I love reading about new developments in design and technology.  As I work in this field not only can this appeal to my interests but sometimes it can benefit my career as well.  Keeping up to date has a number of benefits and in the case of flexible e-paper it did actually save my career!

I was very keen to get on in my workplace and did take on extra responsibilities to try and get ahead.  However this meant that sometimes I would struggle to complete the work I was actually supposed to be doing.  This was a fine balancing act as falling behind in my assigned job role would have made me look bad, no matter how much extra work I was completing around the office.

Email Disaster

This balance came crashing down a few weeks ago when I realised at the last minute I had missed an important email memo.  Part of the interview stage for an internal promotion I had applied for was the submission of a paper outlining a new technology.  This paper aimed to showcase how each applicant kept up with the latest developments in the design and technology industries and also how they would apply these to client needs and expectations.

The memo for this paper had been sent out the week before and I had been so busy I hadn’t even opened it.  When I did finally get a chance to sit down and look at my emails I realised that the deadline for the paper was five o’clock the next day.  I had just 24 hours to research and submit this paper to have any chance at making it through to the next interview stage.

I immediately panicked.  Having completed projects like this before I knew just how difficult it could be to come up with original ideas and apply them successfully to the brief in such a short space in time.  It looked for a while that I would simply not have enough time to come up with the goods.

Plastic Lifesaver

Fortunately I do always keep up with tech and design blogs, forums and periodicals.  I remembered reading a post recently about the new flexible e-paper now on the market.  I had been very impressed with this technology and it had been one of the most exciting new developments I had read about for some time.  I quickly started researching flexible e-paper to find out whether it would be something we could recommend for our clients.

• Flexible plastic based e-paper has been on the market for a while now.   This is basically a screen display that is as thin as a piece of paper.
• The really clever bit is that the screen is flexible and distortion tolerant.  This means you can bend and shape it without affecting the display or damaging the screen.
• There are well over a million tiny transistors built directly into the flexible e-paper backplane.  This enables a very fine level of detail in the final display.
• Another important attribute of flexible e-paper is that it has been designed and tested fully and can offer a standard 5 year lifetime with the capability to process millions of page updates.
• This means that flexible e-paper can offer robust and lasting designs for clients.
• Animation and video-capable e-paper is currently the holy grail of all those in the organic plastic electronics field.
• Top designers like Plastic Logic are working hard to achieve a robust flexible e-paper that can offer true full colour video playback.
• This technology is moving so fast it will not be long before it hits the market.
• This was all great news for my interview submission paper.  We have a client that develops state-of-the art medical equipment.
• After reading about flexible e-paper I came across a suggestion that this could be used to create full curved body scanners.
• This could enable our client to create the first fully 3-D body scan for patients.
• The possibility of this, for medical science as well as IT and communications, was very exciting and made a great subject matter for my paper.

The great news is that my paper was a hit and the interview panel were impressed with the originality of the subject matter and also the way I linked it successfully to an existing client.  This helped me to make it through to the next interview stage and I am happy to say that flexible e-paper saved my career!

* Our guest is Carolina Green, who blogs about technology and the internet.  When Carolina isn’t working she reads about history, and likes to take photos of landscapes.

photo credit: Harald Groven via photopin cc
photo credit: misterbisson via photopin cc