This series of posts has been a long time coming. Anyone who I’ve talked to this about in the last 5 years will be happy that I’ve finally committed my thoughts on this subject to a series of posts. Part one was all about toasters, in part 2, metal pans are in the firing line…

Most pans have plastic or wooden handles. This post is not about them. There are a surprisingly large amount of pans on sale that have metal handles. When the pans are used to heat food, the handles temperature is raised. If you’re cooking something for long enough &, shock horror, you actually used the handle to pick up the pan, it’s so hot it will cause permanent burns. All pans with metal handles happens are broken!

It’s odd enough that these pans still exist at all, what’ stranger is some pan manufactures try & make this a selling point, here’s one example…

Note the bold claim on these £394 (yes, £394!) set of pans: ‘keep handle stay cool longer‘. Cute, but if the handle wasn’t made of metal, you wouldn’t need this ‘technology’ to give the pan a limited time for being cool, it would be cool all the time!

This might come across as over thinking something small or it not being a real problem, but think about it: Companies are making a product that when used exactly as intended, can easily put you in hospital. Imagine if every time you answered a text message, your phone gave you an electric shock. If you received too many text messages, your phone could give you an electric shock powerful enough to injure you. Understandably no one would stand for it, but this senario is exactly what plays out in the kitchen when a pan with a metal handle is used & it makes just as little sense as an electrified phone.

Back to the pans: One way around this is to use the awesome material I mentioned in 2012, Sugru.

Adding Sugru on a metal handle addresses the heat problem rather well & its a lot cheaper than buying new pans.

The best way to solve a problem is not to have it in the first place. Buying pans with plastic or wooden handles side steps all these issues: For those of us with metal handles on our pans, a whole load of Sugru will creatively avoid a trip to the hospital & won’t cost much either. So my message to the kitchen product designers of the world: Plastic or wooden handles from now on!

There can be frustration when someone successfully creates something simple & amazing that you could have produced, but didn’t. I’m sure most people have walked through an art gallery & heard someone cynically say ‘I could have done this!‘. Well recently three very successful ideas have been realised that have made me feel a bit like this. This post details the lessons I have learnt & a warning to anyone who walks around with a notebook full of ideas…

#SmileOn “is a project solely designed to bring smiles to London.” This group has left tens of thousands of yellow postcards featuring positive messages on London Underground tubes. A wonderful simple idea. (Thank you Daniel for sharing this with me. Above image by nickiidol).

At the end of 2012 1 second everyday app raised $56,959 on Kickstarter for their app that allows you to record your life in daily 1 second videos.

Twitter also released the video service Vine, allowing you to make 6 second, gif like clips acting as a ‘twitter for video’.

In early 2011, after just moving to London, I had an idea of leaving simple cardboard hearts with positive messages written on them on tubes & buses. I thought it would be a nice contrast to the stress caused by the daily London commute. I had ideas for including origami hearts papercliped into discarded newspapers on the tube, so people would be greeted with something positive as they opened a newspaper…

Later in 2011, I had another idea for an app ’15 seconds of silence’, that would allow people to upload a calming video that others could watch as an escape from a stressful moment. You could build up your own video galleries that you could watch in a similar way to ‘taking a deep breath and counting to 10′. The difference between my idea & the other three I mentioned? They did it, & did it really well.

I’m not bitter about someone beating me to it. The truth is that I didn’t think the ideas I had were good enough to push any further. I toyed around with them & ultimately left them in the notebook. I bet you have at least a few ideas on paper somewhere that you aren’t doing anything about?

An idea in a notebook isn’t worth anything until you’ve acted on it. Others will have similar ideas (thats no reason not to do yours), they will execute in a way you didn’t imagine would work & become very successful for it. There’s little solis in cynical statements that you ‘could have done it better’ or ‘had the same idea ages ago’, believe me, i’m doing it right now.

In the many notebooks of ideas I have, many will be rather better than I give them credit for. Some would even be worth pursuing further, certainly worth blogging about (remember keeping secrets its rarely useful). I’m sure anyone reading this has a notebook similar to mine & …Well, here’s the thing: You owe us you ideas, so share them. Find ways to remove the barriers that stop you talking about them or dismissing them as ‘not good enough’ like I have. Seth Godins’ book the Icarus Deception warns of the dangers of ‘flying too low’ & unless you’re name is Cesar Kuriyama you are almost certainly flying too low as well.

Like I said, I’m not bitter: I’ve started using the 1 Second Everyday app to document my life. I’m also using it to document the much bigger project I’m working on this year. Yes, a project that sat in a notebook for over a year. Far from being an odd quirky app, 1 Second Everyday is actually helping me be push this project forward & even made it’s way to my main homescreen.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt from moments like this, your biggest failures are not the ideas you tired that failed or the ideas you shared that were laughed at, its the ideas you haven’t done anything about yet. The ideas that still sit in your notebook. The ideas you’re too scared to show. The ideas you think are not good enough. The ones you don’t think your boss will like, or your friends would laugh at. Don’t be another ‘I could have done it better‘ person. Go make your best laid plans happen.

In April 2013, me & Daniel went on a little trip. We both work hard & to get away from emails, work & reliable mobile reception, we went on a short trip to Wales. It was cold, wet & lovely. We watched a lot of TV & chilled out.

Daniel took a few photos that you can see here, here & the lodge we stayed in here.

It’s September 1992, I’m 8 years old & I’ve begun year 4 in primary school.

Me & my young class mates were given a task to write a short story. Although I don’t remember, we appeared to do this quite regularly. I wrote stories about Jurassic Park, witches & wanting to be a stunt man. The other stories have faded from my mind but the one in the photo above really stuck with me. I knew exactly what I wanted to write about & I was excited. I didn’t want to forget my idea so I drew the story at the bottom of each page & planned to write what was happening in each drawing. ‘One day the Navy found a gloomy…‘. I obviously never finished this story. Part way through the task my teacher picked some peoples work to show, one of them was mine. She berated me infront of my class for drawing when I was meant to be writing. She didn’t ask me why I had done this & must have assumed I was not doing the task that was set.

Even now it’s difficult to understand what benefit would be gained from publicly shaming an 8 year old in front of their friends. She was a poor teacher & a bully who had no understanding of creativity, boldness & thinking outside the box. What I didn’t know was this wouldn’t be the last time I faced issues with doodling, ‘time wasting’ & ‘spidery handwriting’.

Fast forward to secondary school. My history lessons in year 9 would usually involve either watching my teacher write whiteboards full of text that we were meant to copy or listen to her talk about something at length, take notes & write what we remember. I used to doodle images of what was being talked about, far removed from the accepted list or spider diagram, but for me at the time it was how I listened & remembered. This would regularly be picked up on. Messy handwriting & doodling was not ok. Looking at my later writing in history & other subjects, there was much less doodling. I’m sure they thought this was better. I had given up, learnt to be compliant. My GCSE grades would illustrate the affect this had (not positive).

Above: Some early type experiments from 1995/96, long before I ever knew what typography was.

At university, no one ever questioned process, I recovered from my secondary school education & doodled with my bad handwriting because it worked well, no one cared because my work was good. The messy non-linear way I threw words onto a page was the reason I remembered, much less than the actual words I was writing. Yes, no one else could understand what I had written, but this note taking, right back to my childhood, was only ever for me to understand. It worked very well.

It would take another few years to notice others doing the same thing. Looking around me at the OFFF & Reasons To Be Creative conferences from 2007 onwards, people in the audience were making notes in all kinds of ways, the point was creative thinking & comprehension, not doing as you were told. This was a world opening up for me…

Above: A January 2013 article from Metro by Ross McGuinness.

Fast forward to 2013. I recently discovered Sunni Brown’s 2011 TED Talk: ‘Doodlers, unite!’ (above). She shows evidence that 29% greater retention of information. Sunni’s definition:

Doodle: ‘To make spontaneous marks to help yourself think‘.

I almost cried the first time I watched this video. It sounds silly but to be so comprehensively vindicated from years of being told I was wrong is powerful & a huge middle finger to the people who were so very wrong about what I was doing.

Above: Notebooks, lists & design ideas from this year. This full circle, 20 year journey ends well: I still have messy writing, I doodle in meetings, talks member & understand what I’m listening to. I believe the skill of doodling has help tremendously in getting me where I am today. I guess there are many people out there who will tell you how wrong you are about what you’re doing or the way you are doing it. This is probably the clearest evidence that you are very much going in the right direction. Keep going.

Those are my knees. This is the side of exercise they don’t tell you about.

This year I’ve been swimming further & faster, I have also taken on more Tai Chi. That coupled with a slipping of diet has pushed my knees too far. This has highlighted some difficulties of doing exercise at this level. If you’re still on track with an exercise plan. If you are still pushing yourself with the healthy New Years resolutions then you may benefit from what I’ve learnt over the past couple of months. Note: I’m not a doctor. If you require more than my anecdotes on amateur exercise, the Livestrong forums & articles are amazing.

Theres a good amount of bending, twisting & pressure with martial Tai Chi. This coupled with the kicking of breaststroke left my knees sore. If this happens, stop. It’s tempting to push, but don’t. When pros hurt themselves, be that on a football pitch or tennis court, they get instant professional help. You won’t. I had to pull myself out of the pool twice with very painful cramp, although lifeguards help a bit, I didn’t get a guy running over to spray my leg with whatever the tennis guys get. After an unhelpful trip to the doctor, I was left without much to go on. In fact I was given no information about what may have caused it or how to prevent it. The biggest difference between pros & amateurs? If you’re an amateur, you’re on your own.

Ice. Ice is awesome. After Tai Chi my knees always get a bag of ice. Bringing the temperature of my knees down seems to help with pain. A hot bath after the ice as well as Ibuprofen also works really well.

After I finally made the choice to slow down a bit I was left with space time. Some of this I’ve used up eating. Doing proper exercise has changed my eating habits. I eat more & better food. But carrying on eating with much less exercise is only going to bring back the fat. Two things I did to combat this was eating fish & drinking water. Both physically fill your stomach and give you what your body needs.

Being careful about what you eat in the hours before & right after exercise makes a big difference to the likelihood of injury occurring. I experimented with eating different things before swimming. I would avoid sugar, coffee, pastries or bread before exercise. Tuna steak before, water, fruit & protein afterwards works really well for me. Couple this with stretching & you won’t get those cramps or pulled muscles half as much.

It’s clear from the photo above, I’ve been using knee support. The strap isn’t particularly confortable, but the ability to adjust the tightness is useful. It’s also very light & makes walking comfortable if you really have pushed it too far like I did. I have also experimented with Kinesio tape. This stuff won’t be new to you if you watched any of the London Olympics in 2012. The tape is far from cheap & falls off quite quickly in the pool & although there doesn’t appear to be a huge amount of scientific evidence that this stuff does anything useful, I can report the psychological benefits are good.

Starting back up again is the biggest issue for me when I need to slow down because of injury. It’s important to start slow & build back up to where you were before, jumping back in & pushing too hard will send you right back to the sofa. A couple of months ago I was swimming 100+ lengths 4 times a week. Now I’m back in the pool I started with 40 lengths once a week & built up from there. It seems that starting again is pretty difficult. Those best laid plans for exercise are always messed up by life. Riding these out is what separates people who get healthy & the people who claim they are ‘too busy’. Be the person who has the time, it’s so much better.

My tips for overcoming the challenges of amateur exercise:
If it hurts, stop.
Ice is your friend.
Ibuprofen is your friend.
Eat well, even when you’re not training.
Stretch properly before & after any exercise.
always push yourself to restart your exercise, but start slow.

This series of posts has been a long time coming. Anyone who I’ve talked to this about in the last 5 years will be happy that I’ve finally committed my thoughts on this subject to a series of posts I’ll roll out over the next few weeks. So here we go…

The modern kitchen is a strange place. Theres little left in this room that hasn’t been engineered, designed & thoroughly thought through. Yet the accoutrements that make up this space are riddled with inconsistencies & design flaws that make the process of preparing food a needlessly frustrating experience.

These issues are so ingrained in the cooking experience, most people won’t even see them as issues. Bags in vacuum cleaners didn’t seem like much of an issue until Dyson came along, took them out & took over a stagnent market with a much better designed & better functioning product. Many items in the kitchen require the same rethink. I am aware that there are exceptions to the examples I will illustrate but these are few & far between. Although you may have an item that functions logically & wonderfully, I’m whiling to bet that these experiences are in the minority for you. This series of posts will highlight the various flaws in the kitchen & offer simple solutions to make these items far better than they currently are for most people. In this post I will begin with the humble toaster…

Part 1: Toasters

People like their bread toasted in many different ways from ‘warm bread‘ to ‘utterly carbonised‘. The only way to tell when your bread is ready is by the colour. The cooker, microwave & even most bread makers make use of a transparent panel. A glass or plastic window allowing you to see into the device without interrupting the cooking process. This means you can adjust temperatures & timings on the fly to achieve the perfect end result, but toasters have no such luxury. The vast majority of toasters, like our Hello Kitty branded toaster pictured above, cover the bread completely so the only way to know when your bread is done is to stop the timer completely & take a look or look down the silts. This is impractical. I’m amazed that the majority of toasters to not make use of a window like so many other devices in the kitchen. This brings me to the next issue with toasters, the timers.

Both cookers & microwaves use the standard ‘minutes’ & ‘seconds’ us humans have become accustomed to in the measuring of time. But the toaster has a unique & fantastically arbitrary system, numbers. Usually ’1′ to ’6′… but 6 what? 6 minutes? 6 seconds? ’1′ on the Hello Kitty toaster cooks bread for 1 minute & 14 seconds. ’2′ on the same toaster cooks bread for 1 minute & 44 seconds(?!) I’ve come to realise that each toaster is slightly different. The numbers on the dials do not correspond to anything or each other.

As we have standard units to measure time, why are toasters exempt? Imagine if your cooker did this: Your recipe says ‘cook for 20 minutes’, but your cooker only has a dial from ’1′ to ’20′, it’s different from every other cooker you have used & does not indicate minutes or seconds, wound’t that be complicated? Well thats how your toaster works.

Most toasters have a convenient sliding tray in their base (see above) to collect the inevitable crumbs the accumulate at the bottom of a toaster. That would fine, accept they are are not convenient at all & fail to perform their only function…

Every toaster is installed with a crumb tray that fails to collect crumbs. The above image shows what happened after I took out the tray out & tapped the side of the toaster. Crumbs everywhere! Even the act of moving the toaster to pul the tray out results in crumbs falling out of the toaster as well as off the tray itself. Imagine if your bin did this: Every time you picked it up your bin to empty it, rubbish fell out the bottom, or if you tapped the side rubbish fell onto the floor, you would consider your bin to be broken right? Well that’s exactly how the bottom of your toaster functions.

Toaster design flaws & their solutions:
Flaw 1: No easy way to view the cooking process.
Solution: Create a window on the side of the toaster that allows you to see the bread change colour.

Flaw 2: Timers do not indicate time in standard measurements.
Solution 1: Have a dial where ’1′ means ’1 minute’. To make this obvious write ’1 minute, 2 minutes etc’ around the dial. Another addition could be a count down timer similar to most microwaves.

Flaw 3: Cleaning is impossible.
Solution: various: A tray that was more separate from the device, like the George Forman grill(?) the or simple a deeper tray that slides out?

Of all life’s role models, heroes, characters, of all the people I’ve looked up to, admired & been a fan of, there’s one that’s remarkably different from the others. He works in a burger restaurant, he’s made over £88,000,000 at the box office, he still lives in a pineapple, he’s not real, he’s not even human! …his name is Spongebob Squarepants.

I happy to admit I’m way too old for Spongebob. I was 15 when the first show aired in 1999 & I didn’t take much notice until In 2004. By then I was a student in Brighton & got a copy of the Spongebob movie on DVD. The movie is amazing. Without doubt it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen & it started a small obsession. I’ve watched most of the 180ish episodes, I own several toys, games & even my gym key is on a spongebob lanyard.

I think Spongebob is a perfectly valid role model for anyone who cares about the impact they have in the world or requires some clear examples on how best to approach the obstacles life places before you…

Spongebob really cares about his job. He’s a humle fry cook, his boss is awful caring only about money, his fellow employee is a lost cause & he is regularly over looked for promotions & praise. Despite all this, he brings with him a huge amount of enthusiasm & energy to the most mundane tasks on a daily basis. He makes his job amazing by being energetic & geeky. Spongebob illustrates that sometimes you get as much as you put in when it comes to work.

Spongebob can make anything fun. Have you ever been stuck in a traffic jam or an airport with someone who can’t help but complain about everything? On the flip side, it’s often the things that go wrong on holidays or at events that can bring people together by making the most of the unexpected situation? In this example, it’s bubbles: A fantastic excuse for a party right? Spongebob shows that fun can come from the simplest things, particularly when others are happy to suspend their cynicism & run with a fun idea.

Spongebob photo bombs Nicholas Cage in the movie ‘The Weather Man‘. What an awesome friend!

Spongebob is relentlessly hopeful & positive. It’s really easy to fall into bad habits, get fed up, give up before you’ve even started or be really super negative about yourself & others. Spongebob is driven by something different, this is something you choose in life one way of the other. Alan Watts makes this point beutifully in the clip below ‘What do you want?’

Spongebob Squarepants has the best work ethic I’ve ever come across, he understands the power imagination & fun can have even in the most pragmatic or dull situations. His hope & positive outlook in the face of disaster coupled with his willingness to try new things is remarkable. We can all learn something from the yellow Sponge. Spongebob really is one of my heroes.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it. Amazon on DVD or over at LoveFilm on DVD.

In October 2012, Me & Daniel celebrated our 3 year anniversary with an impromptu weekend in Madrid. Our own mini post Burning Man decompression.

Below are some little clips I did not include in the video.

We had a very early flight out of Madrid. The place was dead apart from this cleaning lady. She was cleaning for ages but only picked very specific areas to clean, like the vending machines. Strange.

The parks in Madrid had a lot of stray cats & this one followed us around for a little while. Cute.

While we were eating outside, there were cute little birds around us eating from the floor. I put my camera down with crisps. Frustratingly these only attracted pigeons & a dog.

On the first night we were a little jet lagged so slept before heading out in the evening. We were woken up by shouting. At street level you could see kids with banners. I went down to see what was going on. It turned out to be a huge student protest. Spain is currently raising taxes and slashing benefits on a massive scale to avoid ending up like Greece. But these cuts are centered around the young. On the news it showed that later that evening the police were beating protesters. It was a strange back drop & I felt guilty to be having a holiday while so many people were being screwed over by their government.

Daniels blog on our trip includes the many photos I videoed him taking!

The audio used is Booka Shade – ‘Regenerate’.

“Life is too short not to do something you’re thoroughly passionate about.”–Seth Godin.

The best way to create a remarkable project is by addressing the hard things right at the start: Why the project is worth doing, the reason it should exist, the problems it will solve & the user experience (UX). This is how you create a project with meaning & purpose. This is how you make awesome things. This is the difference between Apple & Comet & yea, it’s really really hard to pull off but clearly worth it.

This week is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is on in Las Vegas, NV. A major technology trade show that sees releases & announcements of new gadgets, apps & cameras. One story caught my eye this year, Samsung are having trouble making money from their massive 110 inch smart TV…

“Samsung Electronics has taken steps to simplify the interface of its internet connected televisions in an attempt to make them more user-friendly. […] But along with other smart TV makers, it has faced criticism that many people rarely use the added functionality.”–Leo Kelion via BBC News.

This television has a number of interesting functions aside from its size & picture quality: It can recommend content based on users habits & identify clothing worn by actors making these items available to purchase. Samsung & other similar companies believe their issue here lies with people not being interested in this extra functionality. The real issue however is one of user experience.

User Experience (UX) is where the User Interface (UI, how things are laid out), graphic design (how things look) & motion design (how those things move) all meet. It’s how you feel when you use a product. Stephen Anderson explains UX beautifully here. He describes two kinds of people, I am without doubt the ‘second guy’. For me personally & professionally UI, graphic design, motion design, UX & marketing are all one thing, design.

Samsung did not build this television to be remarkable, at least they assumed its size & screen quality would be remarkable enough. The extra functionality comes from simply having the ability as an organisation to do it & it exists on the device now because they thought they could make money from creating a digital shop out of everything you watch.

These are all issues for Samsung not for the end user, not for you. That’s why they have had to retrofit the ‘simplified interface‘. It has nothing to do with being simple. The user experience was an after thought when the money didn’t come rolling in. They failed to ask why the extra functionality should exist in terms of UX. Because the televisions functionality was not considered with the feelings of the person using it in mind, the design (my definition of it) was an after thought.

This television is ignored because it has no purpose or meaning for the people who might use it. Samsung failed to be remarkable (despite making a great television). I’m in no doubt that the retrofitting of a well considered interface comes from the awesome designers at Samsung. These designers were almost certainly ignored by the businessmen in control when they tried to explain that the design is so important & not an expensive add on ‘if theres time/budget’.

The truth is that when you approach a project with a view to creating something remarkable, the best way to achieve this is to address the hard stuff first. The Whys, the hard-to-define feelings a person will have interacting with your project & how they will see purpose & meaning within it. This is design. UI, graphic design, motion design, UX & marketing all working together at the same time.

Photo by me: The photo is of a sketch I drew for a mobile app. It includes, UI, graphic design, motion & UX elements. (This sketch for myself so understandably difficult to read but explains to me how I expect this design to feel when it is being used).

At the start of 2011 I had very little exposure to how business functioned. I set myself a challenge to understand business more. I would get through any future dull office work by learning about how business worked. One question I wanted to answer for myself was why people picked bad ideas & bad design over great ideas & great design.

My motivation was to learn about the situations & processes in business that lead to or caused bad ideas & bad design choices to happen. Then I wanted to learn how to shepherd/champion the good ideas & good design though to shipping.

That was over 18 months ago, heres a few of the things I’ve learnt & observed:

Leadership:
Leadership is about making decisions & sticking to them. This is really important: being the one in front means being defiant, purposeful & decisive (at least outwardly). It’s about holding the machete & cutting a path through the jungle. Leadership is about publicly expressing less doubt that the people who follow you.

“You stop being a leader when people say, ‘I’m not following’.”–Ed Catmull

Secrets:
For some businesses it is a requirement to hide data, information or knowledge from the outside world. The secrets I refer to are ones hidden within an organisation. They feel important, particularly in design, but hiding things (issues, ideas, whatever) has a negative knock on a effect. If your idea is so easy to rip off that just telling someone means you have lost control of it…it isn’t an idea. Simple as that. Share ideas, let others run with it for a while & see what happens. Most people don’t bother, thats why there are very few artists & a lot of people saying ‘I could do this‘.

The hidden things are replaced with suspicion, fear & ignorance. There appears to be little use for ‘I hold you so’s‘ particularly if you could have changed the outcome of something that didn’t go to plan. If you are in a business, you can change the outcome, if the organisation is structured so strictly that your voice can not be heard, leave. Secrets create more secrets & that excludes people who could contribute or help for reasons that are indefensible or arbitrary. It supports confusion & jealousy. Being open seems like the best way to get things done.

“The best way to find out if you can trust someone, is to trust them.”

Ownership:
Designers ‘claiming’ designs is tiring & frustrating on a non-personal project. ‘My design’ pushes people away, ‘The design’ places responsibility on everyone involved in the project. This gives others a sense of ownership over the project without opening the door too wide for the horrors of design–by–committee.

Sometimes it’s not clear how much foresight other members of the group have. Sometimes their ‘bad idea’ may only seem that way because you haven’t seen as far as them through your own lack of experience. This situation is rare but worth baring in mind when you get precious over the work you are involved with. In the same way as ‘secrets’, it’s usually a good idea to relinquish control of your work on some level, it allows it space to grow.

Problem solving:
If you identify & define a problem, you can create a product or an entire business to solve that problem. This is so powerful but many businesses simply do not function in this way, thats when things get messy. Some businesses are created to solve problems, but the business itself does’t understand, care or even know what those problems are. Sometimes the people who work there don’t understand, care or even know what those problems are either, ultimately the business fails. Identify a problem, define it, then solve it.

Saying ‘Thank You’:
It’s such a tiny thing, but it makes a massive difference. It really hurts when you have worked on something that has benefited an organisation but not been publicly/internally thanked for it. If something awesome has been created, give the creator the credit, say thank you publicly.

The reason:
Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
Similar to problem solving, you need a good reason for something to exist. You need a good reason to take action. Businesses also need good reasons to exist, to act (or not). Making money is never a reason, making money is merely a result, always.

“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.”–Simon Sinek