The new discussion topic for the co-creation project has been posted! You can find it here

Looking forward to an interesting discussion & exiting ideas!

Marieke

Glad to see so much good ideas here, from two different groups of people - users and developers.

So, "What does Mobile Creativity mean to you?"

I partially share ragnar's thoughts, contextualized information is what people seek nowadays.
We are in a world that change really fast, we experience a lot of things everyday, the information comes from everywhere, it's impossible for us to assimilate everything.
The right contextualized information available to ours fingerprints, will save us a lot of time each day, and our life's will be easier for sure .

It's a big challenge I know, but we already have the proper tools for that. We already have fast mobile devices with a lot of sensors that can provide a good 'picture' of surrounding environment, we already have fast and good learning algorithms. We already have the technology !!! It's a matter of putting everything together.
Of course there's no prefect system, and we need to deal with some pitfalls - here, IMHO are the power consumption (most of the HW sensors need to be 'on' all the time, in order to sense the surrounding environment) and some concerns about privacy (a big deal breaker, believe me ).

The 'mobile creativity' area will have big challenges in the future, for sure. Having an device that is capable to deal with tons of information coming for everywhere, select them and contextualize them for me is really an dream, it's the dream of live in a age where the 'devices' can understand our needs and act according to them.

Allow me to ramble a bit more.
Almost all opinions in this thread, targeted an market of masses, and of course this is the aim of an big company like Nokia, but please take in mind, that such intelligent systems in mobile devices can be applied in other areas or smaller groups. These systems can be used to help disabled people, elders or even people with cognitive diseases. An system capable of recognize human activities(my research area ) and sense the environment can make the life of these small groups and their families much better.

To finalize, I can't forget other growing area that intersects the 'mobile creativity' field, some people like to call it Mobile HCI, but since I don't like the term, I will call it Human Mobile Interaction.
Isn't new to anyone here that fancy UI's with the appropriate marketing really sell phones, not matter if the UI gives a good experience to the user or not, sometimes this kills good innovation in the HMI area, already happened in the past, but we don't live in a perfect world, so we have to deal with these factors in order to innovate a bit more.
I personally think that a lot can be done in the HMI area, and I'm not thinking about fancy UI's (we need them too, in order to sell devices), I'm thinking in 'breaking innovation', new forms of HMI, that can improve the interaction/experience with our mobile devices, that are nowadays part of our lives.

An mobile phone is seen nowadays as an non intrusive device (there's only other 'piece' of technology, that we usually have with us, that has the same status), we really need to take more advantage of that .

Hi VDVsx,
Thanks for your interesting and extensive reply. I was just wondering, when you say 'breaking innovation', what kind of innovations are you thinking about in the domain of HMI? How could the interaction/experience be improved with mobile devices in your opinion?

A lot can be done here, but as I said some technologies aren't ready for prime time.
In my opinion if you want to introduce new methods of interaction, you've to do it in small steps, the "acceptance problem" is a big issue here.
I think Nokia is doing that in the gestures area, they introduced only a few gestures in selected phones (e.g. flip the phone to reject a call), and these gestures are very intuitive and are accepted around the world. This way they improved the user interaction a bit, without breaking none of the interaction methods already familiar to the users, reducing the acceptance of the new form of interaction, but more can be done IMO.

A innovative system in this area would be a system capable of translate natural actions to the way we use our mobile devices. Of course gestures can mean different things to different people, in order to deal it that, the gestures system should be adaptable to each user. Using the device sensors combined with learning algorithms, we can achieve it now, for the basics/most used rapid access functionalities of our mobile devices.
Such system could reduce a lot the user intervention needed to operate an mobile device, and would be much more easier to operate the device "on the move".

This is just a example, much more can be done in order to achieve a natural and intuitive interaction with our mobile devices.

>>> What does Mobile Creativity mean to you?

Mobile Creativity for me is:

1) My life - what I did in a dream vacation, to be able to review those precious moments, to be able to video record with a light pocketable device, to be able to write some thoughts, or audio record them, to be able to share some pictures and blog or email.

2) To have the possibility to create on the go, like drawing, skatching, for others mix or compose some music, put all your creative thougths on a document.

3) Have access on the go to all the information you want, financial, geography or history from wikipedia, weather, news, medical information, all the things that interest you

4) Have a mobile device with a smart application that makes your life easier, with maps, weather, calendar, planning and reminding of events should be a central part, and helping you in get all the activities that interest you for the weekends ahead, like I'm thinking of an application smart enough to learn from your habits and to be able to check ticketmaster for the upcoming concerts for you, different sites for sport events, for entertainment events, for travel events, for mountain-hiking opportunities based on weather, for family oriented events (like activities for your kids).
The application should list you all the events found for the next weeks in a list with multiple selection and you just rate the interest for the events from 5 (very interested, should not miss this event) to 1 (not really intersted, but if nothing else, just remind me a day before with a special ringing tone for kind-of-not-interesting-activity). This is mobile creativity, when the mobile device can help you get the most of what you want in activities.

5) Mobile creativity is also about being always connected with your friends and what's up

6) Mobile creativity is also about be part of the community, building communities or interact or help in any way, be part of the change, because the internet communication has unleashed incredible forces in the social activities, people can find and connect easy with people with same interests, ideas, or desire to improve our society

This is my 2 cents, I wrote in hurry, sorry for potential misspellings

To begin, I will re-use my opinion expressed in the final paragraph of my post in the second discussion topic: the "limits" of creativity - I'm highly skeptical about the amount of creativity of the "general population" - or perhaps too stringent in my interpretation of creativity (also: see the Wikipedia definition :-). Let's perhaps rather talk about cre-activity, a term I like to use as a placeholder for "being entertained while still being able to add minor input / low input activities". In fact, we might possibly achieve the broadest view (if that is intended or allowed/wished for) by defining Mobile Creativity as "DOING something unbound to a certain location".

Perhaps we should also try to differentiate between various actors? Who is mobile and when? Users? Developers?

• Mobile workforce user: has work to do on the road (perhaps not during travel, but in locations away from the "normal" office). This work might be more (journalist) or less (insurance salesman) creative, but something must be done, probably in quite a narrow field of tasks, therefore also requiring only a basic set of applications, but with high level of usability and efficient workflows. Perhaps students are in the same niche, often abroad in different places, with a lot of things to get done (in a broader field of work however). Level of creativity: medium-high
• Mobile non-workforce user: is on the road, but not at work. Might be commuting or travelling, can't/doesn't want to work, is mostly occupied with mobility itself (moving) and probably too sleepy or tired to be creative, but still likes a bit of challenging entertainement or needs to access important information. Level of creativity: low-medium
• Mobile non-workforce user, but mobile in another sense: simply not in front of a desktop/notebook, but moving, albeit in a small radius (in various rooms at home, gone shopping, out with friends, in front of the TV together with the wife :-). All possible use-cases, all levels of creativity.
• Mobile developer (Khertan...) Is not at the desktop, but has time at hand and would like to be creative in developing software. Might want to sketch an UI, model it in an Editor, research (developper docs, online), write source code (PyGTKEditor), build packaging scripts (py2deb), test/upload software. Level of creativity: medium-high

From this, we could precise the needs of the different groups, their ways to create and express themselves. However, whatever actor you look at, the basic factors remain the same:

• Not at the home/office desk
• Doesn't want a device that is a hindrance to his mobility
• Wants to get the most out of a device (diversity of mobile applications)

So for me, the device must enable the broadest range of possible applications, offering a large pool of mature/pro tools to give me a maximum freedom to express my creativity on the go.

Finally to pickup on Marieke's initial tagline and return to the poetic side: A number of Inspiring applications must work together to allow Unexpected results to happen (capture a moment of my life through video, picture, mapping/geotagging and texting; being shared in seconds with others worldwide), in such a way that the creative work becomes just having fun - this is what makes me feel creative.

(The continuation of the discussion really depends a bit on where you want to go with the co-creation project - I believe the topic of this 1st thread to be too broad, as it is a bit unclear how open we can define creativity and what questions you ultimately try to answer.)

Good points.

The way I see it is that realistically, it makes sense to consider most highly mobile work a subset of a given project. It's just not usually practical for instance to design databases, model 3d parts, manipulate spreadsheets, etc.

What does make sense is entering field data, capturing in-the-moment events, performing any sort of labor that actually benefits from high mobility.

My personal efforts here have been to identify where scratch pads, clip boards and post-it notes are used and look to replace them with a handheld electronic device. Unfortunately even though *I* can see high potential here, the focus as I see it has been less on utilitarian modes and more on fun and games... which have value of course but I would really like to see that transient paper ecosystem challenged.

Who's with me?!!?

Small update: check http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32619 for the results of the co-creation session!