It's been a couple months since I left Los Angeles and Idealab to move to London and join Canonical's new Design and User Experience team, which Mark blogged about in September:
We are hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries and challenging them to lead not only Canonical’s distinctive projects but also to participate in GNOME, KDE and other upstream efforts to improve FLOSS usability.
The team is shaping up very nicely. We just got back from two fantastic weeks in Barcelona — one week spent meeting our new colleagues at AllHands, and one week spent establishing new design processes with the community and planning Karmic at UDS.
I will follow up with more detail about what we're working on for Karmic once my jetlag subsides and I can write more freely. Before I finish I want to give kudos to Mark Shuttleworth and Ivanka Majic for putting together such an amazing team of artists and user experience fanatics. Free software has a beautiful future.