Power to the tinkerers

When I was a kid, there was a vibrant DIY scene. A lot of people did the maintenance on their cars themselves. Youngsters liked to tweak and tune their motorcycles and nobody thought twice about changing the chain on their bicycle themselves.

The transition to a service economy and the shift of production to low wage countries changed that. When I talk to teenagers nowadays, they don’t tinker with bicycles, mopeds or electronics anymore. There is no fun in trying to make something yourself when you can buy it cheaper made-in-china.

The good news is that creative inspiration will always find its way to expression. For the current Generation Z this means the internet is their canvas. Just look at the thousands of handcrafted MySpace pages, the language used in chat or the teenage blogs that replace the old fashioned diary.

These kids are looking for tools to express their creativity online. Their mobile phones are especially crippled in this respect. Operators and device manufactures want to control the user experience and don’t open up to the creations of their users.

This is what Citylive tries to change with its open widget platform. Using an easy editor, people can create their own small applications and run them on their phone or send them to their friends. By limiting the complexity we let people make maximal use of the stuff that is available. After all, the simplicity of an HTML document is also what drove the adoption of the web technology with would-be publishers, students and creative individuals. Widgets bring the simplicity back to the web.

Coincidentally, whilst I was writing this post, colleague Jef Geskens was reading about the Arduino experimentation board, a real tinkerers dream. The following quote from the Arduino manual perfectly illustrates the design philosophy behind our widget concept:

“Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination and curiosity”

Happy tinkering!