Howells.

I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new website that I have been working on with my girlfriend Cecilia.

Cecilia is an insanely good cook, and The Whole Food Diary chronicles her culinary exploits through a series of articles and recipes. The focus is on cooking with whole/raw ingredients with as little processing as possible. And while the blog is principally vegetarian, I can guarantee that – as a carnivore – every recipe is as satisfying as you could ever hope for.

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I’m pretty thrilled to see that Eli Rousso launched NYPD, after telling me about it one evening last October.

With digital product designers a horribly scarce commodity in New York (and indeed, every major city), NYPD aims to be a finely curated list of the people involved with the most interesting product design in the city. And as far as I am aware, it will be the start of a series of meet-ups.

It’d be great to start something similar in London, but right now I fear it would be a very small list…

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In my opinion, Facebook is one of the most beautiful and refined products across all platforms from the website to the iPhone app. Yet I barely spend an hour a week on it.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to understand why that is, and it boils down to two points:

• There is no presentational delineation between intrinsically, and extrinsically, shared content
• Timeline works beautifully for beautifully curated content

When I started using Facebook, I loved the fact that all the content on it was about my friends. Very simply and quickly, I could discover what they were up to, what they planned to do, or what they thought about stuff. The kinds of conversations that I had on the site were akin to the kind of conversations I might have in a pub.

In a pub, you talk about things that affect you, other people, or about things. The discussions and dialog you have is intrinsic sharing – sharing and discussing things that are very personal to you.

What you wouldn’t do is turn up to the pub with a bunch of DVDs, maybe some magazines, yesterday’s newspaper, and your Xbox. You also probably wouldn’t be standing there listening to Spotify on your iPhone. That’d just be rude.

You then wouldn’t start handing these items out to other random people in the pub, often in total silence.

All this stuff is very extrinsic to you. While you may feel that the a movie was great, it doesn’t really “define” who you are; you liking a particular news article is interesting, but doesn’t really say a great deal about you. All this stuff is extrinsic to you as an individual.

But for me this is what Facebook has become. Sure, you can still hold the sort of conversations and exchanges you could have a few years ago, but suddenly this is surrounded by a messy pile of impersonal, quite meaningless stuff. My Facebook feed is littered with videos, music, links and assorted random stuff, such that the interesting intrinsic, personal content is hidden.

I’d love Facebook to explore how to make the separation between intrinsic and extrinsic sharing clear and compelling.

Path, for instance, is the pinnacle of intrinsic sharing. You can’t share any content that isn’t directly related to you as an individual. Twitter is the pinnacle of extrinsic sharing, in that it works for sharing, yet few choose Twitter to be the place where they expose very personal content.

I’m not saying that Facebook isn’t the place to share good content – it is – but it could easily occupy that awkward space in the middle, balancing the nature of content shared by your friends so you can easily find out a) what your friends are doing and feeling, and b) what content is interesting or fun. But Timeline – which is perfect for conveying personal content in a compelling way – breaks down when random articles and funny videos are brought added to the chronology.

When Facebook announced Timeline, the example mockups were stunning: carefully curated profiles with stunning imagery. It’s purpose – to capture and present personal memories in a beautiful way – was instantly obvious. On go live, my own profile and that of plenty of others looked like a mess. Flippant, throw-away remarks that I don’t care to remember sit oddly alongside a holiday photo album, which in turn sits next to a YouTube video.

What I’d love to see is what happens if the Timeline presented the personal content people choose to share, but then associated to this is a dossier or self-curated magazine about the things I find interesting: the music, movies, events, articles, and other content that surround my life but which don’t constitute it.

I mainly ignored the commentary and madness surrounding SOPA and PIPA, because the proposal conveyed a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet worked and why it exists. It was totally unrealistic and malformed that I felt it was so unlikely to be passed that it didn’t feel worth worrying about.

However, I thoroughly enjoyed this TEDSalon talk by charismatic internet Batman, Clay Shirky. The issue isn’t SOPA, it’s the potential for SOPA-like bills to keep recurring until the entertainment industry gets their way.

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A wonderful TED talk by philosopher Alain de Botton. He proposes a new approach to atheism that suggests the views of a certain, radical atheist in North Oxford are boring. Atheists should just accept that there not being a God is a given, and move on from that simple argument to pick and choose relevant teachings from the world’s religions instead of straight rejection.

The talk is essentially a plug for his new book, Religion for Atheists.

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At last Thursday’s New Adventures in Web Design conference, Dan Mall succinctly captured what so many articles about the role of the designer co-founder in a design-led startup seemed to miss:

Design-led startups are about having people that can give form to an otherwise shapeless idea.

That is to say, the role of the designer is not just about pushing pixels and adding careful decoration, it’s about shaping an idea into something tangible.

John Kao asks what “innovation” really means in The Atlantic and offers a useful innovation lexicon, suggesting that ingenuity is the most under-represented discussions of innovation:

…innovation is enabled by human ingenuity. In a sense, it is the “secret sauce.”

While innovation is the journey from the problem statement (A) to a result (Z), ingenuity is the capability of getting from A to Z faster. Ingenuity is often about a surprising process in which the dots are connected in unexpected ways. And ingenuity delivers social value, not just economic gain.

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[it’s] one of the most critical elements for addressing the challenges facing global society today. Many of these, from climate change to economic disparity, are escalating at a staggering pace that requires precisely the acceleration of the innovation process that ingenuity can provide.

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A recent flurry of tweets spoke to something that really frustrates the dickens out of me: people who are self-employed or who run their own firms, publicly complaining about one or more of the following things:

• Having too many emails in their inbox, saddened at how they can’t possibly reach “inbox zero” today.
• Just how late it is on a Sunday and how much they still have to do, asking rhetorical questions as to why nobody else is working late on a weekend.
• How clients are taking up way too much of their time.

I don’t want to contradict what I said in my previous post about only following/connecting with people you feel don’t whinge, but it’s disappointing that often the same people who complain about work also share superb content and start great conversations.

It comes down to this: if you have decided to work for yourself, it was your choice. And you should be thankful you’re in a very privileged position to create your own destiny and write your own story. You don’t need to shout about the hardships – or indeed the privilege – of working for yourself: this should all be communicated implicitly in the work you deliver. It’s a given that late nights and working during the weekend comes with the territory.

I talk about Cameron Koczon so much on this blog that it might look a little like too much bromance is in the air. But I’d go as far to say he’s one of the most inspiring characters in our industry right now, and he’s doing more than most to promote the role and importance of the designer in start-up land.

If you haven’t seen him talk live (at his conference, Brooklyn Beta, for instance or at tomorrow’s New Adventures in Web Design), I think this A List Apart article by him captures much of Cameron’s belief.

The web is going to increasingly shape our world and consequently our daily lives. We can either sit on the sidelines and submissively assist those who are doing the shaping or we can take a more active role in creating the future we want. This year, thanks to a spike in demand, designers have a chance to actively nudge the world in any direction they like. It’s a huge opportunity with a tiny window. Let’s not let it pass by.

While I agree with everything he says, the issue of solving bigger problems is something I talked about in a previous post. In our typical cosy worlds it’s tricky to identify the right problems to solve with the skills we have at our disposal, and thereon how to pull the right group of individuals together to help create solutions. And let’s not forget about funding: while so many solutions can be prototyped easily, a viable product needs funding and/or access to a good network of influencers to which many of us have little access (particularly in London, and the UK, I would argue).

I’m excited that some agencies and people have taken up the challenge to facilitate projects for good via design and technology (such as the guys from the new London-based agency, Betabüro who I met recently) but I feel there’s another conversation to be had about how we actually do and deliver, now that we all agree about the importance of design in start-ups.

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Wolff Olins’ Nathan Williams argues that the modern Brand Experience should be Ubiquitous, Social, Semantic, Sentient and Human: providing a nice framework by which to create or analyse a successful, contemporary brand.

• Ubiquity throughout the experience, across all channels, and 24x365.
• Social, but only enhanced by the social graph, not dependent on it (and importantly the brand shouldn’t attempt to be a social network, just leverage it appropriately)
• How does the brand build semantic meaning to multi-layered, complex data, and help the individual consume it
• Be context aware and sentient; how can the brand be pre-emptive, not passive
• Human: offers simplicity, democracy, and the opportunity to create new behaviours

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