The service is only available in London at the moment and is limited to Amazon Prime customers. The items that are eligible for delivery are also limited by size naturally (as you can see from the size of the locker below) and whether they are available for delivery within 24 hours so you need to look out for that information when buying stuff.

Anyways, I took a few photos so you can see what to expect.

Amazon Lockers at One New Change

Enter your pick-up code

Open your locker

Goodies inside ...

I’ve just started reading an excellent book called How Many Friends Does One Person Need? by Evolutionary Anthropologist Robin Dunbar and it has already shed some light on a long running argument I have with my wife.

I bought a Hawaiian shirt from H&M a few years ago and tried it on when I got home. (I’m always getting grief for not trying clothes on before I buy them but that’s another gene for another time). My wife approved, thankfully but I was surprised when she said she liked the brown pattern.

“Brown? You mean red, right?”
“No. That’s brown.”
“It’s red.”
“It’s brown.”

Suffice to say, that every time I put on this shirt we get a rerun of this same argument, neither of us budging an inch in and more often than not, involving the support of innocent bystanders to back up our respective opinions.

Thankfully, I now have a proper scientific explanation for this argument thanks to Professor Dunbar.

Slight mutations of the genes that code for the colour-sensitive pigments in the retina can mean that different people see slightly different shades of red or green. For men, whatever shade you get from your single X chromosome is what you get: that’s how you see the world. But women can end up with two slightly different shades of red or green on their two X chromosomes. If both X chromosomes become active during the development of the eyes, these women can have cones that code for both pigment sensitivities, and so end up with an extra colour dimension, in some cases even two extra ones – blue, red, shifted red, green and shifted green, five colours in all.

So it turns out we are both right at least as far as our individual perceptions of colour are concerned.

This reminded me of the colour blindness simulation tools I used to use when checking design for accessibility. Having recently been party to some less than conclusive debate about the suitability of some recent branding work for a female audience, I thought it would be pretty cool if you could do something similar to show exactly how a design might potentially “look” to men and women.

Simply select the “Girl’s Eye View/Guy’s Eye View” filter and voila, instant understanding (if not agreement) of the cross gender colour appreciation of your design.

Even without the technology, I’m pretty sure I now have the know-how to diminish at least one source of disagreement between my wife and I. At least until I get around to some household hacking that is.

I was reminded of the Hobo Code used by travelers during depression-era America, when watching the episode of the same name from the first season of Mad Men. Simple symbols were used to communicate important information about a location so that future visitors could benefit from the experiences of those who had been there in the past. I’d read all about it once before  in You Can’t Win, an amazing book written by real hobo Jack Black in the 1920′s.

The glyphs are wonderful in their simplicity, lending themselves easily to both readability and reproducibility, attributes which are still really important.

QR codes are different however, as their inherent meaning is not obvious, at least to humans. We need the help of machines to interpret the meaning and render it sensible to us. We can’t reproduce QR codes manually either, ay least not without the help of machines once again.

QR codes have never really taken hold in the UK the way they have in places like Japan and Korea and I don’t think this is just down to there being a greater appetite for new stuff over there. I think they require more effort than people in the UK are willing to expend. They appear quite  complex to look at – like a puzzle or a maze viewed from above plus you also need special software to read them. The average person in somewhere like South Korea is much more willing to take on a challenge than their counterpart in the UK. Effort is more ingrained in their culture than ours.

Combining these two systems of symbols one from different eras seemed to be quite an interesting concept and one that could be explored quite easily. Create a mobile web page with information about a particular code, generate a QR containing the unique URL of the page and finally print each one on some stickers that could be manually attached to locations. The area of London where I work, Shoreditch, is also the perfect urban laboratory for this sort of thing as the streets are strewn with the work of graffers and grifters.

I think there is loads of potential in QR codes though despite that fact they haven’t proved to be the kind of fig leaf that advertisers hoped they might be. If the context is right they are massively useful way of connecting the real and virtual worlds.

Sometimes though, the old technology works just fine.

Royal College of Art graduate Benjamin Parton, recently created OI, a wearable oyster card that encases the RFID chip inside fashionable rings or bracelets.

Given the fact that the card has been in existence for 8 years, it’s surprising that no one has thought of this before. Perhaps the “card” is such a simple, ubiquitous item that there is a tendency to believe it is self-contained and not simply a container for technology with a much smaller form factor (the chip inside the oyster card is approximately the same size as the “D” next to the Mayor of London).

The wearable designs created by Benjamin are undoubtedly cool – as a comic book fan I’d be more then happy sporting a magical science ring in the style of Green Lantern – but they probably won’t go far enough for some.

Kevin Warwick famously became the “world’s first cyborg“, a somewhat debatable title,  when he had an RFID chip implanted into his arm in order to open doors and control devices nearby. The purpose of  his experiment was to test if the body would accept such an implant and how practical the sub-cutaneous chip would be. As such, it was conducted under what you might loosely call “laboratory conditions” and the results closely observed. There are plenty of hobbyists however who don’t need the excuse of being a cybernetics researcher in order to try this sort of thing out on themselves.

Amal Graafstra, author of the book “RFID Toys,” asked doctors to place implants in his hands. A cosmetic surgeon used a scalpel to place a microchip in his left hand, and his family doctor injected a chip into his right hand using a veterinary Avid injector kit.   Graafstra uses the implants to open his home and car doors and to log on to his computer. (via Select Sources - thanks Marcin!)

I’ve always thought that the term cyborg ought to be inclusive enough to cover any type of physical enhancement that adds to the natural abilities a person is born with. For example, I’m short-sighted and wear glasses (or contact lenses when feeling a bit more vain) which I you could consider a kind of low-level augmentation, or cyborg-lite.  At the opposite end of the scale, there is a man walking round London right now with a fully artificial heart keeping him alive, an absolutely amazing fact when you stop to think about it.

As the pages of the everyday sci-fi novels unfold around us, there is a question to consider: which will you choose, the soft or hard option?

(PS: a fascinating factiod I found researching this post that was to good to ignore – Kevin Warwick was also responsible for Jimmy Saville’s mechanical chair that served him cups of tea in between handing out Jim’ll Fix It badges!)

Whilst it is also true that mental models will often yield amazing insights, it’s the simple stuff that is actually the most powerful as it reminds us of the commonality of most user goals in spite of the continual demand for the new and the  different.

Human being are primed to seek out new information often to the detriment of what they need and already understand. Mental models help to remind us that our actual needs are often very simple.

First up was the Pecha Kucha event with a nice variety of speakers. Amongst the ones that stood out for me were:

• Vassilios Alexiou from Less Rain showing off some of their stunning work – I can’t wait to play with their new iPad, game Land of me
• Andrew Sissons from Hackney council talking about Hackney House, a temporary structure they will be building during the Olympics to show off the work of creative industries in Shoreditch
• Jo Margrie from the Learning Trust inspiring us with the wealth of talent the local schools have to offer thanks to their efforts in rebuilding the boroughs reputation in education
• Jay Cooper, from Digital Lounge talking about how to have good ideas – hint: don’t miss the doughnut by looking at the hole
• Android developer, Kevin McDonagh from Novoda talking about his British Council funded trip to China and the similarities he found in the start-up culture emerging there
• Andrew Brown from Brass, a Leeds-based agency with piratical ambitions for bringing their creativity south, taking us down memory lane with his ZX Spectrum inspired presentation
• And finally, colleague Ben Scott Robinson from We Love Mobile who gave a really funny yet poignant presentation on the abandonment of Second Life, making it seem like a sort of virtual Detroit

After the Pecha Kucha event we came a serious of presentations by some of the great and good creative technologists working  in advertising. Vassilios Alexiou was up again, talking about Being Henry, an interactive movie they have created for Range Rover. It was pretty cool but I found the stuff about their earlier work Vandal Squad way more interesting, possibly because it wasn’t compromised so much by a commercial agenda.

Jon Andrews from BBH London gave a nice, simple talk on his understanding and appreciation of what it meant to be a creative technologist – prototyping, hacking and playing. He mentioned three kinds of innovation:

1. creating a new technology
2. enhancing an existing technology
3. leveraging existing technology to create something new

In his view, the best creative stuff happens on the boundaries of existing technology, where new opportunities are uncovered by pushing them to their limits, rather than in the rush to adopt the latest emerging technology.

I kind of zoned out for the next three speakers if my lack of notes are anything to go by. I find it kind of of a turn-off when speakers just pimp the successful work that their agencies have done (and that everyone has already seen). It’s just lazy, especially when you have been invited to present to an audience hungry for ideas and inspiration. Hey, maybe that’s just me though.

Best and shortest presentation of the lot was by Scott Seaborn, Head of Mobile at Ogilvy. He showed some recent concept work they had done on how advertising might look in 2020. Hyper-connected hardware and software that knows your likes/dislikes, creating a vapour frame (such a cool term!) around the individual to block out unwanted ads and allow in only those messages that match your preferences. Mobile devices evolving into digital wands that can pull in personalised offers – no longer “the powerful preaching to the grateful”, as he described the old model of advertising.

After the summit wrapped, everyone adjourned to the Hoxton Bar and Grill for drinks and partying. Wish I could have stayed and socialised but living in the countryside imposes a fairly strict curfew on my nights out these days . All in all, a great day and top marks to the Digital Shoreditch organisers for putting on such a fantastic event.

I used to have my own consulting business which I ran in addition to my full time job(s), figuring that this would naturally be the the place to blog about professional thoughts and opinions, all the while keeping my more personal observations on this site. What happened though, was that I hardly spent anytime on either site. Each site was a headlight and I was the rabbit, unable to to focus on one or the other.

Now I know this is dumb (totally dumb) and I should have realised this much sooner. For all the insight and opinion I deliver on a daily basis for clients and colleagues, I have never been able to be particularly mindful about my own wants and needs. I’m also quite lazy and the arrival of twitter was the perfect excuse to limit my output to regular bursts of 140 characters rather than spending the time to structure my thoughts and write a bit more.

So what has changed my mind? Two words that I’ve heard repeated a few times in the last week – “writer’s write”. This doesn’t mean that I think that I’m destined to be a writer or anything. For me this is just the bleedin’ obvious realisation that it’s important to do stuff and not just to think or talk about it. Anything more than this, such as where you do it or how you do it is just decoration and not really that important.

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
W. Somerset Maugham

Packaging-wise they come in a sleek looking box that looks a little like a photon torpedo casing. They obviously know their market very well as the packaging slides out in a ritualistic way that will be familiar to owners of Apple products. The sort of tense, nervous excitement that makes you feel ever so so slightly concerned about removing the contents and breaking the spell.

A nice touch is the number of different sized silicon sleeves. I’ve got one ear slightly bigger than the other so this allows me to customise the fit to my freakish physiognomy.

The a-JAY Four earphones are designed specifically for iPhone so come with a fully-featured three button remote with substantial, chunky buttons that  make the standard-issue iPhone earphones seem embarrassingly ill-considered. Couple that with the unique flat, tangle-free cabling and you probably have more design features that you would have thought possible in such a simple product.

Oh yeah, the sound quality is awesome too! Great performance for voice and music, with quality rumbling bass that really did justice to my test track of choice.

This fear never lasts but does recur from time to time. I think it’s probably quite normal, akin to stage fright, where your emotional self overwhelms the rational part that tells you you’ve done this thing a zillion times before.

Today it occurred to me that maybe this fear is nothing to do with a temporary lack of confidence in my ability but a deeper realisation, that actually, roaming the world looking at stuff is what I should be doing all the time.

It’s heartening to see that the Social Network appears to be more like an old-fashioned morality tale than some faux representation of networked lives. The strapline “you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” hints at the personalities of the Facebook founders and how money, ambition and plain dumb luck combined to drive a wedge between their offline relationships at the same time as they were busy facilitating new kinds of online relationships for the rest of us (oh the irony).

Since the movie is interested in exploring the morality of its founders, this begs the question of how much Facebook has been defined by the personalities who created it and the situation they were in at the time. History suggests that Zuckerberg was driven to create Facebook from his frustrated attempts to join the blue-blooded ranks of Harvard student society. Zuckerberg was an outsider who craved acceptance from his conservative peers so he created a tool that lowers the barrier to gaining social acceptability.

The means to connect and feel connected with minimal effort is so universally desirable that it easily trumped the raison d’etre of other social networking tools where the focus was more on individual expression. This isn’t to suggest  that you can’t express yourself on Facebook – we typically think of a user’s status as cybernetic extension of their real personality. What makes Facebook different from other networks is the effectiveness with which they have bottled and channelled self-expression in a way that allows them to scale massively without losing their audience.

Facebook has had its share of moral panics however. Think of the sensationalised headlines that portray Facebook as an accomplice to theft, child-endangerment and even murder.  Wherever large groups of people gather some form of exploitation usually follows. Like any population centre, Facebook will have its share of dark alleyways. What’s important is that when bad things do happen, it has to be seen to act decisively to maintain order. After all, a massive audience means huge potential  revenues from advertisers none of whom really want to be associated with the types of human behaviour that might create a negative association with their brands.

One example of how Facebook deals with unwelcome behaviour are the “porn cops” Facebook employs to check all images that are uploaded to its servers. Doubtless much of the work is automated by algorithms that detect ratios of pink pixels but human intervention is required to ensure that guidelines such as the “no nipple” rule are met.

The average age of a Facebook employee like one of the porn cops is 28. The chances are they have had sufficient life experience to perform a simple moral task like identifying parts of the human body that might cause offence. But does this experience scale to cover all the eventualities and uncertainties that might arise when managing an online  community larger than the USA?

The fact is that too much is made of the size of Facebook and the well worn factoid that “if it were a country, it would be the third largest on Earth”. This obscures the fact that, as a whole, it is made up of individual networks. The average Facebook user has only 130 friends – this makes it more like a village. Bumping into the same people in the street everyday may help to explain why something so big requires so little policing.

I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg realised exactly what he would be unleashing on the world when he came up with the idea of The Facebook, to give it its original, definitive title. The unique alchemy of sex-obsessed geekiness and old-fashioned social climbing exhibited in his personality and ultimately expressed in the code behind the site he created is certainly a story worth telling.

(This post was originally published on BD Network’s blog)