Nirvana is here and its Mobile

Is it really NOW?!?!?

My acquaintance and fellow Amsterdammer, Reiner Evers, has reported in his successful www.trendwatching.com that the MOBILE MOMENT HAS ARRIVED.

For years now, all of our 'future watchers', and of course the entire European Telecoms sector, have promised us ubiquitous nirvana via our phones, and many of us have gone broke trying to serve that elusive promise.

According to Reiner, THE TIME HAS COME:

"OK, it’s really happening now. For years and years, futurists, cyber-gurus, trend watchers and other overly-optimistic gadget-fetishists have been predicting the glorious coming of the mobile web. Never mind that the lack of wireless broadband combined with archaic and money-grabbing mobile operators turned that dream into a sustained mobile nightmare.

But. The clowds are parting. 3G, 4G, even 5G are coming to the rescue, and of course (dare we say it) the iPhone! You can spend the next few weeks poring over the countless research docs on mobile-finally-meets-web currently being released (here, here and here, for a start), but they all show the same thing: owners of iPhones and smartphones and tablets and nano-notebooks are embracing an improved online-on-the-go experience.

But please forget proprietary portals or paying by the byte: all consumers ever wanted to do on-the-go was whatever they were already doing on clunky computers, and then some. Read: diving into the online world fast and without limits, on whatever gadget offers the best marriage between size, apps and portability. With some serious GPS action thrown in, too.

Which means that cyberspace as we know it (read: a wonderous world of control and make-believe restricted to desktops at home or in poorly-lit offices, and laptops that don’t venture too far from spotty hotspots) is about to vanish, and will be replaced by something that is everywhere, enabling consumers if not enticing* them to actually venture out into the—you guessed it—real world.
Though when that happens, what will constitute the real world will be up for debate. Anyway. Get ready for a generation that is (finally) always online while offline. And vice versa."

* Helped by thousands of GPS-aided apps, refinded local search tools and other PLANNED SPONTANEITY services, being online-on-the go will mean more offline adventures and experiences than ever before.

Emotionally Vague – Color Coding emotions

Emotionally Vague is a research project about emotion, sensation and feelings. In order to produce the study, the researcher interviewed 250 people from 35 countries, between the ages of 6 and 75. Each final survey contained five sheets of A4 paper, one reusable colour swatch board, a red marker pen and a memento card. The result is a multi layered map of emotions and how people reflect them in their bodies. The color coding looks like a DNA sequence with the different tones that people chose associated with each emotion.

“Emotions can be overwhelming. But not always so. They affect our thoughts and perceptions far more than we realise. It is well established that we are subliminally affected by visual media, and particularly in terms of unconscious emotions, drives and feelings.

I wanted to question how feeling can be experienced in the body, not simply in mind. I believe that we can use familiar tools to express understanding of experience, and not be restricted to the use of photographic stereotypes.

Can people describe their visceral feelings of emotion visually, and if so, would any patterns arise? In order to answer this, I had to develop some way of asking people to reflect on and describe their private feelings in a simple, repeatable manner, the results of which could be correlated visually and demographically.

By gathering concepts of feeling by word, colour and line and creating visual languages for anger, joy, fear, sadness and love - a kind of democratic visual language is created - a backwards-brand”.

Found via information aesthetics.