We know, we know.  Things have been a little bit slow here at Think as we've moved into 2010, but one of our resolutions for the year is to change that.  Things have been busier than ever, but we're eager to commit more time to sharing our thoughts, ideas and observations -- and, selfishly, even more eager to learn from the wide range of experts, innovators and generally thoughtful, opinionated and diverse readers who take the time to join us and share their comments.

Since we're more interested in conversation than monologue, we wanted to take a moment to introduce -- or re-introduce -- the diverse group of people behind the blog.  Below, a quick self-introduction from each of our contributors... and if you follow this blog, we'd love for you to introduce yourself in the comments.

This post was originally shared on Adobe XD's INSPIRE, who were kind enough to ask me to blog for them last week. You can find many a great post from those in the user experience and design fields there. Please check it out.
We at Big Spaceship are always looking to incorporate new perspectives that will inform our thinking in projects, helping us shape insights that ultimately lead to ideas and execution. As we roll into 2010, there are a few disciplines we’ve been dipping our collective toes into that I think will have a big impact on the way we approach the experiences we design.

This post was originally shared on Adobe XD's INSPIRE, who were kind enough to ask me to blog for them this week. You can find many a great post from those in the user experience and design fields there. Please check it out.

On top of looking for ways to grab attention, brands should be thinking about how they can engage their audiences in conversation. Discussing the needs and values of your audience with your audience can help you find better ways to solve for their problems. Carrying on a conversation also shows that you care about what your audience wants. And if you as a brand can demonstrate that you care, well, maybe they’ll care about you too. Brands that don’t engage in a discussion end up doing a lot of talking before earning the permission needed to speak in any meaningful way.

This is an atypical Labs post, as it doesn't really concern specific code at all. It's more of a wake up call. It starts with the same thing you've been reading about everywhere -- the iPad. It ends somewhere much different and much more important for our industry. It's a conversation about what we're doing as experts in this field and how we move forward together.

The announcement that the iPad won't support Flash kick started a lightning storm of opinions. The alleged issue at hand is that the iPad doesn't support Flash. This is a bad thing. It's a bad thing for the same reason that it also doesn't support Google Chrome, Firefox and (even) Internet Explorer. It's a bad thing because it doesn't support Unity and Java. It's a bad thing because it supports what Apple wants it to supports and that's all. Which isn't to say that we don't love making Apple applications... because we do. It's just that the iPhone app store was an incredible leap forward from the previous generation of mobile applications and so was rightfully recognized as revolutionary. The iPad isn't revolutionizing netbooks, it's devolving them back to a fully closed era. One environment, one language. A cumbersome, time consuming distribution process.While you can certainly be expressive using Objective-C and with the iPad, the decisions on how a user engages with something we make should be left to the experts.