Stuart Curran's blog

Amazon Locker

Stuart — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:04:54 +0000

I decided to try out Amazon’s new service, Amazon Locker, the other day just to see what the experience was like. It’s a really nice extension of Amazon’s customer service into the real world and incredibly simple to use. I don’t really have any particular need for my packages to be delivered to a secure location but I can imagine that people will find this a great service if you are worried about your Amazon deliveries getting lost in the office post or stolen somehow.

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 ...

In loving colour …

Stuart — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:22:01 +0000

It’s pretty well understood that men and women often disagree about a lot of things in life. What’s perhaps less well understood is that sometimes the source of the disagreement is sometimes hardwired into our genes.

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.

Hobos and QR codes

Stuart — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:35:06 +0000

These Hobo QR code stencils are a really cool idea and judging by the comments, one that a lot of people besides me have already considered.

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.

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Amazon Locker

In loving colour …

Hobos and QR codes