A few reckons about Android L and Material Design spurred by yesterday’s Londroid event.

When reporting our most recent set of Net Promoter Score results to my team, I decided to dig around for some benchmarks across the industry.

Design is a fantastic synthesis of ideas and outcomes, and will always be so.

Sure, utility is still the key outcome of design, but let’s not ignore its broader potential. Design can have aesthetic and cultural impact too, even if that is only to inspire designers working on more essential products.

In cross-platform design, some things should be consistent. But others are better being coherent.

My only criterion of successful technology is that it enriches the lives of the world. Right now, Android looks to me like the best vehicle for doing that at the largest scale, and I think designers are mistaken if they disregard its potential.

Once the announcer pauses, I know it’s me they’re after. “Paging passenger… [click] …Senid Bowles?”. 

I’m at the World Chess Championship Candidates Tournament, at London’s IET. The winner will play India’s Viswanathan Anand for the 2013 title. Anand has been World Champion for six years, but most punters now regard his title as vulnerable. The stakes are high.

It’s no accident that slogans end up on book covers and campaign t-shirts. Slogans are the natural by-product of a shortform, connected world: the MVP of an idea, packaged to span the globe. Of course, their concision also makes them dangerous: no nuance, no debate. Idea soon becomes ideology.

We all know that the language we use is critical for framing discussion. So as not to prioritise one input method over the other, I’ve been trying to modify my language to suit this multi-input world.

Here’s a little tool I’ve found useful when deciding whether to build a responsive site or a separate site for different devices (eg a mdot smartphone site to accompany a ‘full’ site).

It feels almost arrogant to approach building for animals with regard for entirely human axes such as aesthetics and style. Far better that the occupants can flourish somewhere architecturally unremarkable.

Context is a slippery topic that evades attempts to define it too tightly. Some definitions cover just the immediate surroundings of an interaction. But in the interwoven space-time of the web, context is no longer just about the here and now. Instead, context refers to the physical, digital, and social structures that surround the point of use.

I finished Black Ops 2 yesterday. Is it too much to ask that games make some sort of sense?