible.

   Doing something new is about discovering what’s interesting, what you like and what you can use in your work. Most times I approach ‘newness’ from one of two ends – either doing something I normally do, but with new tools (say … Flash versus JavaScript), or trying to do something totally different with existing tools (‘how do I paint like Picasso in Photoshop?’).

   Having to make something tangible means that you actually have to work through the process of creation, not just think through it. But most importantly it gives you something to show people.

   You don’t necessarily have to show it off on your blog. It’s possible to get creative satisfaction from a quiet sense of personal achievement, but if the aim of this exercise is to ultimately let you work on your passion, then it makes sense to let it wander free – see point one above.

4. #4 Keep up-to-date in an area you never work in

   Everyone has outside interests, but it’s easy to give them a low priority when you’ve got more ‘pressing’ matters to attend to. I make it a point to keep up-to-date with the latest in architecture, whether it’s on BLDGBLOG or in the pages of Monument. It has no direct relevance to my job as an interface designer, but it’s a superb source of cross pollination for aesthetic ideas and general day dreaming. The same can be said for computer games, automotive design, or quantum physics – all sorts of weird and wonderful connections can be made with your professional life. And who knows? You might even be able to merge two of your passions.

Whether you make use of my advice or not, the most important thing is that you have passion for what you do. It’s easy not to notice as your dream job slowly morphs into paid drudgery, so check every now and then to make sure you’re in the right place. If the train to the next town looks appealing, buy a ticket and jump on board.