04/23/2008 09:39:05 PM 
His presentation was a sort of biography meets sources of inspiration ramble, but it was good.
Jones, worked for three years (2003-2006) in Nokia's design research team spent a lot of time talking and learning about play, a core project he'd been involved in for a couple of years.
Nokia started by searching for universal human experiences something that required no research, just a book, Human Universals by Donald Brown that lists all the commonalities that exist in the human world. Matt and his team discovered there was a lot of global commonality in play which suited Nokia because at the time, it was searching for its own space in gaming.
While Jones and his gang came up with a lot of trend-right directions/themes (social networking, hacking, just-in-time situationalists, reclaim the streets,mundane is the new fun, etc) it appears the only thing that Nokia had on its mind was the doomed N-Gage.
This play project seems to have informed Matt's philosophy for design, he used the idea/quote of Play= Improvisation + Exploring, to make the link back to the design world.
He suggests that most people don't take play seriously, but play is the best way people learn and is all around us. It's the thing that can make experiences sticky and compelling, if you know how to use it right.
He had some nice examples;
The Prius dashboard "makes MPG, the new high score"
Dopplr's brand identity that is personalized for each user and changes as their behavior changes
Playfulness in copy on Dopplr- "July, no trips, we envy you."
As a distraction, Jones talked about his sideline projects for Welsh clothing company, Howies; a computer meets printer meets conveyor belt thingy that spits out Flickr images tagged with Howies. (Russell Davies is a co-conspirator on this).
Another project revolves around creating a map chest for the Howies London store complete with bugs, mid wind speed monitors and web cam feeds from Welsh surfing breaks. His inspiration was to stop the Howies people from becoming homesick for their roots when they were in Central London.
He ended with an interesting thought about the current vogue for the Big Idea, which he doesn't really believe in, instead he feels it's much more about the details and nuances, which are hard to get right and hard to copy.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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