S60 Open to new features

A natural part of designing something — almost anything, I suppose — is looking around for inspiration. How did somebody else do this? How has this problem been solved before? What already works, and what could work better?

Every design and development group probably does this. I’m sure there’s a department deep inside Toyota that buys the latest Honda, and vice versa. We’re no different; we look at browsers all the time. In a previous post I mentioned that one of the goals around here is for other browser design groups to say “let’s do this the way that S60 browser did; that works really well.”

Some design groups are good at looking further afield for inspiration. I once read that years ago at Apple Computer, Steve Jobs parked a BMW motorcycle in the lobby of the building where development was proceeding toward what became the Macintosh. Not because they were designing the first internal-combustion computer (I guess that came much later and had to do with laptop batteries…) but because there was something the motorcycle could offer as inspiration. I don’t know exactly what it was — maybe just the fact that some products, whether motorcycles or computers, could be so coveted they commanded a higher price.

When I think about our browser, and what it should “be like”, I try also to cast my mental nets further afield than just other browsers. To pick on Apple again, iTunes is a pretty good application — can it suggest anything about our browser? Even stranger (maybe I’ve had too much coffee), if we used Lego blocks as inspiration, our browser would be almost infinitely configurable. Or possibly it would come in a bag. If we’re inspired by a busy coffee shop, maybe our browser would have a “focus” (like the screen of your laptop), and a “periphery” with semirandom information (like the conversations going on around you).

There’s no need to limit your sources of inspiration, of course. The examples I’ve mentioned, possibly excluding the coffee shop, are very common. I’d wager that Legos and iPods are mentioned these days in every design group in the world, almost no matter what their actual product focus. This is, iteslf, fascinating, and I’ll say more about it later. Think “emergent properties” and “recursiveness“.

And by the way, has anybody seen that extra phone I thought I left in my drawer the other day? The things keep disappearing for some reason, especially the black ones.