(This review also appears on the library page for Don Quixote)

This was my first encounter with Cervantes and his deluded knight, Don Quixote. Previously discouraged by its sheer heft (this is a long book – basically two novels in one volume), my new e-reader allowed me to take it on holiday without risk of hernia. I’m glad I did.

I found myself especially surprised at its sophistication, especially given that it’s nearly four hundred years old (the second volume was published in 1615). There’s a notion floating about that most of the interesting innovation in the novel form took place from the 19th century onwards, and I suppose I bought into that notion. My expectation – that Don Quixote would seem dated and quaint but historical and “worthy” – turned out to be very wide of the mark. This is pretty far from Balzac.

In the course of these two volumes, Cervantes seems to invent almost every structural innovation that has been used in the modern novel, and then some. These innovations range from obvious ones like story-within-a-story to intricate crossovers between novel and reality and stylistic parodies of then-popular genres.

To concentrate on this aspect of Don Quixote, however, is to unfairly portray it as a parade of gimmicks. The innovations aren’t distracting or clunky, and they’re balanced out by a rich vein of gritty historical detail that probably comes from Cervantes’ own history. I actually got a bit of a science-fiction buzz from the accounts of naval campaigns in the Mediterranean, which Cervantes actually fought in (he was captured and enslaved for several years). And this particular translation meticulously avoids introducing any olde-worlde mannerisms into Cervantes’ English, lending his voice a contemporary character that’s appropriate to the sophistication and “modernity” of the novel itself.

What about Don Quixote himself, and his quest? I found him more insane, more dangerous, more misguided than popular conceptions of the character led me to expect. The word “quixotic” means hopelessly idealistic, impractical and unrealistic. Quixote is all of these things but he’s insane too, and highly dangerous, even though he usually finds himself on the receiving end of severe violence after conflicts he initiates. It’s only towards the end that I started to feel sympathy with Quixote, with this reaching something of an extreme when he and Panza are separated by the deceptive aristocratic pranksters. All in all though Don Quixote is actually a pretty dangerous character and the novel is quite violent both physically and psychologically.

If you’re thinking about tackling Don Quixote I’d recommend you try to read it in electronic form, as the weight of the physical book would be discouraging. You’ll also benefit from the ability to follow footnotes and look up dictionary definitions. But be prepared for a long journey at the sides of these two unfortunate characters.

Filling out forms is a necessary evil whether it’s on the web, mobile apps, work-related systems, or even on old-fashioned paper. We don’t enjoy doing it but sometimes there’s no other option.

Why are forms such a chore? Designers from multiple industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades. Indeed, every layer of the experience when we use a computerised form has been meticulously crafted to reduce our stress – from the ergonomics of the keyboard & mouse to interaction components like dropdowns, radio buttons and auto-completed text fields. But the fact remains that they’re a stressful part of our everyday lives.

A recent example of design being used to ease the pain of forms is Funnel, a survey tool for iOS and Android.

Using Funnel for customer satisfaction surveys

Funnel uses an approach designers commonly take to the form problem, which is to make the process feel more fun and playful in the hope that users will warm to it. What’s the rationale behind this approach? Is it really more fun to fill out forms that are designed like this?

Making traditional form interactions look nicer

The interaction models are pretty conventional, just designed in a way that makes them less intimidating (assuming you aren’t intimidated by large smiley faces, of course). While this layer of design might be dismissed as superficial by people who focus on functionality, it definitely matters. The visual layer provides users with a subconscious cue as to the type of activity they’re about to undertake, and this will in turn affect their emotional state as they embark upon the activity.

Imagine two different signup forms, both asking for the same set of personal information, except one has been designed for a mortgage application process and the other for a music-oriented social networking site. They might even use the same set of interaction models – dropdowns, calendars, radio buttons – but we’d be surprised if the visual execution was identical. The mortgage provider should use visual design to convey an appropriate level of seriousness; after all, entering the wrong information may lead to rejection, or might count as fraud in extreme cases. However, this level of seriousness would seem oddly intimidating in the case of the social networking site.

Guess which one of these forms is a mortgage application

But is it enough to focus purely on the visual execution of forms, as Funnel seems to do, if we want to make them less painful? The visual, aesthetic layer design is slightly problematic in that it’s very culturally sensitive. A design that suggests playful informality in one part of the world might seem downright childish in another. This layer is also very subject to changing trends – a visual style that seems contemporary one year might become dated and corny very quickly. So perhaps it’s time to tackle the problem of forms at a deeper layer than purely visual design.

What are forms for? To gather information from users. Do we always need highly specific and granular data? No. Are we still dependent on keyboard, mouse and touch inputs? No. Can new devices and the data they can gather fundamentally change the form-completion process? Maybe.

Imagine a mobile form that works like a theremin, where the user lifts their device to change the value of a field, or tilts the phone to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Imagine a restaurant whose mobile app gathers feedback not with a slider, but by having customers express themselves with a smile or grimace and then taking a photo and algorithmically “scoring” their satisfaction. Imagine a rail company using location data to invoke a customer satisfaction survey when a journey ends, referring to timetable data to work out if the train was late and pre-populating the form as appropriate.

Some of these ideas may be less far-fetched than they sound at first. For example, the Happy Things project for Mac OS detects when you smile and automatically takes a picture of your face. It’s becoming easier for software to gauge our emotions as well as our location.

There’s a lot of scope for innovation in the way systems gather input from users, especially where mobile devices with richer contextual awareness are concerned. The process can become more powerful as well as more playful, as long as we continue to challenge ourselves as an industry and as designers. Why not exploit these capabilities instead of – or as well as – making checkboxes feel nicer?

You might not have heard of HBGary Federal before. I certainly hadn’t, or at least not until February 4th when their CEO Aaron Barr boasted to the press that he had unmasked members of Anonymous and was going to pass their details to the FBI. This was presumably in retaliation for Anonymous having slowed down the servers of Visa, Mastercard and Paypal for a few hours back in December 2010, a crime that will no doubt live in infamy.

As it turns out HBGary Federal is a computer security consultancy that does a lot of work for the US government, trading on a reputation as experts in the field. Their CEO was obviously looking to generate headlines with his Anonymous story. And he succeeded, but not quite in the way he was expecting.

Within a few hours of his boasting to the press about having “infiltrated” Anonymous, Anonymous struck back. And they struck back hard. The HBGary Federal website was compromised and defaced, Aaron Barr’s Twitter and Facebook profiles were hijacked, and – most damagingly for HBGary – the company’s email server was breached, the emails extracted and put into the public domain via BitTorrent.

At this point, the damage done to HBGary was already severe. How could “experts” in information security be so thoroughly compromised, so quickly, and in such a humiliating manner? As Aaron Barr put it, soon after the attack took place:

I knew some folks would take my research as some kind of personal attack which it absolutely was not. I thought they might take down our Web site with a DDoS attack. I did not prepare for them to do what they did…

But the worst was yet to come. It took a few days for the contents of the email dump to be reviewed, and what it revealed was even more damning – not just for HBGary Federal, but for the shady culture of impunity it portrayed among firms contracting for the US government.

The new twist in the tale came when a project proposal was discovered among the emails. The proposal, titled “The Wikileaks Threat” (link to the full presentation), had been created by HBGary Federal in conjunction with two other companies for Hunton & Williams, a law firm that works with Bank of America. It outlined a systematic plan of attack against Wikileaks and its supporters which included tactics ranging from DDoS attacks, falsification of information, and what could be seen as extortion of prominent free-speech supporters such as Salon writer Glenn Greenwald. The exact quote about people in this category was that they could be pushed to “choose career preservation over cause”.

Slide from the Palantir, HBGary and Berico proposal

If you want to know more without reading the whole thing, this Tech Herald article has a good overview, but you should definitely read Glenn Greenwald’s response over at Salon:

The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

To put it mildly, the tactics outlined in this proposal are indefensible and the other companies involved have since apologised to the proposed victims and distanced themselves from HBGary Federal. Indeed the chief of Berico has called the proposal “reprehensible” (PDF link to company statement).

But this doesn’t bring the matter to a close. The leaked proposal is almost certainly the tip of a very large iceberg, giving us a glimpse of a corporate culture surrounding the US government that has grown accustomed to operating outside the law. As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

The exemption from the rule of law has been fully transferred from the highest level political elites to their counterparts in the private sector. “Law” is something used to restrain ordinary Americans and especially those who oppose this consortium of government and corporate power, but it manifestly does not apply to restrain these elites.

The story began with a so-called security expert bragging to the media and has ended with the disgrace of his company. Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

Rarely in the history of the cybersecurity industry has a company become so toxic so quickly as HBGary Federal …many of the firm’s closest partners and largest clients have cut ties with the Sacramento startup. And now it’s cancelled all public appearances by its executives at the industry’s biggest conference in the hopes of ducking a scandal that seems to grow daily as more of its questionable practices come to light.

These questionable practises, which are still being uncovered, are too many to list here, but this timeline over at Ars Technica is worth a read if you want to know more about Aaron Barr’s techniques.

It’s a shame that this story isn’t getting more press attention, because it reveals a lot about what’s happening on the front line of the struggle for internet freedom – and by “front line” I mean the hand-to-hand trench combat as opposed to the high-profile court cases taking place in the US and in the UK.

But it’s unlikely to get much coverage because it’s a messy, data-intensive, and fast-changing story; in other words, the type of story that is extremely difficult to get across within the constraints of traditional news media forms. Traditional media seems to be more comfortable talking about Julian Assange’s personal hygiene or Downing Street’s new cat than covering this sort of thing.

As a grizzled veteran of the London Overground, I’d become accustomed to the routine of the daily trundle across the city’s northern districts to get to Hammersmith. I’d toyed with the idea of cycling, but the length of the journey was just too discouraging.

All that changed after I spent a couple of months working in Spitalfields and got into the habit of cycling as I really love traveling and going to new places, I used to be in a scooter club and Im recently trying to buy a new one so I can keep on the adventure, there are really great recommendations in the Scooter Adviser where you can find the best electric scooters. When I changed jobs again and ended up back in Hammersmith, I was resolved to stick with the bike – no matter how knackered I became.

So, for the last few weeks I’ve been cycling from Islington to Hammersmith. It was traumatic at the beginning, because my route took me through central London and I nearly gagged from bus fumes on the first day. But since then I’ve found a much better route. It’s knackering, yes, but I’m getting used to it.

It probably won’t be long before I completely adjust to the routine and become a hardened cyclist, so I’m taking to chance to note down my observations about the world of cycling before that happens. Today I’m going to talk about a type of cyclist that I call the Easy Rider.

The Easy Rider has two gimmicks. The first is that they cycle at a very relaxed pace, and the second is that they are completely oblivious to red lights. The second comes as a bit of a surprise, as you’d expect light-jumpers to be the fast-paced cycle-courier types, not these people who glide gracefully along the road.

You first encounter an Easy Rider when you overtake them, which isn’t difficult because they’re so slow. You don’t expect to encounter them again, but you do, and it will happen when you’re waiting at the next red light and they come trundling past you. This cycle then repeats itself – you overtake them, hit a red light, they trundle past, you start moving, you overtake them, and so on.

It gets annoying after a while, not just because it’s always frustrating to see cyclists jump red lights, but because it’s tiring overtaking people over and over again. So you wonder, maybe they’re on to something? The Easy Rider is remarkably unruffled while you, what with all the acceleration you’re doing, are a sweaty, gasping wreck. And you both get from A to B in the same amount of time.

But ultimately I don’t feel I can become an Easy Rider. They look really relaxed and they’re probably laughing at people like me – those suckers! – who stop at red lights, but I’d just be too worried about what might happen each time I sail out into that junction. Would my graceful insouciance survive a collision with a pedestrian, truck or car? And I frown on red-light jumping for reasons other than my own personal safety anyway. I’m happy to keep overtaking them no matter how sweaty I might get. At least I’m getting some decent exercise!

Technology is getting smaller and more powerful all the time. Today’s phones pack more punch than the bulky PCs that sat on our desks ten years ago. Where is this trend going? Computers clearly aren’t going anywhere, but could the computer – the physical device we actually use – become so small that it effectively disappears?

Let’s start by looking at what makes up a computer. For the sake of this post, we’ll assume there are two simple components – the “brain” and the “body”.

The body and brain of a computer (click for full size)

The brain (CPU, hard drive, memory, etc) does the actual work. It gets smaller all the time, which has led to things like laptops, smartphones and tablets which only became possible because the brain got small enough. And if the brain keeps shrinking, even if it becomes microscopically small, that’s not a problem – after all, we don’t have to be able to see it or touch it.

The body is different because it must be big enough to remain usable. Keyboards the size of postage stamps wouldn’t be much fun, would they? The human form sets a minimum size threshold for the computer’s body.

Anyone who’s been through a 30-minute Angry Birds marathon will have learnt the hard way that smartphones aren’t great for sustained daily use (and, yes, I’m talking from personal experience here). We couldn’t use them like we use our main computers, which is fine because they can’t actually do what we need our main computers to do.

So far, the cramped form factors of these handheld devices are consistent with their capabilities – but this might be about to change. We’re nearly at the stage where the smartphone’s body can easily house a brain capable of working as a desktop or laptop PC.

The extended device

As smartphone’s brains become ready to replace our main PCs, the only thing stopping them will be their small bodies and the discomfort caused by extended usage. But does this need to be the case? What if the smartphone’s brain extended itself into larger, more ergonomic bodies?

Tomorrow's powerful smartphones could control a whole range of devices (click for full size)

I’ll admit, I find it difficult to get my head around such a small device projecting itself on to a large TV screen. Something about it seems counterintuitive. But I can see the benefits, and the technology’s already heading in this direction.

The latest batch of HTC smartphones feature a technology called DNLA which lets mobiles stream video to televisions and other compatible display devices. If your TV isn’t bleeding-edge enough to support DLNA, you can get an adapter to do the job instead. So you can use your TV to watch the movies on your phone, which is obviously preferable to spending two hours hunched over your Desire HD.

A more innovative approach has been taken by Motorola, whose forthcoming Atrix smartphone will be accompanied by a special dock – a much larger “body” that, when plugged in, turns the phone’s form factor into a laptop.

Motorola Atrix with laptop dock

This is much more interesting than just streaming video to a television. It represents a dramatic decoupling of the computer’s brain from its body, and points to a future where phones, as primary computing devices, are accessed through a wide range of interfaces. When we pick them up and turn them on they’ll behave like phones, but we’ll also interact with them through numerous devices in our immediate environment.

Today’s computer may gradually vanish – our laptops and PCs becoming mere peripherals, mindless bodies controlled by the brains in our pockets. And it might go even further as the brain continues to shrink. Who’s to say that a similar fate doesn’t await the smartphone itself, that they won’t also become mere interface devices controlled by computers we wear as watches or jewellery? This might sound a bit sci-fi, but research fields like ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing have even more radical ideas than these about where we might be heading.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the design strategy of Apple’s store on Regent Street. I was interested in how, by stripping out money and its visual signifiers, Apple were deliberately creating a space where a direct and emotional connection could form between visitors and the products.

Anyway, here are a few links about the Apple Store that I thought I’d post up here, in case anyone’s interested.

• Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is the firm of architects that has designed Apple stores across the globe. Their approach to the Regent Street store was to “edit distracting elements from the visual field” to create a serene environment in which “Apple’s products gracefully assume center stage”.
• The Atlantic reported in October last year that more than 74.5 million people had visited one of the 317 Apple stores across the world in the preceding quarter, setting a new record for footfall in retail.
• Back in 2009, Social Episodes wrote about the Apple Store customer experience far more extensively than I did, relating it to six “laws” of customer service. I like the story of the Apple staff keeping their cool when, after spending lots of time with a customer complaining about iTunes syncing, they discovered that he didn’t even have it installed on his PC.

So whatever Apple is doing with its retail stores, it’s obviously doing it well.