This is my youngest son, Pascal, when he was two years old. He’s looking sheepish because he’s just picked an apple. It’s an apple from the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, the orchard where Isaac Newton first conceived of gravity.

We were drawn to this beautiful, remote farmhouse for a tea break on a long journey, and ended up learning some science. A master storyteller can make the laws of gravity come alive anywhere, even in a lift, but to experience them at Woolsthorpe adds an extra weight. The National Trust which now owns the house has turned a barn into a small discovery centre where you too can see the forces of nature anew, right where Newton did more than 300 years ago.

In his famous Proposition 75 Theorem 35, Newton wrote:

“If to the several points of a given sphere there tend equal centripetal forces decreasing in a duplicate ratio of the distances from the points; I say, that another similar sphere will be attracted by it with a force reciprocally proportional to the square of the distance of the centres.”

That “reciprocally proportional square of the distance” bit means the attraction gets stronger, much stronger, as things get closer together.

So it is with stories.

Sheffield and Leeds are 34 miles apart. When I told the story of Leeds steam engine pioneer Matthew Murray in the Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield, the Interesting North audience gave me polite applause. (Granted, it was 10:30am on a Saturday when many had got up early to be there.) When I told the same story in Temple Works, Leeds, just across the road from the site of Murray’s Round Foundry the audience gave much more. I could have raised a mob there and then to tear down James Watt’s statue in City Square.

• A story in the same county is quite interesting.
• A story in the same city is more compelling.
• A story in the place where it happened is extra powerful.

It’s more than just playing to a home crowd. Actually being there increases exponentially the return on just a small leap of imagination. We can picture the protagonists standing beside us, under the same sun, breathing the same air. It’s why the microcontent of blue plaques is so powerful.

It’s why it was so much fun to talk last week about the Corn Exchange in the Corn Exchange. Several people have remarked on the same moment in the talk, something that brought this thing home to me.

Bettakultcha follows a lightning talk format of 20 slides in five minutes. When I reached the part about the amazing domed roof, there seemed little point showing people a Powerpoint slide of the inside of the Corn Exchange in the Corn Exchange. Cuthbert Brodrick’s masterpiece speaks for itself. So I blanked the screen and asked people to look up.

They looked up at the Spartan, modern-before-its-time structure above our heads. It turns out this was the point of maximum attraction, the moment people were as one with place, the point most remarked on in my conversations ever since.

Similar connections to place cropped up in some other Bettakultcha talks too:

• Lee Jackson cantilevers a whole history of hiphop from a Jimmy Savile story. (And, let’s face it, everyone in Leeds has a Jimmy Savile story.)
• Richard McCann‘s shocking and inspiring life story is wrapped up with the story of our city, dark side and all.
• Tim Ineaux follows in the four-legged footsteps of Muybridge’s horse and Le Prince’s traffic moving across Leeds Bridge.

All of which must not be taken to mean that local stories are static, parochial stories. As I argued at TEDxLeeds and hinted in my Corn Exchange talk, our city owes its dynamism to outsiders and their connections with other great cities around the world. Without Egypt, we would have no Temple Works; without France, no Louis Le Prince.

These unexpected links with other places, these wormholes, only open up when we open our imaginations to the things that happened in the past, in the places where we now find ourselves.

An oft-remarked characteristic of the internet is that it erases distance and difference, that it allows a script kiddy in Kazakhstan to cripple a business in California. In this account it seems local differences will be erased by the swelling ranks of the Republic of Facebook.

But this emerging medium must surely also power a resurgence in situated storytelling. The location-aware dimension of the mobile internet is uniquely well placed to bring stories to people where they need to know them most. The hyperlinked web dimension makes it possible to leap through wormholes from one situated story to its entangled quantum twin.

I wonder where they will take us next?

Cornelia Parker got the army to blow up a shed full of stuff and then hung the shards from an art gallery ceiling.

It felt like a metaphor for almost all the talks at Matt Locke‘s brilliant event, The Story: everywhere narratives are fragmenting, and no one seems certain how to put them back together.

• Adam Curtis‘ experiments with archive video footage demonstrated persuasively how we’ve lost confidence in the veracity and validity of smoothly packaged news bulletins.
• Mark Stevenson berated us for losing faith in a bright human future.
• Martin Parr documented the vanished minutiae of a Northern English mill town and analogue studio photography.
• Karl James gave voice to families thrown off balance, one by childhood leukemia, another by rape; and to children who felt written off by their teachers.
• Lucy Kimbell dissected her own sense of worth and wellbeing to create ‘Audit’ and the LIX Index.
• Players armed with toy guns blew apart Mary Hamilton‘s carefully constructed live action role play set pieces (though she didn’t seem to mind so much).
• Matt Adams reduced teen pregnancy to 100 or so text messages scattered across seven days, while Phil Gyford is dicing 10 years worth of Samuel Pepys’ diaries into Twitter-ready chunks.
• And with all those cats just a click away it’s no wonder Graham Linehan‘s attention span is so shot through that he hasn’t read a book in six months.

These things are not stories but snapshots, vignettes from, as Curtis put it, our age of “emotional realism”.

If there was one disappointment today it was that we were denied any straightforward, spellbinding storytelling performances, as delivered by Tim Etchells, Cory Doctorow and David Hepworth at last year’s The Story.

Fortunately, while none had the full prescription, some of the speakers did offer tantalizing hints of how the frayed and shredded fragments of stories that surround us might be woven back together into a genuinely new genre for our age.

I’m not sure what it looks like but I think these are some promising elements:

From our repertoire of emotional realism, I think we can keep and work with the heightened sensations:

• the arresting visual image of the Maldives Cabinet meeting underwater
• the excruciating 19 seconds of silence while the father of a sick child composes his thoughts
• the details you only spot when you study the news from Helmand uncut.

Add to that the data exhaust of a billion mobile phones taking readings and measurements for a super-charged, real time LIX Index. And as for adding a soundtrack to e-books, whatever next, talking pictures?

Adam Curtis’ diagnosis of the need for a frame, for a less starry-eyed appreciation of power in the Internet age is spot on. One can detect this re-framing implicitly in Cornelia Parker’s work too.

But with this frame in place, we can safely build on the wonderful things that happen when storytellers open up the process and let their “audiences” in on the shaping of the story:

• At least half the wordcount in Blast Theory’s ivy4Evr came from recipients of her texts responding and talking her through the issues as they themselves might experience them.
• Mary Hamilton’s Zombie LARP “story machine” solidifies stories by institutionalising “froth”, the over-excited re-telling of events that follows inevitably from a successful live action role play happening.
• Pepys Diary on Twitter has attracted a 14-strong menagerie of other characters spontaneously responding to his tweets.

And now @glinner uses project management software to co-write the IT Crowd with a small group of hand-picked Twitter followers. I loved the idea that he could go away for a week and return to find that “the stories accrete like coral” around the provocations he has sewn on Basecamp.

When I made ‘1794: A Small Story‘, I got an inkling of what happens when you put fragments out there, unfinished, joined to the web. Now I’m inspired to make it more sensation-al, more social and more savvy about the undercurrents of the sea in which it swims.

Also, Monsters! Made of people!

More discussion of The Story 2011 on Twitter.

The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we’re going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We – friends, family, all – talked about our lives in early Twenteenage Britain: public sector insecurity, the choice of good schools, distant relatives, our new phones and other devices. The confection that follows is made from the left-overs.

Our current preoccupations seem to boil down to two resources, both of which are unequally distributed within families, communities, our nation and world at large. To understand these resources is to see where opportunities and conflicts lie, to look for unlikely allies and unexpected lines of agreement.

The first of the two resources is disposable time – the uncommitted minutes and hours in which we make our own choices.

The clichéd “cash rich, time poor” professional classes are not alone in their want of this resource. The pressure on the “squeezed middle” is as much a temporal crunch as a financial one. As Ed Miliband said: “If you are holding down two jobs, working fourteen hour days, worrying about childcare, anxious about elderly relatives, how can you find the time for anything else? … Until we address the conditions that mean that people’s lives are dominated by long hours, then the big society will always remain a fiction.”

Time wealth ebbs and flows as we move through life-stages, and is at least partially subjective – there are huge variations in people’s estimations of their own and others’ busy-ness. But, whether acknowledged or not, the debate over fairness and equality – over social security, pensions and the division of unpaid labour within families – must be as much about time and energy as it is about money.

The second resource, sometimes a skill, but as often a learned attitude, is tech mastery, a belief that computers, the internet and mobile phones exist to help us achieve our goals, not to enslave or bewilder us.

Tech mastery is the toolkit to take control in the modern world, to “program or be programmed.” Good technology products and services increase the mastery of their users; poor ones sap it. That tech mastery tends to rise and fall with age, and to be more concentrated among men than women, says more about the biases of tech implementation than about the innate abilities or preferences of those demographic groups.

I believe 2011 will be a year when people get angry about bad usability and the failure of the new media to meet the needs of all but a narrow section of society. As the web becomes more mobile and more, genuinely, worldwide, it has to do better at empowering all its users, young and old, rich and poor, not all of whom have the latest device designed in California.

When free tech culture meets the law it’s more than a matter of understanding the “what.” There’s also the “why”.

One person’s innocent checking of their mobile phone is another’s gross intrusion into quality time.

We also find some opportunities…

What services could bridge the gaps between the generations and social groups by drawing on what they have in common?

How could two groups of people make the most of their complementary resources?

To square this circle, we need to pay attention to the different characteristics demanded at each point, and find ways to spread the wealth more equally. Something like…

Right now, at the start of 2011, I have many more questions than answers about disposable time and tech mastery inequalities. But I reckon we’ll see a lot more of these themes before the year is out.

Why? Well it goes like this…

In the beginning, was the Screen, and the Screen was a Television, and we gathered round the Television and gave it our undivided attention. And there were not many channels, so producers devoted their time and money to making good programmes in which we grateful viewers were immersed.

Then came the Web, and unlike the TV, it offered near limitless choice of sites and services. So the producers of Inter-Net Web Sites had to worry about stuff like findability, and usability, and (yuck) “stickiness”. They had competition, and we were easily bored, so they strove to give us novelty in content and agility in development. They invented SEO and pay-per-click and the Million Dollar Homepage.

Yet still all the striving happened within the bounds of the Screen. By and large the world outside the browser window was of little concern to the web designers.

Meanwhile, there were Telephones, and unlike TV and the PC-web, they existed in a world of divided attention. We made short calls in busy places, and sent hurried text messages in the gaps between other important stuff in our lives. The context of use was filled with constant distractions. As I’ve advocated here before, try using your service in broad daylight on a busy street corner, preferably in a slightly dodgy area of town, and you’ll see what I mean.

The life of a mobile service provider was a hard one, focused on finding the right customer needs and meeting them with usable solutions. Technology was fragmented and its vagaries absorbed much time and effort, but at least this meant that the few who conquered the technology could enjoy substantial rewards. The world outside the Screen was complex and confused but, compared to the wild, wild web, services were scarce and contention for “real estate” was limited.

Now, joyfully and at long last, those technical barriers to entry in mobile are melting away. Anyone can make content or services, offer them to consumers anywhere in the world, and monetise them through payments and advertising. We can experience those services on bright, light, sleek, enjoyable devices.

For those who laboured through the hard years this should be both exciting and challenging, but one thing is for certain: just turning up is no longer nearly enough. Unlike the mobile of old, today’s services exists in an era of abundance - not just “an app for that” but dozens - thousands - all vying for our attention.

To put it another way, mobile web services are born into the zone of maximum contention for the user’s attention. To succeed they must be strong enough to attract and retain the user in a state of divided attention and among an abundance of competing services.

This means mobile web design requires a special set of qualities, resting on the bedrock of solid technical infrastructure and user interface expertise, but towering far above basic functionality and product.

Key challenges faced by the mobile designer include…

• Discovery – the need to stand out from the crowd, to appear for the customer at the right point and time in their journey, both online and offline.
• Engagement – not minutes racked up in a single session, but deep engagement with the user’s everyday life and habits, spanning multiple contexts and episodes of use.
• Choreography – of touchpoints to deliver the end-to-end service experience, in which mobile plays an increasingly important, but rarely exclusive or dominant, part.
• Adaptiveness – to the needs of the customer, her contexts, her devices and the available enablers.

And it’s no coincidence that these are also the transformative characteristics pursued by service design.

Mobile web services are exciting precisely because they can reach so far into the noisy, messy real world, and because they form such a plethora of competing and inter-connecting solutions. Scan a barcode with a cameraphone, then click to call the cheapest retailer. You’ll quickly understand the potental in the palm of your hand.

Realising such potential demands, to paraphrase the Service Design Network’s Manisfesto…

• an holistic approach, which considers in an integrated way strategic, system, process and touchpoint design decisions, and
• an iterative process that integrates user-oriented, team-based interdisciplinary approaches and methods, in ever-learning cycles.

Welcome to the new world of mobile design. Step forward the service designers.

Be it known that at some point in the near future I plan to bloviate on the concept of the prospectus and its coming revival in new and unexpected transmedia formats. Consider this a prospectus. I’m so meta.

It chimed with some stuff I’ve been wondering about lately, such as how the emergence of the web on devices smaller than a paperback could change the medium of the book itself. It certainly seems as if the publishing industry could be about to go through the kind of transformation that has beset the music business in the past decade.

And just as some of the greatest beneficiaries of the music revolution were the unsigned “long tail” artists, so I think the place to look first might be in the world of self-published, small books, pamphlets, chapbooks, and the like. These seem in a way to be more suited to the new mobile media than the big set-piece hardbacks like Johnson’s inestimable canon.

Ivor Cutler’s unique works apart, the foremost examples of the art must be the 16-page pocket books published by the late JL Carr under the Quince Tree Press imprint.

As you can see, I raided our bookshelves but frustratingly could only find one. I think my sister has more.

The books, some Carr’s own work, some reprints of out-of-copyright poetry, were distributed through East Anglian bookshops and tourist attractions, and made perfect pocket money purchases even in the days before Borders invented the gauntlet of “Little Books of” and YuGiOh cards at the checkout. I love the idea that Carr offered the books at two prices, one for adults and one for children.

Sadly Carr died the year that Amazon.com was founded. What would his pocket books have looked like in the internet age, I wondered?

So I’ve decided to make a prototype.

Next Wednesday night, I’m giving a talk at Ignite London, on some of the political and technological heroes of 1794. It’s a five minutes, 20 slides format, which somehow lends itself to minimal storytelling. Afterwards I’ll try to turn it into my first idea of a minimal book – a book minus the binding and much of the content, but still tangible enough to have value. It needs just enough to “excite the attentions of the ingenious,” possibly with a dash of Eno’s Oblique Strategies thrown in.

Bill of materials:

• 1 story
• 20 web pages
• 20 Moo cards
• 21 Stickers
• 1 Engraved card holder

We’ll see how it turns out next week.

In my ramble through the possibilities of Mobile Gothic, Ruskin’s fifth quality of Gothic – Rigidity or Obstinacy – was the hardest to express. It may not be all of Christopher Alexander’s qwan, but it’s certainly an important part of it.

At the time I wrote:

“The articulation of the parts of the mobile user experience is a key to its success, which is why we talk a lot about flow, about seamless user experience, but it often sounds vapid. Ruskin reminds us that there should be angles, there should be tension and change as we move from one mode to another.”

The angles, the angles, it’s all in the angles. It’s all in the angle brackets. Because at the heart of Mobile Gothic is hypertext.

And at the heart of hypertext is, well, text.

Let’s pause for a moment to remember just how amazing text is.

Somehow we humans have parlayed the hunter gatherer’s pattern recognition instincts – evolved for rapidly spotting food and predators – into a supremely efficient way to mainline other people’s ideas into our brains. No faster way has yet been invented.

For all the emotional richness of voice and video communication, this is the good enough solution that’s upderpinned our progress from the Book of the Sibyls to “Spinvox converts your voicemails into text”.

From the desktop bible…

… and the desktop computer…

… to the handheld paperback…

… and the mobile phone…

… text uses people to make more text.

Augmented reality? With what is this reality to be augmented? For the most part, text…

But text alone is not enough. Mere words stand, like the Greek and Egyptian buildings that Ruskin deprecated, “by their own mass, one stone passively incumbent on another.”

Mobile Gothic needs more – “an elastic tension and communication of force from part to part.” That’s where the angle brackets come in.

Hypertext is hyper. It goes beyond, but does not take away from, the original text.

In The Plenitude, his postumously published credo for the Stuff Tribe, Rich Gold writes:

There are cultures where telling stories means retelling the same story that your parents told you.The power of the story comes, in fact, from the retelling of it over and over again. In its consistency, its sameness, it provides the eternal. In our culture this is called copyright infringement and you can be fined or even sent to jail. Each story must be new and different.

Subversively, hypertext restores something of those cultures where repetition is prized…

Here’s Christopher Alexander on the building of the great Gothic cathedrals:

“There were hundreds of people, each making his part within the whole, working, often for generations… The master builder did not need to force the design of the details down the builders’ throats, because the builders themselves knew enough of the shared pattern language to make the details correctly, with their own individual flair.”

Repetition, and reuse, with the changefulness brought about by many hands working together, but separately.

Of course there was printing before Gutenberg, but only his moveable type made it disruptive. There was an Internet before Berners-Lee, but it was his hypertext that made it a web. Mobile Gothic should have hypertext at its heart.

Passing peasants were doubtless discouraged from picking up a chisel to hack at the nearest stone, but Gothic buildings like York Minster and Strasbourg Cathedral were certainly the work of many hands, over many generations – not generations of software but generations of people. They were in very public beta for longer than Google News.

And so in chronicling the exciting changes we’re about to see in the mobile user experience it seems appropriate to turn to John Ruskin, Victorian art critic, social theorist, and owner of a magnificent beard.

As the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, Ruskin must now be counted great-granddaddy of the Maker Faire. He spent much of his life railing passionately against mechanisation and industrialisation built on classical principles, and for a sense of humanity and imperfection that he nostalgicly saw embodied in Gothic architecture.

What has this to do with iPhones, Nokias, Androids and WinMos? I think it’s this: the mobile user experience has, hitherto, been top-down, governed by repetitive strictures, managed and manageable by a technocratic elite. But classical perfectionism is unsustainable, and must soon give way to a more vibrant gloriously chaotic Gothic.

The fragile, beautiful iPhone stands like 14th Century Venice on the cusp of this change. Barbarians from the Internet are at the gate.

In The Nature of Gothic, Ruskin defines and prioritises six characteristics of Gothic, belonging both to the building and the builder:

Come with me now to the heights of fancy, as we apply each of Ruskin’s Gothic elements to the language of the mobile user experience.

1. Savageness

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.”

The craftsman as hero is a consistent motif in Ruskin’s artistic and social theories. To him, mechanisation and division of labour dehumanise workers, enslaving them to execute exactly the specifications of others. The only way to recapture the humanity in labour is to put the designer back in touch with the tools of the craft and to unleash the creativity of the maker.

To Ruskin this liberation was a Christian duty, and the anonymous medieval stone mason was the archetype: working under general direction on a piece of the whole, but free to add his own flourishes, faults and foibles. The resulting imperfections are not just a price worth paying but a joy to behold, the mark of humanity in the work.

I believe that this is the delight of the web. After several decades of increasing professionalisation, specialisation and stratification in software development, the web offers a set of tools – HTML, Javascript, the browser – that are simple yet powerful enough for anyone to wield the chisel. That is not to say that we don’t need master masons to think bigger and work finer than the rest of us. Those chisels in the wrong hands can still result in atrocious user experiences.

But simple, ubiquitous development tools are what makes the web what it is, LOLCats and all. Those tools, if they’re not already here, are coming soon to a mobile phone near you, empowering many more people – savages or not – to create their own experiences. I think John Ruskin would be rolling his own widgets.

2. Changefulness

“I have already enforced the allowing independent operation to the inferior workman, simply as a duty to him, and as enobling the architecture by rendering it more Christian. We have now to consider what reward we obtain for the performance of this duty, namely, the perpetual variety of every feature of the building.”

“Changefulness” is a word to conjure with, a tension embodied: a state, of being full of change; a state of being, full of change.

Look up at the bosses that stud the ceiling of a medieval cathedral. Each performs the same structural and decorative functions as part of the building. But no two are the same. The more you look the more they repay your gaze with detail. The bosses change across space and time. When the roof of the South Transept of York Minster burned down in a fire the Church was inspired to crowd-source replacements.

For bosses, think icons. No not those icons. These icons – designed by different hands, stacked and restacked by the actions of users, they bring change and changefulness to the mobile user interface. Vision Mobile even predicts a feudal system on your idle screen. It doesn’t have to be icons; other forms will evolve but the changefulness, the capability of perpetual novelty, marks out the interface as Gothic.

Classical design cannot do this. It has repetition but never change. Classical has elegant forced symmetry that makes sense in the design review but not in the usability lab. Creativity is reserved for centrepieces where it is crippled with the fear of failure. At Robert Adam’s Nostell Priory, near Wakefield, blank lumps of stone jut out of a perfect Palladian facade. In two hundred years, no one has had the guts to make a mark. Now the National Trust owns Nostell Priory in perpetuity, perhaps they could do us an oak leaf, or a QR code or something? It wouldn’t happen to a Goth.

3. Naturalism

“… so soon as the workman is left free to represent what subjects he chooses, he must look to the nature that is around him for material, and will endeavour to represent it as he sees it, with more or less accuracy according to the skill he possesses, and with much play of fancy, but with small respect for the law.”

For Ruskin this was all about foliage – how the textbook representations of nature in Roman capitals lacked lightness, truth and life and how the Gothic sculptor “could not help liking the true leaves better”.

While the mobile user experience may sometimes bring representations of nature to us, I think its more important role is in being with us in the natural world, augmenting not replacing reality. This is a very different role for the internet-enabled mobile device compared to the internet-enabled PC.

And with this role of enhancing nature, the mobile acquires affordances that make it a part of the natural world. It knows where it is, and which way up it is. It responds to our gestures. Its user interface has gravity and bounce that the technocrats would deem irrelevant but that the user finds delightful.

4. Grotesqueness

“The tendancy to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images, is a universal instinct of the Gothic imagination.”

Leave the HTC Touch HD‘s weather app running on a rainy day and the screen mists with droplets. Then wipers appear to clear them away.

Turn up the volume of BBC iPlayer. Like Nigel St Hubbins’ amp, it goes up to 11.

Mobile experience is going to be fun to make and fun to use. Sometime crude, sometimes ugly, but often surprising and delightful.

5. Rigidity

“… I mean not merely stable, but active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance, which makes the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved, and the stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending, and is as much seen in the quivering of the lance as in the glittering of the icicle.”

Ruskin compares the Egyptian and Greek buildings which stand “by their own mass, one stone passively incumbent on another” with limb-like Gothic vaults and traceries under “an elastic tension and communication of force from part to part.”

The articulation of the parts of the mobile user experience is a key to its success, which is why we talk a lot about flow, about seamless user experience, but it often sounds vapid. Ruskin reminds us that there should be angles, there should be tension and change as we move from one mode to another. In the previous era of mobile design we tended to smoothe over the gaps by applying surface decoration over blocks “passively incumbent” on one another. In the Gothic era the parts must work together under stress, vaulting the user towards the achievement of their goals.

6. Redundance

“The years of his life passed away before his task was accomplished; but generation suceeded generation with unwearied enthusiasm, and the cathedral front was at last lost in the tapestry of its traceries, like a rock among the thickets and herbage of spring.”

“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple,” writes Ruskin. To him, simplicity is an imposition, an insistence by the building and builder that they and they alone know the truth and demand our attention. Gothic’s mass of decorative accumulation is a sign of its life and its humility.

… which encapsulates this final feature of the Mobile Gothic user experience, a profusion of content, services and possibilities which make the infrastructure melt away. I think this is the quality, above all, that has been missing from the early phases of mobile. Too often simplicity was achieved by taking stuff away to leave just a narrow, comprehensible range of options. The coming mobile internet, and the iPhone with its apps for this and apps for that, promise empowerment by the opposite route: making everything imaginable intuitively possible.

I don’t think we’re there yet, but the chisels are there for the taking. Mobile Gothic. It’s the future.

I’m on the bus, checking my RSS feeds with Bloglines Mobile.

I see a couple of links I might want for later. The obvious thing would be to bookmark them on Delicious. But that’s not an option using the mobile versions of many sites in Opera Mini.

So I reach for the nearest scrap of paper, my bus ticket, and scribble some reminders.

Paper wraps phone again, and as an experience it’s hard to beat.

Minimum requirements:

• downtime for catching up on RSS
• mobile phone, with browser
• paper ticketing, without advertising on the back
• web search to find the links later

Possible extension:

• Location-based mobile bookmarking by bus stop:

Update 21/05/2009: Location-based mobile bookmark #2

“City kids are not like country kids”, he notes, “… the space available to play is smaller… so they learn to play smaller.” (Whereupon I’m reminded of Christopher Alexander’s delightful Child Cave pattern.) For designers, the resulting constraints can be a Good Thing. We all need to Play Small…

“One thing that really brings home Play Small to me is iPhone web pages.

“Most people would assume that a mobile web page is a compromise. Not as good or as rich as the main page. The thing is, more and more I’m finding I like the mobile pages better than the main pages.

“Stripped of all superfluous content and navigation, devoid of over elobarate graphics, they’re like raw ‘what I came here for’ in one handy pocket sized rectangle.”

Absolutely. The mobile web tends to make for better design, and the small surface display is just one of the reasons.

Design for the PC-based web has been rendered flabby not just by growing screen size, but also the assumption of fast, always-on broadband. This assumption enables two kinds of impositions on the user.

First, with less worry about filesizes, people pack an almost limitless number of links, graphics and styles onto a single page. Can’t decide which of your site’s functions to prioritise? Why not include all 19 of them equally! Above the fold! Can’t fit it all in? Make it dynamic to expand and shrink stuff in new and confusing ways.

Second, since pages appear almost instantaneously, we fall into the trap of assuming that any additional clicks cost nothing of the user’s time. Who cares if they take a few blind alleys? That’s why there’s a back button.

The cost, of course, is in the increased cognitive load. Website owners that work like this are abdicating their responsibility to think through a problem fully. They are offloading the work of understanding onto their users.

Ben’s “‘what I came here for’ in one handy pocket sized rectangle” speaks of the reverse, of care taken and thought for the user. The most popular page on the web also bears this out: earlier this year, Google applied a “one in, one out” rule to the 28 words on its classic homepage.

Which brings me on to another reason that the mobile web has the potential to generate better designs: mobile forces an increased focus on the context of use.

It is too easy in the fixed web world for us to assume that we and our users inhabit the same environment. Maybe this happens because desktop and laptop computers are at once the tools we use to specify the online experience, and  the appliances on which our users will interact with the results.

In contrast, mobile experiences are defined by their external environments as much as by their internal functionality. And in considering the environment we also end up considering our users as different from ourselves, and hopefully better understanding their needs and priorities as a result.

In Paper, Scissors, Phone I suggested getting real with sketches and mobile prototyping as a way to further sharpen this focus on target users and contexts.

Ben concludes with  a beguiling extrapolation of credit crunch chic:

“Make no mistake, we’re currently leaving the era of Baroque brands and moving into a new period of austerity in communication. And as we move towards Depression 2.0 maybe Play Small will become a vital tool for all designers across all forms of media.”

The “austere” bit worries me though, because well-thought-out design doesn’t always have to look like a bank statement (though that’s the noble aesthetic of Dopplr, which earns a special mention in Ben Terrett’s post for being so well designed on the PC that even mobile cannot improve it).

I’m reminded of a video I saw of an iPhone user comparing the full web and made-for-mobile versions of a social networking site. Unlike Ben, he preferred the full version on his phone. He felt the mobile version was “limited”. And as he talked to the researcher’s camera, his fingers danced across the touchscreen. This user so clearly relished the panning and zooming and the satisfying gravitational bounce as he hit on the edges of the page. The made-for-mobile page – one long screen-wide galley of content – was functionally superior but it had much less “bounce” than the full website. It was too austere.

I really hope that a fitter, more fitting web will follow from the widespread adoption of mobile multimedia, and that doesn’t mean there’s no room for delight. Though the space may be small, it can still be a great place for play.

Update 18/10/2010: Stacey Higginbotham on GigaOm tells how “mobile connectivity sets developers free” -  Stop Cramming the Mobile Web Into the PC Box