“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born”
— Nikola Tesla

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination”
— Albert Einstein

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet”
— Franz Kafka

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible”
— Pablo Picasso

I found these excellent articles by Leo Babauta a few days ago: The No.1 Habit of Highly Creative People and The lost art of solitude. They are an excellent dive into the value of solitude and they provide also some excellent quotes, like the ones above.

The location was amazing, the organization was also up to the game and overall I’m satisfied of the event. There was a good variety of talks, and even if there were a couple of them that I noticed were difficult for the crowd, being a bit too high or abstract, overall these played well in the balance with the more pragmatical ones.

Unfortunately I have also a criticism: while the event was indeed good, in the end basically nobody talked really about emergence with the exception of Jamie Brassett. Most of the talks were either referencing to it in an incredible loose way or using the term with a completely different meaning — giving me the uncomfortable impression that some of the speakers weren’t even knowledgeable about emergence at all.

I’m not really good in doing reports afterward, but as I did during dConstruct 2011, I sketched a PDF book during the event with all my notes. You can download it here (I hope it’s readable).

A few interesting concepts or quotes:

• Michael Wolff: “People tolerate pretty terrible behaviours” and on the other side “People will never forget how you made them feel”.
• Jamie Brassett: “The challenge is to articulate an open space with simple rules, like a flock”.
• Richard Seymour (video): “Why did you write something in the back of the clock where nobody sees it? — God can see it”.
• Anais Nin (cited): “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are”.
• Tom Hulme: “Our ability to plan is disappearing”.
• Misha Glenny (video): “Certain disabilities turn in incredible skills with a computer”.
• Julie Jenson Bennett: “We should stop looking for the new but look for the better”.
• Nadia Berthouze: “Our body speaks to others as it speaks to ourselves”.
• Barry Buzan: “Individuals today can achieve relatively big power”.

You can see all the videos on the event website.

Norman was bothered by his analysis and tried to find examples that refuted this conclusion: he failed. Every radical innovation he investigated was done without design research, without careful analysis of a person’s or even a society’s needs.
— Norman D., Verganti R. (2012) Incremental and Radical innovation

The metaphor used in the paper is a common and very effective one: incremental innovation is like being on a mountain and trying to reach the top of it. Radical innovation instead is like jumping to a new mountain with the hope that it’s higher than the one you are on.

Understanding this is very important because it shows you the advantages and risks of both approaches. The incremental approach is very effective when grounded in research and is the one leading to the top, step by step. On the other side the radical approach isn’t usually grounded in research and has a quite high failure ratio because you can’t predict on which mountain you are going to land.

However, you can clearly see that:

Radical innovations seldom live up to their potential when first introduced. At first, they are often difficult to use, expensive, and limited in capability. Incremental innovation is necessary to transform the radical idea into a form that is acceptable to those beyond early adopters.
The bottom line is that both forms of innovation are necessary.

I think that you can see this clearly with startups. A startup by itself is usually an attempt in doing radical innovation, but in the principle it’s very very rough and requires lots of work to start growing and showing the full potential. Plus, if the idea isn’t delivering – the mountain isn’t as high as imagined – the startup usually pivots.

The paper goes on showing the two main dimensions where innovation can happen.

We conclude that human-centered design, with its emphasis on iterated observation, ideation, and testing is ideally suited for incremental innovation and unlikely to lead to radical innovation. Radical innovation comes from changes in either technology or meaning. Technology-driven innovation often comes from inventors and tinkerers. Meaning-driven innovation, however, has the potential to be driven through design research, but only if the research addresses  fundamental questions of new meanings and their interpretation.

And this is the most interesting part: technology and meaning, as two dimensions where innovation can happen. The two are related, and as such there’s always a bit of each in every innovation. The accent is where the main shift happens.

Let’s see briefly a few examples from the paper:

1. Market-Pull Innovation: any user centered design approach.
2. Technology-Push Innovation: the introduction of the color TV, the Xerox copier, the electronic calculator.
3. Meaning-Driven Innovation: the shift of watches from tools to fashion accessories, the invention of the mini-skirt in 1960s as a symbol of women’s freedom.
4. Technology Epiphanies: the Wii, using a new technology to change the space of video games.

Clearly, the Market-Pull Innovation is safer, while the Technology Epiphanies are way more difficult, also due to the resistance of the users to change.

You can find the full paper in PDF on this page. It’s worth a read. Norman and Verganti do a great work in detailing these two dimensions with some excellent examples and models.

“To some extent the social factors of status do affect how we perceive and value art, but what I want to try to convince you in this presentation is that there’s something else going on. Something that psychologists have called essentialism. And the idea of essentialism is that we don’t just focus on the superficial aspects of things, rather, we go deep. We are obsessed with origin and history. This is natural. Universal. Hard-wired and irresistible.”
— Paul Bloom

He does a lot of examples, spacing from art to sex and food as well, showing through these examples and researches how essentialism isn’t just a social and cultural construct, but exists in young children as well. Hard-wired indeed.

One of the examples he gives is an opera by Tom Friedman. The opera is a white piece of paper.  It’s a completely blank canvas. The title is “A thousand hours of staring”, and the reason of it is that the artist stared at that blank sheet of paper for 1.000 hours.

I think that essentialism points out a very interesting aspect that can give us a good way to interpret art and to juxtapose it to design. It will not answer every possible question, it won’t close any debate, but I still found it very interesting.

Follow me for a moment.

Essentialism might be the reason why design is different from art, even when the two result in exactly the same thing from a pure perception standpoint. Now of course it’s very difficult to have a work of art and a work of design producing exactly the same visual result, the same architecture, the same music or performance, or else, but it’s not hard to imagine if you take the example of Tom Friedman above, or if you remind the saying “Oh, I could have done that”.

The difference lies in what’s behind that. While both design and art can create beautiful results, it’s the essence of it, it’s the story behind that distinguish the two. In simplistic terms it’s also the amount of time that the opera symbolizes. It’s the meaning of it that’s important. It’s the human nature that it connects with, the one of the author(s) connecting in some way with yours.

That’s why two drawings that look exactly the same will be different when someone tells you that one is by Picasso and the other by their friend. It’s because we attach meaning to these art creation that transcend the appearance itself. I probably shouldn’t use this term, but in some way it is its “soul”.

That’s why if I take anything from the road and I place it inside an empty room in a museum, everybody will start thinking “what is the author trying to tell me?”. It’s automatic, because we expect that from art. And I’m not fantasizing: Marcel Duchamp did exactly this with his “Fountain“, and it’s also probably one of the provocations behind Piero Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit“.

Essentialism doesn’t apply to art only, but from its perspective anything can be art as long as there’s a story attached to it with probably someone that injected a lot of thinking and made you think about your human nature.

So, what about design?

If we exclude the accepted fine arts and artistic disciplines like painting, writing, sculpting and so on, design is probably the non-artistic discipline more likely to be debated as art. The reason is simple: they are both creative processes and they both use the same media.

Using the essentialist perspective however you can see the difference between the two: art is defined by the author itself as a deep and meaningful process that, in the end, created the object or performance. Design instead doesn’t have this kind of story attached to the result itself. The essence of the two is deeply different, and as such, one is art and the other isn’t.

If you observe some edge cases you can see this. Take Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, the “Juicy Salif”. It’s a squeezer that doesn’t work. But Starck is a famous designer, he created it with a specific intent, it has a story attached, and it was built by a famous italian design brand, Alessi. Even the wikipedia entry of it tells the bit of story attached to it and quotes Starck saying “it’s not meant to squeeze lemons but to start conversations”. If you buy the Juicy Salif, it’s not to squeeze lemons. It’s for the story.
And it’s exposed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

I was discussing this perspective with photographer Claire Gaul and it came out that you can summarize and simplify it as: an object of design has its roots in what is going to do after it’s created, while an object of art has its roots in what happened before it was created. I must clarify immediately – thanks Riccardo - that this doesn’t imply that art “dies” once it’s done: both of them are going to be experienced in the future, you experience art after it’s done, it could make you cry and so on. But you can imagine like the weight exists in two different parts of the timeline.

The two things can be mixed, as in Starck’s example above.
The two things are also interwoven with a whole lot of other factors often debated when you try to define art.

In the end, essentialism alone isn’t able to define clearly the boundary of art and design, but I think that its perspective has a great value within this discussion. That’s why I encourage you to watch Paul Bloom’s “How Pleasure Work” and think about it.

• 1930s — Walter Shewhart proposes a series of short “plan-do-study-act” (PDSA) cycles.
• 1950s — The X-15 hypersonic jet applied incremental and iterative development.
• 1958 — Project Mercury (NASA) software development, ran with half-day iterations.

“All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities.”
— Weinberg G. M. (Project Mercury)

• 1972 — The USS “Trident” Ohio submarine command and control system, developed by IBM FSD. More than 1 million lines of code. Four 6 month iterations.
• 1972 — Army Site Defence missile tracking software. $100 million project, developed by TRW in 5 iterations.
• 1970s — Light Airborne Multipurpose System (US Navy). 45 one-month iterations.

“Every one of those deliveries was on time and under budget”
— Mills H.

“Software development should be done incrementally, in stages with continuous user participation and replanning and with design-to-cost programming within each stage.”
— Mills H. (1976)

• 1977-1980 — Space Shuttle (NASA) avionic software. 17 iterations over 31 months (8 weeks average).
• 1980s — Artificial intelligence researchers used Lisp machines and evolutionary prototyping.
• 1987 — Command and Control Processing and Display System Replacement, developed by TRW in 6 time-boxed iterations.
• 1980s — The DoD was experiencing a project failure rate of 75% in a sample of waterfall project of about $37 billion overall, where only 2% of them were used without extensive modification. At the end of 1987 the DoD changed its policies to allow iterative development.
• 1994 — The DoD was still victim of the waterfall mindset, developing too much using waterfall and so Paul Kaminsky issued a report stating: “DoD must manage programs using iterative development”.

But of course, by the 90s the agile concepts were spreading more and as such more and more project were started using this approach, until in 2001 the agile manifesto was written.

Here I did just a summary, but the data I presented comes from a 2003 article by Larman and Basili, published by IEEE: “Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History” (PDF). It’s well written and with loads of references and details. Thanks to Dave Gray for pointing me to this great source.

What’s incredibly interesting is that the author of what’s considered the first formalization of waterfall, Winston Royce, agrees instead with incremental and iterative development. Even in its very first article in 1970, “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” (PDF), he states:

STEP 3: DO IT TWICE
If the computer program in question is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned.

Waterfall… has never been really waterfall.

Why then? Well, if you think about it, it’s all about human perception and learning. The waterfall article dedicated entire pages to this “STEP 3: DO IT TWICE” but unfortunately it wasn’t part of the core message in the “waterfall” idea, and as such dropped out in the popular understanding of it.

It’s a matter of perception, learning and communication.

That’s also why I started talking about the Dot Loop: to have a simple and effective way to communicate the approach I value most and show how it applies universally.

Despise and deride it all you like, but the business card remains a growth market. How has this 17th century technology not just survived but continued to flourish? [...]
Bump was fast out of the gate, reporting 53 million users since its March 2009 launch, but a recent internal evaluation surprised its founders. The deep dive revealed that despite its design as a business product, it was primarily serving an after-hours function as a social tool.
— Bennett R. (2012) How Business Cards Survive in the Age of LinkedIn

“Surprised”? To find the survival of the business card surprising means not understanding human behaviour and interaction design as well.

Giving a card has many meanings: from the physicality of the card itself (have you ever played with one in your hand?) to the ritual of the handover (a strong social ritual), to the speed of doing that (handover, done!), to the visual design of the card itself (that’s a cool design!), to the collection part of it (did you ever flip through the cards you got after a day?).

If you want to “challenge” business cards with your product:

1. it needs to be faster, or as fast as.
   Test it. If I can give a business card and take your faster than your app, I already win.
2. it needs to be visually designed, branded, colorful, not just a line of data.
   You need to allow people to design their cards. There’s pride and “wow” in that.
3. it needs to create a sort of ritual.
   This is more subtle, but you need to avoid technicalities. Create some kind of gesture maybe. An interaction. Bump does this pretty well, but maybe something less awkward would be nice.

Notice that “having to install the app” already hits 1 pretty badly. Yes, it’s fun at the beginning to try the new app and see how it works, but when the novelty goes away, you’re going back to cards again.

Technology alone can’t help here. Promising that aggregating the cards afterward in a better way, organize the data, setup the reminders and the call isn’t enough to balance out the three factors above. Promising a better long-term outcome over a higher initial investment is something difficult as human beings, otherwise gyms would be the best business ever. ;)

Nothing surprising.

And yes, it’s again about Proximity Interactions.

Responsive Web Design

• If you want layout adjustments across devices.
• You can live without complete optimization for specific devices.
• You don’t have access to server-side solutions.
• You really don’t trust device detection.

Device Experience

• You want maximum optimization for each type of device.
• And the ability to serve completely different user experience & features to each class of device.
• You’re comfortable with device detection.

— LukeW (2012) Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS?

LukeW takes a completely technical perspective: devices, optimization, server-side, detection. It’s true, it’s important, but in the end, is it really what’s that choice should be about?

What was not implicitly said in Luke’s article (and I think bears discussion) is that choosing responsiveness, as a characteristic shouldn’t necessarily define the wider implementation approach. Device Experiences (i.e. standalone sites, aimed at a group of devices) can also be responsive, providing the flexibility to support a much wider range of devices.
— Stephanie Rieger (2012) Responsiveness is a characteristic

We’re getting there. Her addition is as valuable as LukeW starting point, but unfortunately it’s still missing the point in my opinion, the most important, critical and difficult decision. She has the answer between the lines, but she still talks about devices.

The user journey is the most important decision, not the technology. The discussion about technology, devices, optimization, etc, comes after you do your research and you verify if your users want to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way when at the laptop, when on the couch with a tablet and when around walking with a smartphone.

That’s the first decision.
The user journey.

And then, the two approaches might well converge. It’s not so strange as Stephanie was saying that you develop a mobile/tablet interface and you make it responsive, while having a completely different one on the desktop.

Once you start thinking about the journey, you see also clearly that when you say “No” in the decision tree above you might as well decide to go native instead of providing a website with device experience. It might be a wiser business decision.

The examples can be from the more extreme to the more obvious. If you are making a photo service, the focus of the device will be all around taking the photo and editing it, while the web counterpart on desktop and tablet might be focused on the fruition of beautiful galleries. It optimizes the flows, it reduces costs and creates better experiences.

Instead a news website probably will fit better being responsive since the objective and journey is very similar both on desktop and mobile: getting the news.

In a recent project I worked on the mobile experience was more focused around reporting and notifications, and the desktop about collaboration and interaction. It’s clear what was our choice there: a desktop website focused on facilitating the discussion and the interaction between people while the mobile website was focused around giving you at a glance the single update you wanted and the person to contact for that. It wasn’t possible to be built as responsive: not only the pages were different, but also the flows and the actions were different.

So, step back from the technical details at first, make the right decisions based on real user needs and activities, and then you can dig into all the technicalities you want.

This guide is for someone that matches two requirements: you have a job in London and you are coming from an European country (or, any other place from where you don’t need a visa). That’s why this is a guide ‘when’ moving and not ‘to’ move. :)

Before landing

Planning is a always a little difficult because everyone has a different way of dealing with it. I have friends that got a plane ticket to London for an holiday and they never went back, others like me planned about one month in advance, and others planned even 6 months in advance.

My planning consisted in booking a good plane ticket, to have some room for luggage, and a hotel to be covered for the first days. However I should probably have checked alternatives, because I discovered later that’s possible to remotely to find a temporary accommodation, like shared rooms (finding a flat to rent was almost impossible to me, even through agencies).

I also landed a few days before starting work, so I had time to find a mobile number, open the bank account and start visiting all the housing agencies I found in the areas where I was interested in.

Transit

If you are going to live in London, the answer is only one: Oyster card. Get it as soon as you land… or even before, ordering it from abroad.
This can be used on almost all the tube and surface lines in London and also on some railways. The difference is huge: paying cash is more than two times as much as using the Oyster.

It’s also important to familiarize with the TFL website, because it gives information on both delays and planned maintenance, and that’s critical on the weekend when they do heavy maintenance works.

Mobile phone

One of the first things that I’d advise to get is a data plan for your smartphone. It will make your first weeks in a new place way simpler. Think about having maps with you, or checking times and informations on the web while you’re moving. While it’s of course possible to do everything without, if you have a smartphone, just do it.

The problem here is that most of the time if you try to get a Top-up card they will ask you a proof of address within UK. That’s a problem because you have just arrived.

This happened with Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile: all of them required a proof of address. However O2 has the perfect top-up plan and requires only a passport.

It’s a great mobile data plan to start: you top £10 and it gives you the data plan for one month. £10 are added to your credit, so you win two times: it’s cheap, you get a data plan and credit as well. If you aren’t willing to top-up £10 – even if I find it hard to believe since you’re using your phone a bit in the first days – O2 costs just £1 to have data access for a single whole day, when you need it.

There are also other options like GiffGaff, quite cheap and with a good data plan. It might work for you. Some people also reported to me that Three can be a choice too.

My choice:
02 Pay and Go (Top-up) Text & Web
I did this on day 1, just after landing

Bank Account

This is going to be a problem: to open a bank account you need a proof of address, and most of the time to rent a house you need a bank account – or, at least, it makes things easier.

Since it might take a few days to create an account and receive all the cards and code to access, I’d advise to start this process as soon as possible. I created my account at Barclays on the second day I was here.

The good part: Barclays has many banks around the UK, and you’ll be talking with a human being to open the account. The internet banking exists and works well, and as of 2011, they added also international money transfer to it.

The bad part: most of the time you have to go there to do anything extra over the internet banking and even if you try to ask them questions via email they’ll tell you to call or go there.

Doing this is tricky. The best thing is to have a employment contract and an address of a friend so you can just provide them until you find a house.

The contract is useful to lower their barrier, even if I saw it’s not necessary at all, most of the time they don’t make a problem, but having it avoids lots of questions.

The address is useful because for them is necessary to open an account and send your debit card and codes to. Pay attention that the address needs to be residential, they will not accept an office one, even if personally I was able to provide my office address (I’m not sure why). The idea is that your friend will receive your card and codes at his address, and you’ll move it when you find a house.

Once open, I’d suggest to transfer some money if you can, because it might take a few days and you’ll need that to rent a flat and these kind of expenses. You can usually pay with a foreign credit card as well, but it’s better to be covered. Personally I transferred around 5.000 € to be safe, and I was more than plenty to cover the first expenses.

My choice:
Barclays basic account
I did this on Day 2, takes a few weeks to receive the cards

A note about postcodes

The UK the postcodes are organized in a very useful way, because they identify a house up to the entrance door… almost. This means that every household and office block in UK has a different postcode, and most of the time you don’t need much more.

Also, in London and only in London, the first three letters are cardinal points: N, S, E, W.

For example: SE1 4PA means “south-east, area 1″ and 4PA identifies the block and door.

Note however that:

1. Sometimes the first number on the address doesn’t identify the block (like in Italy) but the flat door. It’s important to keep that too.
2. Sometimes tools like Google Maps get the postcode wrong, so when you search it’s better to include also the street address, unless you’re sure it works with just the postcode.
3. Sometimes the block number is replaced by the building name.
4. Even if a lot of buildings have both a number and a name, and the postcode points directly to the building, in some other situations the street address indicates a set of buildings. It’s tricky, you should always check.

As a simple example, see this address:

Flat 66B
The Tall Building
Pennington Hill
E1W 2CZ, London

The strictly necessary information could be just “Flat 66B” and “E1W 2CZ”, everything else adds more detail. Note also the use of the block name instead of the number. Be careful however because as I said sometimes the entrance is in a bad position as as such you need all the details.

House: sharing option

First of all you should see if you want to live alone or if it’s ok for you to share.

If you want to share, there are a few sites you can consult, like:

• SpareRoom
• Easy Roommate
• GumTree / Flat Share

This is quite easy, and you should be able to find a bed within a week. Personally, I was able to find one in 2 days from the start of my searches in june 2010.

Be aware that you might need your own pillow, sheets and some other stuff.

Flat: independent option

If you want a flat all for you, these are the sites:

• RightMove
• Find A Property

For a flat I’d advise you to choose an area checking the web or waking around to see where you’d like to live. It’s a good thing trying to use the websites to know which agencies operate in the area you want, and then go through an agency. While of course it’s nice if you can avoid the cost of an agency and rent directly from a landlord, in my experience I found more time-effective using an agency.

A problem you’ll see if you try to do that online is that most of the time there are “fake” ads by agencies and also some scammers that ask you to “prove” that you have money. If you are able to dig through these, you’ll find also some good landlord. :)

Be aware also that most of the flats you’ll find will disappear in a day, sometimes even in hours.

I built a quick checklist for things that I verified in every house I saw:

1. Internet: check, better before viewing the flat, if the postcode has a good internet connection
2. Floor: check the condition of the floor, its insulation and of course: if it’s wood, it’s better
3. Carpet: as few as possible (this is probably personal taste, but it’s also easier to keep and clean).
4. Windows frames: well closed, better if with double glazing
5. Heaters: check and ask how the heathers work
6. Water heating: check if there’s gas and if not the size of the tank
7. Power shower: a power shower is basically a pump attached to the shower, which compensates for lack of pressure in the pipes. It is extremely loud, better to avoid when possible. At least make sure you try and turn it on while you’re viewing the flat to have an idea of the noise level
8. Kitchen: check the stove
9. Washing machine: check if it’s in good condition and if it has the dryer
10. Furniture: check its condition. Also, mind that the amount of furnishing can vary, and might or might not include things like dishes, pans and bed linen: you might have to buy them yourself.
11. TCO – total cost of ownership (monthly rent + bills + council tax, see below)
12. Contract: check the length and renewal policy. It’s important for example to understand if the break clause is at 6 months (so you have to notify that you leave 2 months before, at 4 months in) or at 8 months (so you have to notify that you leave at 6 months exactly).

From what I understood so far, that the best periods to look for a flat are february and june, because many people move at that time (i.e. resident students and such).

Remember also that while there are lots of flats that are immediately available, there are others that will be available within one month, and in my experience these were the best ones, except in some lucky occasions.

Council Tax

In the UK there’s a tax that is associated with the house and varies between different locations. It’s called “Council Tax” and it’s paid directly to the council where your house is located, each month.

In London I’ve personally seen this varying between £100 and £180, but I think its variation might be more than this.

This isn’t included in the rent, so be aware that on top of each month’s rent, you have to pay this. However, if you’re living alone, you’re entitled to a 25% discount on Council tax, and if you share it’s usually split.

The good part is that in the UK you get to vote for your council if you’re resident.

Internet

The simple answer here is:

• if there’s a fiber connection, use Virgin. Just make sure it’s fiber.
• if there’s only ADSL, use BeThere.

Of course, even with these two very good choices it’s possible that you’ll land in a bad area. There’s nothing that helps that, you just have to place your bets.

Be aware that you might need to sign up for a British Telecom (BT) landline before being able to connect an internet provider, even if the internet provider will be able next to provide the landline as well.

The whole process might take even a month between the two activations. I had a O2 Broadband key in the meantime to cover it, but sometimes finding a bar or pub near you with wireless connection might work as well.

National Insurance Number

When you start working it’s important that you apply for a NIN number, that’s required to track correctly your income and everything related to UK services, including pension.

You have to book an appointment through Job Centre Plus – phone only – and take a few hours to fill all the paperwork there. You’ll need al the documents you can provide, they ask a lot of things, but I noticed that a few friends made it through with way less data than I provided, so I don’t know exactly what’s the bare minimum.

More informations here:

• DirectGOV: Applying for a National Insurance number
• HMRC: Applying for a National Insurance number

I did this after a couple of months being here, meanwhile they told me a temporary NIN was used for tax purposes on my salary payments. I’m not sure about the details of a temporary NIN: on the details I received the field was empty, while in other occasions I read that you could “generate” a temporary one yourself. I’m not sure about this, but it worked for me.

Medical support: the GP

When coming from the European Union there’s a standard coverage that’s accepted everywhere. However, it’s a good choice to find a clinic in nearest place to your house in case you need anything. This means that you have to register to a General Pratictioner, or GP.

To do this, the most important thing to have is a proof of address, because GPs are local and accept only people that are resident in the area.

Apart from that, the registration is as simple as filling out a form and providing a copy of the proof of address. As far as I know, they will ask also a sample of urine and do a check the first time you register.

The registration will be then completed in a few days, and they will send you a letter with all the informations you might need to contact them, emergency and book an appointment.

For italians: AIRE registration

It’s advisable to move your residential address in London for the italian bureaucracy and government matters. Note however that it’s an entirely italian government detail that doesn’t matter at all from the perspective of the UK government.

Advantages? Well, you can use the consular services from London, so you can have documents replaced here directly and also you’ll receive elections materials directly here without the need to go back to Italy.
But of course, read the website for full informations.

The process is quite straightforward, you have to fill out a form and send it over to the italian consulate, that will add your detail to the expat registry and remove you from your italian registry. You’ll receive an update by mail.

Bear in mind that this process – in a truly italian fashion – can take an inordinate amount of time (last time I checked it was up to 6 months).

Also, while the details aren’t at all clear, moving your residence to the UK should be required to stop having to fill tax forms in Italy.

~

If you’d like to add something else to this guide, feel free to comment below. Thanks for all the updates I received so far. :)

This is not how things work, right?

But it’s exactly how it works on the web. You have to type a password before using your laptop.You have to login before you can access Twitter, you have to login before ordering anything on Amazon, you have to login before using Facebook. And then, if you work in an office and don’t like to mix your job and your personal life in a single identity, you need to log out of all your accounts and log in again to your professional ones.

This is because the web today is based on logins. We are more then 10 years into the internet age and still we are identifying ourselves with usernames and password, a method that has already demonstrated to be incredibly difficult to manage for everyone, because the “good password policies” are too hard to apply for a normal person that just wants to send a photo to his grandmother.

Is the login paradigm a failure? Yes, and you’ll find plenty of evidence online. One of my favourite is this report form Trusteer (PDF) that shows how 73% of people share the critical banking username with other online services and 47% of them share both username and password. From a completely different perspective there are recurring discussions on where’s better to put the registration, because that boring detail hugely influences adoption. Check this excellent presentation by Joshua Porter on this very topic. Of course, this model served us well up until now. But this is not enough anymore.

I believe we should move away from logins, and embrace identities. Or, without getting too philosophical, move towards an interaction paradigm that looks more like real identities and less like cypher codes from Mission Impossible.

I’m surely not the first person thinking and talking about this, and even more there are lots of people out there working directly on this specific topic, taking one stance or another on how to solve the problem. There are products like 1Password and Passpack and there are also big companies like Google trying to push forward solutions, plus efforts like Mozilla BrowserID that are headed in this very direction.

This indicates two very interesting things: first this is a huge problem that’s felt by almost everybody; second, there are a lot of problems to solve before reaching our end.

What I’d like to do here is to connect all these different approaches together under a single umbrella, to help everyone head in the same direction. And this vision is excatly the shift from logins to identities.

Identity

How could we do that? Well, one step at time. The first step is quite simple, and requires an incredibly simple interface in your browser. That’s what I want to propose today, and I’d love to start a discussion, in order to create a better web for everyone. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe that this is the right way to go.

This is how I think identity should appear on your future browser version:

Did you notice the top-right corner?
This browser window, knows who I am.

There isn’t much more to add, that’s what the user has to do to login. Nothing. This browser window is logged in with your personal identity and will instruct any websites you visit accordingly.

It’s so simple that the part about the basic user experience ends here. It just works.

What’s great about this way of managing identities is that you can easily switch from one to another. Plus, you can have multiple windows open, each one with a different active identity.

Private browsing will be just another identity, not a special mode anymore, giving a clear signal that you can still browser without disclosing anything at all.

Switching from one identity to the other might be locked with a password, and it might be possible to add an option to automatically logout to Privacy mode after some inactivity time.

For convenience, let’s use a name for this identity-based approach. Identity 2.0 is taken by OpenID. So, instead of Identity 3.0, let’s use the more meaningful Seamless Identity.

How does Seamless Identity work?

As it often happens with transparent interactions like this, there is a hidden complexity underneath. There are technical challenges that connects with two topics: privacy and security.

While I know a bit of both, I’m not expert enough to have a definitive answer for a service that could potentially work for every person in the world. That’s why I’d love to have feedbacks on the model I’m describing here and build together a solid standard.

One of the API could be a JavaScript API, and could work like this:

1. By default, it exposes a low security identity token generated for a specific domain. So any website will be able to associate data with you and you alone, without any risk to lose it, since that token will be stored with the identity. I imagine that this token will be generated with a cryptographic algorithm in order to be both secure, unique and not sharable between multiple domains. In this way, nobody will be able to track your movements even if your identity is active, because each token will be unique and different (and possibly, revokable).
2. If the website wants to know more about you, it has to ask. It’s not much different than a waiter asking your name to take your booking, and it will be available at the push of a button. I think that the next level up is “email”, since too many services right now need it for things like notifications. Notice however that there could be a service attached to this identity module creating special emails that could be invalidated, protecting in this way your real email address.

It’s interesting to note however that most online services will be able to provide most of their features with just the first level token, since the important thing is to uniquely identify you. The need to provide an email address is in many cases just a byproduct of the login paradigm and its compulsory registration. Think about it: you would still be able to access the whole of Twitter, Facebook or Flickr even if they didn’t have your email, right? The important thing for these services is to know that you are really you, in order to grant access to your data.

PROS:

1. Transparent user experience.
2. Increased safety against phishing: since you never have to type anything or disclose twice your credential to a website, they can’t ask you twice without looking suspicious.
3. Your data will be inputted only once in the Identity Manager provided by the browser, and you’ll never have to type this information again. So, nobody could steal your password, email or credit card, since you’ll never type these details again. This would also allow automatic detail change the next time you visit the website. The browser runtime will protect the data for you (this is an important point of course for the browser implementation).
4. A new class of services will be enabled, and the adoption barrier will be lowered to almost zero. There will be no registration process to slow you down: you’ll open a website and you’ll be able to start using it immediately.
5. Facebook, or other identity providers, won’t be the gatekeepers of your data anymore. They could instead be cloud services offering more services on top of this identity mechanism.
6. It will allow peer-to-peer authenticated exchanges, since the identity is now in the device and not in the service you’re registered with.
7. No website will have to store your credit card data anymore, since it will be provided ad-hoc by the Identity Manager when needed.

CONS:

1. You will still have one password, the one protecting your device(s).
2. The identity will be a cryptographic information stored somewhere: if you lose it, it’s gone with all the accounts you ever created, and you’ll have to retrieve them with site-specific requests.
3. The identity needs to be transferred to every device you own.
4. If you don’t have your identity with you, there’s no way to login by default. Exactly like if you don’t have your identity you can’t buy alcohol, or you can’t get on a plane.

However the cons aren’t so bad and can be easily mitigated:

• Points 2 and 3 might be mitigated by a backend based on a standardized cloud service to store the identity. Data would be encrypted before being stored so that not even the company providing the service could access it (see Passpack as an example of how this has already been done transparently). The service would allow retrieval in case all your hardware is lost. If you think about it, it’s in some way what already happens with Android/GoogleAccounts and iOS/iCloud.
• Point 4 might be a problem for some users, but it might be less relevant since there’s a growing number of users that uses smartphones, and well, a feature like this could be ported to non-smartphones as well.
• Point 4 can also be mitigated by the services themselves, enabling different login mechanisms to allow non-identity based authentication (i.e. sending you an SMS with a token). This isn’t new, and it’s usually well developed in the best password recovery systems.

It’s worth noting an interesting detail: a lot of people are already using the browser built-in feature of Saved Passwords, or systems like 1Password. WIth these you get basically all the cons above, with a minimal advantage compared to what would be possible with Seamless Identity.

Use cases overview

What’s even more interesting is that while SeamlessID is intended and works as a replacement of logins, certain services such as banks might still require additional security systems and ask for nonce passwords. Also, the “password recovery systems” of today, will be “identity reconnect systems” just in case you need a one-time access from remotely or reset your identity connection. These will be provided as today by the services, because they will store different data (a recovery for a bank will be different from a recovery for Twitter).

That’s entirely fine. This is just a first step.

This diagram shows at a glance different use cases and how SeamlessID solves the problem easily.

As it’s now probably clear, there’s no way logins can help you in having the very first level of identity. That’s missing, because it’s too slow. It’s also one of the reasons why a lot of systems like Facebook are closed gardens: once you’re in, that first sight identity is granted. Once you’re in.

All the middle ground of identity is covered by logins as well, however SeamlessID will be simply quicker, by providing information at the click of the mouse and in a more secure way.

Seamless Identity API draft

This is a draft I thought that might enable this kind of service. It’s worth noting that while this is a JavaScript API, it’s possible to suppose that the browser could send the token inside the HTTP request header as well, thus providing this feature on systems without JavaScript. But that’s an advanced topic for another time.

It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of similarities with the Session API from Mozilla BrowserID, even if the Session API is still based on a login model instead of an identity model and seem still delegating the identity management to the website.

window.id.token

This property will provide the unique token to initiate the first level of identity exchange. As said before, this is unique within a domain.

The token could be an alphanumeric string like a md5 hash.

If the domain is blacklisted, or the user is in Privacy mode, the token property will return false.

As you can see this is similar, technically, to what already happens today with cookies, but the difference here is that now is the browser that generates the token from a private key and not the website.

This is huge, because it means that the identity doesn’t expire and the user has control over that identity.

Effectively, it means that you can trust any data created with the token, because it’s already you, and you can at a later time decide to keep that data, reset the token, upgrade the registration with the website or else.

window.id.get(<required>, <optional>, callback)

This will be a function to request the user to explicitly disclose these information. The application can request one or more fields, each one identified by its name.

For example:

window.id.get(['name', 'nickname'], callback);
window.id.get(['name', 'nickname'], ['avatar', 'country'], callback);
window.id.get(null, ['avatar', 'country'], callback);

When this request is issued, the user will see an overlay generated by the window chrome (not the page – for security reasons) asking if they want to allow that domain to access these details from that moment on.

window.id.getOnce(<required>, callback)

This function works exactly like window.id.get, with the same ability of ask for one or more fields from the Identity profile, and the same popup.

The difference is that these informations are returned to the web app only once, and every request needs to be authorized again.

Certain class of values, like credit cards, might only be available under the “getOnce” call. It might also be that this function will work only if the website is under HTTPS.

window.id.<field>

Once requested at least once with window.id.get(), each of the details will then be available directly at API level. This is useful also to handle updates: if for example the nickname changes, the system will be able to lookup it and verify it changed, updating its internal value automatically or after a confirmation.

This works well because we are talking about identities, and when some detail about you change you expect anyone you are in touch with to automatically get that update, or at least ask if you want that update to happen.

Notice also that I used “window” instead of “navigator” because the idea is that each window can use a different identity and this would make it cleared. However this is really just a detail managed by the browser engine itself. It could be “navigator” as well.

Native support

Another important thing about this approach is that identity will switch from being just multiple logins to memorize to being an operating system level feature, like the KeyChain feature in OSX.

In this way, once ready, Firefox, Chrome, Explorer, Safari, Opera and the other browsers could just provide an interface to that identity system.

This is even more relevant because for security reasons it is important to have all the interactions with the Identity Manager to be outside the website part of the screen: in this way they couldn’t fake any interaction with it (even if, as stated, you’ll have to push just one button, not type private data directly in the website).

This last thing is easy on a computer, but it’s hard on a smartphone where most of the screen estate will be used for the website. In this scenario, it will probably need to slide away like happens with the multitasking bar of iOS, in order to show the controls outside and maybe showing an image that you setup, and that a phishing website couldn’t know.

What will it mean for developers

Think about what happens today: you are developing an idea to help people do something. Today, you can’t really start if you don’t have a registration system of some kind. Even if you use a library, you have to take it into account.

Even worse, you will have to find ways to motivate enough your user to overcome the registration barrier and use your service, or create a smart system to allow your user to demo the system before registering, with all the complexity that it might mean.

With Seamless Identity the registration barrier disappears.

For your earliest prototype, you might even just take the token and work with it, without any registration or any additional detail. You will be able to test the platform and build only one code path. There’s no split between app and demo, it’s all app, working, without any barrier.

And all of this will cost you a single call to window.it.token.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Could you imagine all the services that could exist thanks to this?

Adoption

While I was writing this article Google published a very similar idea to handle multiple Chrome users. You can see their solution here. This is a good early confirmation that this approach is good, even if I’d put the login on the right corner because it’s where we usually expect it to be and I don’t want it to be confused with the app itself. However Google Chrome’s solution vision is limited to Chrome. What we are talking here instead is a new layer for the open web.

I think that Mozilla has the right culture, technology and freedom to move forward this shift to identities and create a standard that will be adopted by all the other browsers… and hopefully operating systems as well.

Mozilla is already working on BrowserID, and this could potentially be the backend for this kind of identity shift, and after reading this article by David Ascher now I’m even more sure of this.

There’s of course a risk: the risk that each browser manufacturer will try to create walled identities, forcing users to use only one browser forever, with no ability to switch. You can clearly see that this will basically kill this concept, and will delay the adoption of an improved identity system for more years.

It’s important, if not critical, that the identity is easily transferrable, with a one-click way to do it: “Do you want this browser to use the Identity X?”, done. Even better if it will be a OS-level library. And BrowserID is again already trying to solve this problem by federating the concept of identity.

Otherwise… it will be just a way to trade one kind of fragmentation for another. Let’s work together. This should be a standard foundation for the future web. Identity must be in your hands, not in the hands of some external entity.

Even if I believe that Seamless Identity is the correct next step, I’m not focused on this specific implementation, just on this specific user experience and the fact that the code usability needs to be excellent, but even that is open for discussion. I believe that identity needs to make a step forward in being seamless and transparent, and that’s what I want to see. If it’s delivered in a different way, that’s still great.

~

If you think about this, the switch from logins to identities will also close another gap between native applications and web applications. Today you don’t have to login to an app you downloaded on your Android or iPad, and why should you if it’s local?

Moving from logins to identities on the web will allow this seamless experience for web apps as well, everywhere, on mobile and desktop. And on mobile it will be even more powerful.

I see a huge potential.

Do you know any browser developer? Participate in the discussion (on Twitter we are using the #seamlessID tag), link this article to them. I’m sure they will be interested, and you’ll help to change the web. ;)

Updates from the comments

1. Storage: what wasn’t clear enough probably is that this system by default stores everything in a secure space on your device. There’s no need to sync or put it on the cloud, you are in complete control. This already happens with Password Managers. If you want to think about this in a different way, SeamlessID simply makes transparent and more secure your Password Manager.
2. Device-less access: on the completely opposite side, there might be situations where you either don’t have your device, or you can’t access one. In this scenario, it’s also simple, because SeamlessID doesn’t mandate any restriction on the fact that the account might also be synced remotely. You might be able to log-in temporarly with a remote account, like a special privacy mode. The stress point here is that the browser should handle this layer of complexity, not the user. This already exists: OpenID logins, Facebook logins, Twitter logins, Google Account logins are all doing this.
3. Is it a replacement? No, not at all. Yes, this idea is designed to completely replace logins for normal usage, but logins will still be available as an alternative. Consider also that with SeamlessID in place you might still need a way to access a service without your authenticated device with you. The way will be the equivalent of the current “password recovery”, with the difference that will generate a one-time access instead of resetting the password.
4. Identity vs Identity certification: the fact that today we are using logins means that when someone says identity they often refer to “identity certification”. However, that’s a different thing: one thing is the neighbour that knows you by sight, another thing is the airport check-in that asks for your passport. That’s why SeamlessID has different access levels and doesn’t mandate any certification: it might be added, or not. The important part is automating the task so it’s not anymore the user that needs to remember that, but the Identity Manager in the browser or operating system.

Even if I was speaking mostly about design, I added some elements of business, strategy and change management as well, because I thought they were relevant.

I admit, this is a quite dense presentation, I would have probably taken out some topics in hindsight at least for UX Conference, trying to be more focused. However, on the plus side, from the feedback I got it was really successful and lots of people asked more. I probably need to do more workshop and less speeches in the future. :)

One method, two tools, three business tips. This is how I organized the presentation, in order to be not too unbalanced toward design, even if that was the focus, but also not being too high for more hands-on people.

One method

The most important part of Social Experience Design is that it can’t be done without a shift from traditional, deterministic thinking to the different Theory of Complexity thinking. This shift is critical because it’s the only way to deal with complex systems, such as people and social dynamics.

That’s why I talked again of the Dot Loop, because it contains all the factors that needs to be built-in in any design – well, in any company – to be really effective. The Dot Loop is an effective abstraction to deal with complex systems without a banalizing approach to them. Every successful company work that way – even, of course, probably they don’t call it Dot Loop, even if I’m starting hearing about it more often. :)

Two tools

The first tool is the Motivational Diamond, a very simple comparative visualizations that helps anyone working with social dynamics to focus on the four Relational Motivations (Competition, Excellence, Curiosity, Affection) and compare different services or parts of the service.

The second tool is the Social Usability and its Checklist, prepared to simplify the approach to it and provides an easy mnemonic. Social Usability works on four factors, that are Relations (the other), Identity (you), Communication (the channel between you and the other) and Emergence of Groups (all the emergent dynamics, again a complex system behavior).

Three business tips

These are very simple, but are also a very important part of a real change management process:

1. Be in-the-flow. This is critical in any good design tied to any change management process, but also for startups that are launching a new product: you have to understand that the day of your user is already
2. Be a double-pyramid business. This is a very important aspect, and might be an article by itself. Luckily it is: I wrote about the double-pyramid some time ago. This means that social businesses needs to engage in a different structure and find a balance between hierarchy and socialization, because the solution is in that balance and not in building a full hierarchic company or a full flat company.
3. Be a double double-pyramid business. Plus, you can’t be really a social business externally if you aren’t internally. You might have a unit that does customer service or social media operations, but if the whole company isn’t aligned, the users will get that, and the rewards are going to be lower (not zero, but lower).

The workshop

The extra part I prepared for Digital Accademia’s workshop regarded a couple of exercises to allow people focus a little more on how to use actively Relational Motivations and Social Usability.

I prepared two exercises to stimulate thinking and discussions:

• In pairs, draw a Motivational Diamond
  This is very interesting because it helps clarifying the four Relational Motivations by discussing it with a peer, and then the public discussions allow to clarify even more. As often happens in workshop, I learned something also this time: I have to clarify better that we are talking about traits that trigger relational aspects. For example, when we talk about “excellence” we aren’t talking about an excellent content, but about how we are promoting people’s excellence… and narcissism. :)
• In isolation, pick an item from the Social Usability Checklist and design an interface for it. Then, merge it with your partner to create a new UI with the two you prepared.
  I liked this one a lot because it shows how very simple solutions and interface can trigger more complex behaviours. One of the participants was worried because her solutions looked “too simple” but actually… that was the value of it! :)

A small joke

At UX Conference I was the last one of the day, so I had to think of something. That’s why I started with a small design practical joke… but I won’t tell what it was, and I removed it also from the presentation above. You’ll see the next time, maybe. ;)