Jonathan Culling

Jonathan's bio

Jonathan Culling joined Foviance as Lead Consultant in January 2010. He has 16 years track record in digital media and 10 years as a user experience designer and user researcher. During this time, he has shaped the intranets, internet sites and web applications for some of Europe’s biggest brands.

“I’m fascinated by the technological advances that continue to shape the web and our use of it. The digital landscape is changing rapidly, so we need to be foresighted and flexible to stay in tune”.

Updated: December 1st – Jonathan decided to ‘go pink’ instead of green

Men are lucky. We don’t have to buy make-up – it simply grows out of our faces. Most men, like me, choose to remove this make-up every morning in a ritual of lathering and scraping. But could there be an easier way to raise money than to neglect the ritual for a month and “do a Movember”?

That’s what I thought when I began to ‘grow my mo’ on November 1. It was easy enough to grow a few days’ worth of stubble. You just have to be lazy, which is precisely how you end up looking.

Then it started to get more challenging. I decided that, for maximum impact and money-raising potential, I would grow a moustache and sideburns combo that joined to create the shape of a W. The only way I could think of achieving this was by shaving with a naked blade – any foam and I wouldn’t be able to see what I was doing. This resulted in the most uncomfortable razor burn, which has stayed with me through most of the month.

As the facial hair began to come thick and fast, so did the backhanded compliments. Neighbours in Ealing started asking my wife if I’d turned gay; she defended me (I hope). A colleague suggested that I should cultivate hairs on the tip of my nose by shaving there or sprinkling it with hair tonic; his argument that the W wasn’t complete without the apex in the middle.So it hasn’t been that easy. But it’s been worth it, since at the time of writing I have raised £140 for research into cancers affecting men. But I would like to raise more, and have decided that the only way to do this is to make myself look even more ridiculous. Here is my plan:

• If I pass the £200 mark, I will die my moustache and sideburns green on the 1st of December to celebrate the start of the Christmas season.

• If I get £300 in donations, I will hang baubles from them.

Please visit my Movember page here

It’s 6 a.m., some time in November 2020. My alarm doesn’t go off; I stopped using one years ago. Since then, I’ve been woken up by the lights slowly coming on in my bedroom and the pillow gently deflating.

I grab an object on my bedside table and place it carefully in its docking position below my right eye. A beep prompts me to give a verbal instruction: I say “Fu Man Chu”. My razorbot beeps twice to acknowledge the command, then whirrs into action and travels across the contours of my face, buzzing and trimming, while I lie motionless on my back.

Yes, Movember (http://uk.movember.com/) is still going strong in 2020, and these days I don’t need to squint in front of a mirror to get a perfect shave. That’s a big bonus for me. When I bought the razorbot last year, it had to be personalised – so I set it to calibration mode and let it map out my face and neck. It then asked me if there was another ‘region’ that I wanted to calibrate; I politely declined.

After two minutes, my facial trim is complete. I haul myself out of bed and visit the bathroom to see how my Fu Man Chu moustache is coming along, and gargle with some plaque-busting nanobots.

The lovely Jesse Lewis of Disney Online told me about an iPhone app called Hipstamatic, and now I’m hooked. It’s inspired by Lomography, whose adherents ‘shoot from the hip’ to produce random and often stunning photographic compositions.

I decided to put Hipstamatic through its paces on my recent holiday in Greece. For £1.19 you get the app, plus three lenses and three films – more are available to be purchased separately (and I challenge you not to splash out on a few more after having played around a bit). (more…)

The rise of social media and web 2.0 has encouraged a worrying trend – the philosophy of permanent beta. This recognises that an application or website can never be perfect and continue to evolve long after that initial release. The feedback channels that have become so important in social media provide a never-ending source of user reviews and comments, which any conscientious development team will study before working on a new, improved release. (more…)