Hi everybody,

As promised I would place a first discussion topic for the co-creation project "Creativity on the Move". Everything that is said during these dialogues will be used as input for the expert co-creation session before the Summit. So here it goes.

The first thing we would like to talk about with you is the following:

What does Mobile Creativity mean to you?

It can be anything - inspiring applications, unexpected results, just having fun, what makes you feel creative, etc.

Let if flow!


cheers,


Marieke


Just a note: I will be on holiday till the 28th of August, so unfortunately I will not be able to respond during this period, however Nokia will also keep track of the responses.

For me it means trying to figure out new ways to make the devices ease our daily lives instead of just copying programs and ideas from earlier devices and environments... like combining location and calendar data to offer information that's relevant to your current situation without you having to dig it up.

Let's say that you're at the mall and your next appointment is at work. The device should view the next bus that will take you there without any interaction! There could also be a reminder if it seems that you're going to be late because of the distance and time it will take to get there.

I might be dull and boring but in my case mobile creativity means being available to do almost everything I'd do with a desktop computer, while on the move.
This includes power-browsing the internet, writing documents or essays, presentations, editing pdf files, taking photos or videos with enclosed camera, editing on my device and embedding in a web page or sending somebody, all while listening at my music or at streaming audio from the web.

My mobile has to be a third lobe of my brain, a third eye, a third arm and a third leg, an empowerer, a way to enhance my possibilities, both in work and in leisure. It has to be small enough to be carried everywhere and have enough power to last for more than 24 hours of use.

It has to be able to show two faces of the same medal: one based on an easy to use gui for the cases I'm in a hurry and I need to get things done, and one based on the free exposition of its internal mechanisms, when I want or need to tinker with it and hack it for new functionality or for the plain kick of it.

OK?

In my case, mobile creativity means taking this apps and the hardware given to me and using it in ways never intended or thought of before.

I'm a huge fan of the Street Fighter series of games and I like to watch high-level tournament players battle it out. Up until a year or two ago, the only way for me to watch footage is to get lucky and meet someone that happened to have a VHS tape of some tournament footage of dubious quality. Now?

I'll take my kid to the park on a sunny day and as he's playing with some friends in the grass, I'll pull out my N810. I'll open up the default RSS feed reader and take a look at http://twitter.com/SF4Vidfeed, a Twitter account that automatically posts tweets whenever a new Street Fighter 4 match video is posted in one of several places online. I scroll through and find one I want to watch... and a few button presses later, I'm watching a match between two top players that just took place less than 5 minutes ago halfway around the world.



That's what mobile creativity means to me.

With mobile devices, there has always been tension between having your stuff with you and being able to get at your stuff. I want my mobile devices to do one or the other well, preferably both! With my N800 and a couple of big SD cards, I can carry a lot of music and photos and PDFs. At the same time, if I discover that I need something from my home computer, I can fetch it to my tablet over the public Internet. Because it can talk to other devices over USB, my N800 can ingest stuff from other devices like my video camera and my DSLR.

What I want from the next generation is location based services that I can use without revealing my identity. I don't mind paying for some of those services as long as my identity remains hidden from the provider. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good introduction to locational privacy, http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy.

Some ideas for "Mobile Creativity" (I think they could be used for Harmattan at his point...):

1) Support for MESH NETWORKING: I think this could be the base for a lot of interesting things... please don't re-invent the wheel, just look at how OLPC project has been developed. A person can start playing or drawing something and can share that with other people around him.

2) Collaborative Tagging: I'm in a party, I take a picture to lot of people, I share it to the people around me and all can TAG others. Tags appear almost in real time.

3) Collaborative Geo-Tagging: I go around the city, looking for PUBs. Other friend of mine do the same. When I discover something and I tag it, all my friends can see it on their maps in real time.

4) Real Time streaming: I'm at a concert, in a pub, at a party ecc.... and I wanna stream what is happening to all my friends (just like the qik.com service does). A service similar to this or just provide a client for Qik.

5) Geo-chat: chat with people around you! Share your location (having the possibility to choose the approximation (5km, 1km, 10mt ecc...)) and start chatting with people around you.

6) p2p sharing: sharing music/video/photos with people around you.

7) Integration with all kind of sharing services, with plugins support. I mean: you develop the main application that can work with the most known services (Flickr, Youtube, Picasa, ecc....), the community can develop plugins to support all the other services...



that's all.... for now

Mobile Creativity is having a mobile device that's an extension of one's thoughts, interests, dreams, and physical body. Mobile Creativity is real-time interaction and communication with a person's "world." This can mean several things: communication with friends/family, interacting with business associates, retrieving information on the web, etc. But any individual's world is much larger than the internet -- and even pure "communication." A person's world encompasses life, art, music, and culture, and fuses traditional communication with new ways of interacting with one's interests.

Personally, I'd love to be able to hold my up mobile device and see my surroundings through the device's camera so that I could sketch on top of what I'm seeing (or take notes or retrieve information...). I wish I could record some music that I'm hearing and have the device tell me the artist and title of the song. I'd like to scan my surroundings with the device and retrieve information about where I am. And, I'd like the ability to upload all of this information to a service that could sync with all of my other computers.

Overall, Mobile Creativity is the freedom to use a mobile device for whatever a person likes -- untethered by hardware and software limitations; free to mold and stretch the device in ways that were never thought of by the manufacturer. Mobile Creativity is making a device one's own -- an inherent piece of who a person is, not just a gadget that fills one's pocket.

Tim

I carry a NIT and a phone.

Which means I want to have a well integrated PIM suite on BOTH,
(incuding notes)
and they should syncronize NIT<>Phone seamlessly.

So I don't always need the NIT with me.

I don't know about mobile creativity...

But I'd like to be able to see all MY activities and ALL the input\output I do through my device on a single timeline.

All of the emails, messages (IM, SMS), photos taken, audio recorded, appointments made\attended, shown in a single timeline display, tagged with media types and all the associated metadatas of course. This will break through the boundaries of 'Apps' and just relegate them to submodules that I use to interact through this single system.

That is what singularity means to me... not some contacts-facebook integration.

The most important thing in mobile creativity for me is getting the technology into the background. If I want to share a photo that I've just taken with people around me or add text to the photo and e-mail it / tweet it / flickr it, I don't want to fuss with the technology. All the heavy lifting needs to happen very quietly in the background.

I really think a touch-based sketch pad is overdue for the tablets. It needs to be both vector and bitmap, and it needs to be both finger and stylus friendly, depending on what you've got and what you want. It needs to handle photographs, and it should be able to handle stuff pulled from various places -- text documents, web pages, etc. It should let you overlay all of these things and add your own drawings, notes, etc.

Liqbase comes close, and mypaint comes close, but liqbase only does vector strokes, and mypaint was too clumsy to use (as well as having too many bugs).

Andy80's ideas really intrigue me. Mesh networking, real-time sharing with those around you, geotagging, etc... I'm so impatient. I want those things now, I don't want to sit around talking about them...