With the recent loss of Steve Jobs I felt I needed to write a little something to mark his passing; but with the eulogy that the Internet has become since his death I felt my words would simply be lost, or just not mean enough. A few days have passed and I felt now was a good time…

The thing is, that Steve, whether you liked him or not, had an attitude towards design, technology and life that changed the way the human race interact, communicate and learn with the devices around them. He was able to remove the technical boundaries from his mind and lead the creation of things that became extensions of ourselves, to make the way we create easier no matter what these creations needed to be; and that is why I think there has been such a reaction to his death.

Steve Jobs just knew what we wanted and gave his passion and eventually his whole life to make those needs a reality. Yes, there have been many visionaries before him, Bill Gates for instance has dominated the computer market with the Windows OS for nearly two decades, yet I don’t feel any empathy towards the man who created a system designed for those who had to have at least a basic knowledge of computers, and that is where Jobs differed.

Every piece of technology Apple has released in the last decade has not been made for geeks, they have been made for everyone! That is the genius of Apple and more accurately Steve himself, no matter who you are, what your knowledge, you should be able to use it, just like everyone can use a book or a pen.

And that is how I feel about Steve’s legacy, writing this on my iPad2, checking the responses to this on my iPhone and teaching my daughter how to use technology an her iMac – Thanks Steve

So I bought an iPhone 4 recently and so far it has lived up to my expectations, well, that was until I realised you can’t switch multitasking off!

So for those that don’t know what multitasking is or if you haven’t realised that the phone has the feature (as I didn’t, *gulps with embarrassment*), here is a quick overview.

Basically, when you open an app, use it and then hit the home button it doesn’t close, it disappears into the background. Hit the home button twice (quickly) and all the apps running in the background appear in a strip a the bottom of the screen, great right? Well actually no! And here is why…

What you don’t realise and I certainly didn’t, is that these Apps while running are draining your phone’s resources, including your battery life which is a little annoying. So if your battery is starting to run low quickly, then this is probably why.

So, quickly I realised that you can remove these Apps from the background in the very same way that you can delete Apps from the home screen, so no problem. Well not quite, doing this soon becomes a pain, I now spent most of my time removing Apps from the background! So, I assumed that I must be able to disable this function? Erm… Well apparently not, for some bizarre reason the recently resigned CEO of Apple decided not to give us the choice, yep that’s right you can’t choose to disable this function.

It would seem Apple have taken the right to choose away from the user on this one, still not quite sure why though. Hopefully, this will be added in future iOS updates, until then, if you know a work-round or have heard about a solution please get in touch.

Since the global financial collapse I have seen a worrying trend in big business to centralise and reduce resource, designers are pulled together into regional pockets, sales teams become call centres and some skills are simply lost.

I recently read a piece from Twitter suggesting that the more you centralise the less successful any process becomes; in the piece it was demonstrated that teams of people with varying skill sets working in the same building achieved greater productivity than those within a region, so with the increasing trend to pull similar skills together I started to worry that this was destroying the chance to do our best as teams.

Let me explain, I am a designer, a creative technical mind that can produce my own designs and theories while at the same time being equally capable of bringing the ideas of others to life.  Personally, I feed from other colleagues no matter who they are; I know I am only as good as my ideas and my ideas can be constrained by my own capabilities and creative boundaries, so being able to discuss any project with others helps to free me from those constraints and improve any concepts I may already have.

This can only be done by surrounding people like myself with colleagues who have completely different skill sets, yet this is where the problem starts. Slowly but surely teams of differently skilled individuals are being removed and replaced by teams of similarly skilled individuals, these skilled teams are then all based in one place and can no longer communicate easily in a face-to-face environment with other sections of the business. Instead a meeting takes place in a conference call or emails are cascaded around to gauge opinion, any ideas put forward by others can then easily be disregarded and pushed aside during the creative process.

The popular music industry is a prime example of the separation that is happening everywhere.  Collaborating musicians never meet, the mixing is done by a team in one place while the instruments are recorded elsewhere.  This in my opinion has led to a music industry that really hasn’t managed to produce anything truly provocative and influential for the last decade at least.  Instead they keep mass-producing to a certain trend, which leaves all music of any time painfully the same.

The main culprit here is technology!  It has never been easier to communicate, share and discuss with the modern devices available to us all on a day-to-day basis, but with all the technological advances that are happening we are not communicating more, we are communicating less and I don’t think we should ever under-estimate the importance of face-to-face discussion.

Conclusion

I know that most of this is only my opinion and is not greatly backed up with ground-breaking research or examples but I work in a business where this is happening, I can see the industries and businesses around me doing the same and with that I can see that creativity is being lost.  Technology seems to me to be the only sector where there is any innovation occurring, everything else has simply started regurgitating what has gone before.

For businesses to survive and things to feel exciting they need to push boundaries, not stick to formulas, however, this appears to be happening less and less. Surely centralisation of skills can only lead to good individual skill ideas and not great team ideas.