Credit card brands appearing directly on this Beverly Hills parking meter.

Most of us will have grown used to parking meters being an everyday part of our urban experience: something to feed; occasionally bump into; lean on; and on occasion when the people in uniforms are nowhere to be seen - joyfully hit. Despite it taking our coins we tend not to think of it as a point of sale terminal, it's simply too mechanical, too unreliable to be thought as such. Until now.

Now, the mere presence of the credit card brands stickered to its surface brings the transactional side of its functionality into sharp focus, the pedestrian part of our streets have just become a little bit more commercial.

A couple of ways this might evolve: the credit card company logos make a break from the confines of the shop door frames and continue their assault on our urban infrastructure - eventually becoming more ubiquitous than, well the humble parking meter; over time the stickers are removed because everybody learns that parking meters accept these two brands of credit card; and/or they popularise the use of parking meters as surface on which to tag/sticker graffiti.

Most people assume that touch based payment systems such as MasterCard's PayPass simplify the purchase process - you just Tap & Go ®. Except that the user still needs to know where to tap before they go and that there are now, and nearly always will be competitors offering similar touch based payment solutions at the same point of sale. The confusion comes from knowing which to touch, and the visual polution to our urban landscapes.

Expect to see more stickers for competing services added to this parking meter in the years to come.

Enjoy it whilst you can, parking meters will eventually go the way of the phone booth.

But at least they're on target. Fairground target practice on the outskirts of Lhasa.

I'm a fan of design provocation - little projects that challenge the way we think about and see the world. Which is why Sasha Pohflepp's camera made me smile - press the button and it pulls in a photo from the internet that was taken somewhere in the world at the same time. We're at a stage in human evolution where connectivity can still bring about a sense of child like surprise and wonder - pause a moment to enjoy it because it's an experience that most of you will look back on as an era of nostalgic innocence in years to come.

Here on future perfect we've been exploring and thinking about the future of cameras for quite a while - from understanding the first camera phone's in Japan to the social rules that govern group photos in Lhasa and beyond the beyond. As an experience-capturing device 'the camera' makes for a wonderful object to explore: its ubiquity now crosses every demographic, every time-zone and most contexts - whether allowed or not; and the practical and social practices around taking photos are often finely entertwined with the events they are capturing. How might the future perfect connected camera differ from todays stand alone terminal? A couple of examples...

We've all been in situations where a photo hasn't turned out - with a better connected, location and direction-aware camera it's possible to pull on other peoples' snaps of the same place - right down to knowing which camera settings they used to get their results.

The whole idea of pressing a button to 'record' an event is a powerful one - in part because it denotes the control and ownership to the button-presser. Ever been in a group and handed your camera to someone else to take the photo? How did you feel about the resulting photo - both in terms of attachment to what was taken and in terms of how it ended up being used? What happens when live feeds a-la USTREAM become the default functionality - is there a point where no-one expects 'the photographer' to actually hold the camera?

To know or not to know?

The social rules in elevators start out similar to male urinals: maximise the distance between you and anyone else present. The major difference in terms of movement is that once you choose a urinal and start to pee your standing position is largely fixed whereas with the elevator your position is likely to change as more people enter. (When people leave a once-crowded elevator the remaining bodies tend to retain some of their proximate stickiness).

What would it take for urinals to adjust their position depending on who else is in the room?

The Institute for Money, Tecnhology and Financial Inclusion has generated a list of 11 Design Principles for Financial Services for the Poor, drawn from a cohort of 20+ research projects they are running around the world:

1 Design for social obligation
2 Design for social rank
3 Flexibility with sanctions
4 Structured illiquidity
5 Change the iconography, design with local values
6 Design for convertibility
7 Calculate convertibility
8 Design for relative volume, not increment
9 Lucky Numbers
10 Tranches and Tiers
11 Design for Cyclical Events

Download the principles here.

The IMTFI is funded, in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and in 2010 is set to more than double the number of projects around the globe.

Full disclosure: I'm on the IMTFI external advisory board.