Red River College: upwardly mobile.

Winnipeg designers, you’ve got some catching/keeping up to do. Fast.

Red River’s Creative Communications students are super-big into mobile technology this year. Smartphones and iPads are now standard gear in Cre Comm, & students are learning to create content, design for and market on the mobile web.

So what’s the state of mobile education in Winnipeg? I chat with: Advertising & PR instructor Kenton Larsen about the new mobile gear requirements for RRC creative kids;  iPad-using RRC ad major Jeremy Jack; and Kevin Glasier,  interactive producer at Tactica Interactive (& Cre Comm grad) about the unique characteristics of mobile design.

Kenton Larson: Giving our grads a competitive advantage

Erica Glasier: So, all Cre Comm students need an iPad this year?

Kenton Larson: First-year students all require a mobile device, the least expensive of which is an iPod touch (but a smart phone is what most of them have). Advertising majors in Cre Comm are sharing iPads, which was the result of me applying for a Program Innovation fund.

EG: Good call. What made you decide that this was a vital piece of technology for students to learn with?

KL: The reason behind this move is we want our grads to have a competitive advantage when they apply for jobs, and – when they get hired – be tech-savvy when they come up with solutions to all kinds of communication and marketing problems. Our new grads’ best competitive advantage over “old veterans:” understanding how to use and harness new media and technology to benefit their client or employer.

EG: How is consuming media on an iPad a fundamentally different experience than just using the web (ie, why did you think they needed to see the digital world from this perspective)?

KL: As WIRED magazine points out, people don’t “live” on the traditional Web anymore, more and more they’re living in apps as powered by the Internet. My own use tells me that this is indeed true! I haven’t bought a hard copy book or magazine since I bought the iPad, but I’ve downloaded tons of them.

EG: What have the students done differently so far this year, in your opinion, that was facilitated by using the iPad?

KL: From my own perspective, it was important that they not treat the iPad as a museum piece, but actually use it every day in their classes and to communicate. So far, it looks like it’s working. Every week we share useful apps and discover new ways to use the iPads – this week we used it to storyboard ad ideas. Next week? Who knows!

Jeremy Jack: Loves his iPad

Erica Glasier: What do you think of your iPad?

Jeremy Jack: Our fancy new toys, I mean, learning apparatuses! I feel like the iPad has opened my eyes to the future of media. The networking, newspapers, magazines, movies, comics, television, games and the advertising that go with them. I am grateful that I am adopting this trend before it takes off. What I am learning from it will be extremely valuable to my future in communications.

Kevin Glasier: Top 5 Tips for Mobile Web Design

Guest mini-post by Kevin Glasier.

The mobile site must be a more streamlined user experience than the desktop version. You just don’t have the same screen real-estate and bandwidth luxuries. If you’re starting a new online presence I’d go so far as to say design the mobile site first and then move to the desktop version – this will ensure you’re focusing the high priority information first and creating concise user paths.

1. Know what your user wants from the site.
This is obvious and goes for any website, app or just a general design task. Mobile UI’s clutter fast so you have to focus on the essential elements of the site and ensure you’re delivering there first. Try to keep the site under 5 levels deep.

2. Know the devices you want to support.
Are you targeting smart phone (iPhones, Android, Blackberry), feature phones (Nokia Slide, Motorola RAZR), and/or other devices? Understand the capabilities of each category before you start.

3. Avoid Flash
The iPhone and Android do not natively support Flash at this time.

4. Don’t rely on imagery
Reducing the amount of imagery you use will reduce page size and download times which is important when the user wants information fast and they don’t want to burn through their data plans.

5. Use an elastic/fluid page layout
These layouts expand and contract with the width of the screen. It’s important on mobile sites because there no standard screen size across all devices. You can also give the site a specific look for each device by creating custom style sheets but that can turn into a lot of work fast.

The Canadian iPad review

Preface: Back in the day, I was an art school kid learning graphic design. We worked on Macs. Macs were easy to use.

Philosophical review: Apple, those revolutionaries, made the cell phone user friendly. They took the crappy, crappy experience that was using a cell phone—on par with that most hated and poorly designed UI, the office photocopier—and made it doable. (So doable I recommend the iPhone to people one and two generations above me, so they can send a freakin’ picture through SMS and be done with it).

Apple said hey, we’ve got an amazing user interface here. Really good stuff. This should be…a computer. So they turned it into one.

The iPad was created from the UI up, and that’s how it should be. The user at the centre of the experience. They’re correcting the UI mistakes of the past, destroying the lock in of 90′s OS conventions.

This is why Apple survived the unbelievable market share domination of Microsoft.

Gearhead review: This is going to be eleventy hundred times more convenient to drag around conferences than my server…er, laptop.

Content, consumption, creativity and clicking on our convictions

Content. The iPad was designed for you to “consume” it. The big brands that are rushing to animate their brochures so you can consume them on the iPad are sorta philosophically stealing your human agency of creation and replacing it with mind-numbing broadcast. That’s not very 2.0.

The iPad has the capability to serve up those creative objects, but the high cost of entry means that marketing messages have the loudest initial voice.

Jeff Jarvis tells us that the mythic social media influencer—whether they exist or not and however useful in spreading ideas they may be—is merely the mouthpiece of broadcast. Marketing strategy dictates locating the widest reach for the lowest cost. Unfortunately for marketers of “content”, the quality of the message dictates it’s spread, not the follower count of the spreader.

Jeff also posits that all actions online—liking, fanning, uploading, commenting—are content too, and they are, to Google and Facebook. Who add their own powerful aggregations by connecting your social graph and your activites—and selling it to marketers.

The meta layer that Facebook ads to our actions is being created for only one thing: to make money. See how Pete Warden’s recent attempt to use ostensibly public data from Facebook to create something a little more meta–and how quickly he was nearly sued into oblivion by the web giant. (Pete was trying to use the content in a way that commented on society, showing interesting correlations like where the most fans of Glenn Beck live and what pages they’re most likely to fan).

Even as broadcasting and passive consumption refuse to die, Umair Haque takes us beyond the social media channel with the idea that organizations should develop a social strategy, using the new tools of connection for a more meaningful place in the world, producing more meaningful stuff (content, if you will—if relationships, voice, and ethics are content).

The tools can do nothing short of connecting people, and we’re squandering them on product placement: the one positioning opportunity you can’t TiVo.

The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.
—Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

That’s the same as Umair’s explanation of ‘medium is the message’. The iPad paradigm, consumption, and the advertising-orchestrated conviction that every bit of personal data we give up—I like this, I fan this—is valuable content has an impact on us as we conceive of ourselves.

We might be letting the algorithms of marketing conversions dictate our thinking when we equate liking a brand to creativity. This situation was created by us, but not to serve the greater good. The humanist perspective places people at the heart of meaning.

Meaning comes from truth. Expose, expand, spread a truth and you are truly creating content.