grannies with mobiles: 2013

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Thunderclaps and Phonebloks

This is a lovely idea: Phonebloks

In an attempt to stem the tide of electronic waste, a guy in the Netherlands called Dave Hakkens has developed the idea of a phone that is made up of optional modular blocks. This allows the user to pick and choose the different elements that are important to them in a mobile device e.g. a better camera, a larger battery and so on. If any of the elements break then they can be replaced without having to throw the whole phone away. As someone who recently had to dump a rather nice camera aka an HTC Incredible Android phone because something went wrong with one part of the phone and it started overheating ( I shoved the phone in my bra while I ran the race for life and it was a hot day) I can see the point of a device that allows me to unscrew and remove an offending part and simply snap in another. There's a nifty little video that gets the idea across nicely on the website.

Dave wants people to support the Phonebloks project by adding their names to a list of people who will spread the idea all at the same time via a social media thunderclap e.g. set it up to automatically tweet from everyones account at once in a 'thunderclap' of noise about the idea.

Great idea ~ the thunderclap as well as the Phoneblok.

A lot of people have been sharing the link, liking the idea of a phone that is not tied to one supplier or network or manufacturer. I'll be very interested to follow its progress. I do vaguely remember in the late 80s or early 90s, when all computing devices were said to be heading for convergence with cooperation between the hardware and software and mac will talk to pc and vice versa and all will be seamless and painless. Still waiting for that to happen too. So it will be great if different partners work together to realise this in some way and then extend the idea to other appliances that fill the land.

I would have shared the Phoneblok idea when I first saw it but it took me 'til now to get over being more than slightly irritated by the promotional video. So, to get it off my Android-phone-killing-chest, here's a little plea to those 'guys' who make these promos:

Dear Boys,
Next time you are asked to create a video about new technologies, remember that women make up more than half the population of the world. I can't be bothered to work out the percentage of women in your video but it's low. In the real world, women are Entrepreneurs, Designers, CEOs, Developers, Investors and Researchers. And enjoy taking photographs. Although I wouldn't know that from looking at your vision of who will come together to create the future Phoneblok world:

Ok, so you did have one female character using your technology. Maybe you thought you were being good guys by including a woman in your vision of the future, but why make her an elderly lady in a rocking chair who is used to illustrate the idea that there are those who need to keep their Phoneblok simple? Even if you wanted to make her a user rather than creator she could have been the photographer. Or anything. She may be hard of hearing but she could be a retired rocket scientist.
Yours,
A Granny
x

Sunday 28 April 2013

Such a long time since I skyped with the Grandbabies, but today I managed to catch up with them to find out how their Fourth Birthday Party went yesterday. The conversation consisted of showing me toys, rolling around on the floor, smacking the computer and running away, and then my favourite, kissing the screen when they said goodbye.

Tuesday 8 January 2013

XX Game Jam

In October 2012 I took part in my first game jam, where teams of artists, programmers, game designers, musicians etc dash to create a computer game within a set time, often with people they have never worked with before. This particular game jam was special in that it was super fast ~ we only had 24 hours to create our game or concept and also it was the first ever XX Game Jam ~ only women participating, most of them strangers to each other.

We were quite quiet to start with, and stayed relatively quiet as we split off into our groups to start working hard on our games.

The theme we were all given was Clockwork ~ very now, very steampunk, and very open to interpretation in different ways, as evidenced by the different games that resulted.

Our small team of three had never met before and consisted of Kimmi Gan, programmer and Teri Mardel - a games designer

We also had some input from Fiona French, who teaches Game design, and got us to stop long enough to plan what we were doing and work out how much was feasible to achieve in 24 hours, if we were intending to sleep at all.

So we set to and developed a game which involved Ada Lovelace jumping up and down to release cogs that bounced onto a crocodile (a ticking crocodile, like the one in Peter Pan that has swallowed a clock).

The resulting game got simpler and simpler from our initial ideas of snapping jaws and teeth flying out, but we were pleased with our effort, which Teri labelled: ”Tick Tock Terror”.

We didn’t win the game jam, but we did get a special mention for the aesthetics of our game, which pleased me, as the ahem, Artist (aw, shucks). I am assured this was not just because our main character was Ada Lovelace in a crinoline holding a spanner or that we incorporated Babbage’s engine as our background ~ it was because it was already playable, and albeit seemingly simple, Tick Tock Terror is surprisingly tricky.

The games from the jam will be online in early 2013 so you can have a go. There are some links below to the XX game jam supporters and also some of the press coverage.

Organised by the wonderful Debbie Rawlings at Auroch Digital, the game jam was hosted by Mind Candy , creators of Moshi Monsters, in their outrageously vibrant and overstimulating offices in London.