I’m one of those unfortunate bastards who gave up drawing, just when I was getting good at it as a pre-pimple teen. This means that I still draw as I did when I was 12 – 14 – like. Which sucks. Bigtime. I’ve had plans about doing something about it for years. And I haven’t. Now Jakob does it seems.

Jakob is in a completly crazed drawing mode these days, weeks – months maybe soon. He’s drawing like mad, all day long. Where running out of paper, and today I even had to tell him to PLEASE not draw on the stereo with that permanent felt tip marker. Every day when I pick him up at kindergarten, there’s a new roster of drawings of the day waiting. The grown-ups (that’s what they’re called in kindergartens), tell me that he’s producing twice – maybe three times – as many drawings as the ones I see. Hard to keep track of.

Monsters, robots and creatures with sophisticated technical limbs, big mouths and sneaky symmetri spurt out of the boy. He just sits there, completely taken by his own creations, and works enthusiastic and concentrated for hours. So far it’s just “characters” he’s doing, which I find very inspiring.

All of the sudden I find myself actually using the nice set of drawing pencils I bought years ago. Jakob and I sitting around the table, equally taken by the magic of the pencil or the permanent marker.

I’ve heard other parents rage about this before. I guess all parents that are remotely interested in drawing, painting or any kind of arty activity, will at some point get to experience the effortless, and in a way reckless, approach of their child. An approach mostly lost by most adults. Kids don’t need all the details to be accurate. They’re not really so tied down by right and wrong, and most importantly, I think, they’re experiencing the world – the magic marker – for the first time.

Enviously I try to copy some of Jakob’s drawings, just to capture some of the “I don’t give a hell – attitude” that he seem to pour into most of them. Sometimes I just use some of his patterns as a starting point. Just to see where they take me. Sometimes I hear myself almost yelling at him, like another 5 year old, because he wants to draw on my drawing as well. I mean, really, it’s hard not to get upset, when the boy all of the sudden approaches the best human face I’ve drawn *ever*, with a black permanent marker, while asking: “Can I colour the head, Dad?”

In the morning where going out to get some more paper. Lots of paper. And pens. We need pens, markers, pencils, maybe even an electric eraser. We cannot afford to run out of supplies. We have a lot of learning to do while the fire burns – both Jakob and not least me.

I’m currently looking at the world through a new type of window. New to me at least that is… I’m sitting in my small living room that have recently grown considerably larger, due to the fact, that I have pulled a stationary PC out of it. My home is now officially Mac territory.

Lately I have found myself critizising & designing user interfaces and usability design for a living. I have done so for some years now, as a part of my work at Titoonic. With a variety of purposes, missions and target audiences. For games, web sites and advanced software for kids. But allways with the PC as my own working foundation, and as the unconscious meassure of standards, of good and bad, of right and wrong.

Somehow it seems irresponsible of an interaction-, usability-, user experience-, and communications designer not to absorb as many ways of solving the problems of the trade as possible.

The solution is actually quite obvious. I’ve bought a 15′ PowerBook. I’ve scrapped the old noisy wintel-hell and I’m forcing myself onto a path that I forsee becoming a troublesome one; I’m (currently) the only Mac user at work, and the guys are already giving me hell for switching. My brains keyboard shortcut centre is temporarily fucked up. I feel a frightening, yet at the same time somewhat comforting, lack of control. I’m not used to photo library software that wants to take charge of all my files, instead of using the folders I’ve created. I get scared when iTunes move my music around and follows some weird system depending solely on all the music files to have proper ID tags (allthough I recently bought an iPod nano, I’ve allways used WinAmp). And what’s up with Photoshop not having a solid gray background – I mean, I can see my friggin desktop image through it ?!

On the other hand. All that are just indicators of what I’ve been used to so far. Not of good and bad, or right and wrong.

I find myself in a small living room, slimmed down of approx. 20 kilos of ugly, default gray, noisy wintel steel and plastic. Everything just works. I’m not getting any info I don’t need. Not even while booting (”Searching for secondary slave” – well, aren’t we all in a way?). I’m listening to my music streaming from the PowerBook to the stereo (yes, I know I would have been able to do that on the wintel PC as well, but still, the AirPort with AirTunes is Apple, as well as the ease of setting it all up). That’s a promising couple of first experiences.

But, admittedly, all of the above are just lame excuses for my to buy an expensive computer. The actual reason for this purchase when I’m being completely honest to myself is – brace yourselves; I’m petting a slick titanium finish 2,4 kg completely wireless (at least for 4-5 hours more) computer, that looks friggin cool. That’s it. I’ve bought the design.

What’s even worse is, that I have now found myself turning into one of those bloggers that crowd the blogosphere with mile long praises of all their designer hardware. Designed by Apple in California. Made in China (but that’s a different story).