Cell-phone recycling guide: "Tantalum is a superconductor, one of the best on Earth. It is used to coat capacitors to help them create more power from less energy so that your cell phone no longer needs a battery larger than the phone itself. In war torn central Africa, people are forced into modern day slavery to mine this rare element, which is then sold to fund the wars in this region"

Mike@FP alerted me to Costing the Earth last year, which had an episode on the subject of greener approaches to recycling: forcing manufacturers to bear the cost of disassembling their goods, making it in their interest to enable easier recycling wherever possible. Strategies they looked at included using shape memory alloys to bind phone handset parts together: pour boiling water over them, they lose their strength and the handset just falls apart.

Where the upside of mobile being mass-market is a huge audience, the down-side is that even a minimal negative impact on the environment from each member of audience has a huge aggregated effect...

Through one of those roundabout coincidences which plague the population of Brighton, Devi@FP bumped into Sally Underwood at a party recently, and invited her in last week for a chat about a project Sally's working on in the area of inclusive design (and specifically orthotics).

"Inclusive design is a process whereby designers and manufacturers ensure that their products and services address the needs of the widest possible audience", according to the Include 2005 web site; which seems to be exactly what Douglas Rushkoff is referring to in this piece: "Paying attention to one group's disabilities enhances usability for everyone else."

For example, mobile phone keypads are typically composed of tiny keys which require very specific motor movements: fiddly enough for the over-30s, never mind the elderly! And yet I'd bet the vast majority of calls made are between people who already know each other - via the address book. So given that most of our telephone interactions involve selecting an action (e.g. "make call", "take photo") or choosing from a list (e.g. selecting a recipient for a call), why the continued prominence of the keypad, which we also shoehorn into a means for doing text input via T9 or similar?

When are we going to see the equivalent of an iPod scroll wheel on mobiles: a childishly simple, bloody-obvious-in-retrospect, means of navigating through a mobile interface?

And why is voice messaging not a more prominent service than it is today, when it can meet some of the use cases that SMS satisfies so well (i.e. asynchronous, fast, communication) for people who may be unable or unwilling to tap out short messages on a tiny keypad?

Interesting looking weblog of mobile art projects. Hah - and I *knew* I recognised the aerial view that they linked to here, in the spirit of Animals on the Underground:

It's the Brighton Elephant - of course!

A load more gaming and play-related links that I'm just not getting around to writing about:

• Pac-man and modern art mix well
• Waiting for the naughty sorceress: "Delightful moments of nonsense pervade every aspect of this game."
• Russell on marketing Go as a hot new game, something which (as his commenters point out) Hikaru no Go seemed to do quite well; I really enjoyed all the episodes of this that I've gotten round to watching so far. I'm been playing Go with a few people once a month for just over a year now, and it's something I'd really like to put more time into.
• Beautiful-looking cultivation game (via Mr Jones): "A community of players working together to compensate the real pollution and eyesores of a city by planting and taking care of virtual flowers and other plants on a virtual data layer superimposed on the city."
• Will Wright on The Sims: "Players can use the game as a tool for communicating with other people."
• Virtual game items sold for real money: "Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia."

I finished reading Difficult Questions About Videogames last week, and can thoroughly recommend it: it's a lovely dip-innable book cataloguing the answers of c.70 folks from the games industry, academia and elsewhere, to questions like "What is a videogame?" and "Why is playing videogames fun?".

Samples quotes:

"In one sentence, games are fun because they allow us to rehearse basic survival skills and we are hard-wired through evolution to feel good when we do that." - Noah Falstein

"People are pattern-matching machines and we find pleasure in patterns." - David Thomas

"What a silly thing it is that we insist on propagating that epithet anyway, 'gamers'. Do you ever hear Hollywood targeting a film for 'hard-core moviegoers'? Or a publisher talking about a new book that will really get the 'bookreaders' talking?" - Ian Bogost

Suzie Cardwell also had some nice thoughts on casual gaming, prompting me to google and find her powerpoint presentation on women and casual gaming - well worth a look.