Human-robot standup comedy (where else) in Japan. Zenjiro (human) and PaPaJiro (robot) will perform together. If the robot kills ‘em out there, will that violate the First Law?

Technorati: robot, comedy, performance

“We want to express our regret to chickens for having to kill them, while also giving thanks to them for providing us with food”

Doggles - sunglasses for dogs. Of course.

According to this story the SF dump has an artist-in-residence. And has, for a very long time.

My gosh is Faith Popcorn overrated. Check out some of what she has to say in A Post-Privacy Future For Workers

Q: What will the office of the future look like?

A: The changes could start with the office remembering who sits where, what temperature they like, how soft they like the light to be. Also, there will be a lot of virtual reality, so you’ll do almost no traveling but meet virtually: People you are meeting with actually appear in your office.

You’ll also be able to watch your kids at the day-care center and be with them virtually. You’ll be able to [virtually] travel to Paris, London, Rome, to pick out the cuisine you want for your dinner — and it will be delivered to the lobby of your office before you go home.

Q: So it sounds like we’ll be mixing personal and official business more?

A: Yes. We’ll even have employees who will live on campus, supervising different tasks. That will be needed because we’re becoming a global society in which people, in different parts of the world, can work on a project 24 hours a day. So your workplace will become more of a 24-hour kind of a space.

Q: A lot of people think the opposite will happen: That because of mobile communications, employees will work from home more.

A: Well, that will happen. The home will be the office. Or, you’ll live right next to your office. And your employer will be taking care of all your personal and physical needs to increase your productivity. Your kids, your dinner, your clothing needs, your books, your movies — would all be provided through your company.

For instance, your vital signs will be measured at work. If the measurements say you have high cholesterol and too much fat in your diet, you might get prescription menus. And the food would be delivered to your refrigerator at your home nearby.

Q: A lot of people don’t want their companies to know what their cholesterol levels are. Wouldn’t this raise a lot of privacy concerns?

A: I think privacy is an issue of the past — there is no privacy. Already, when you order a book on Amazon.com you give up some of your privacy: Based on your choices, they provide you with other books that you might like to read. They follow your reading pattern. On eBay they compile lists of what you collect. So I think that privacy is a nice idea, but many people see it as something they’ve already lost.

Plus, I think people will get over such concerns when they see the tremendous convenience such technologies and services can offer.

Q: People already don’t use half the functions in their software. Why would employees want all of this new technology you talk about?

A: The problem with technology today is, in many cases, you have to read through instructions to figure out how to use all the features. What we need is voice controls. For instance, you should be able to say, “Bring my car around in front.” Or “I miss my mother. I want to see her.”

An interesting ad campaign for tennis features pop culture figures, including those from other sports.

We just went into 3-Day Blinds and put in an order. Why is it going to take 7 - 10 days???

More than 250 sociologists, anthropologists, historians and other scholars who gathered at UC Santa Barbara for a conference on Wal-Mart came looking for more than the company’s vital statistics. Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here were examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture

The ‘1,000 Samurai Parade,’ held in the Japanese city of Nikko (a 1 hour 40 minute train ride north of Tokyo) every May 18 and Oct. 17, commemorates the 1617 enshrinement at Nikko of the remains of Ieyasu Tokugawa, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate
full story

The SF Chron does a critical analysis of the SF Apple Store in terms of design, brand, and architecture.

“…a gleaming package stuffed with such goodies as an all-glass staircase. But it’s not a real building. It’s a 30-foot-high corporate branding concept that could be located anywhere. And it fails the first test of good architecture — to be a good neighbor…The computer chain that for years urged us to “think different” now imposes order from above: its outposts are interchangeable by design, with details repeated from store to store. San Francisco’s glass staircase underneath a narrow skylight replicates the centerpieces of other “flagships.” …Apple prides itself on curvaceous computers. Its iPod Minis come in five colors. I’d love to see the same design flexibility where it would matter most — the world we all share”

Ah. So that’s who likes those robot dogs.

A list of FreshMeat articles is auto-erroneously-index as a source for Hawaii cleaning lady

As reported in this story Toronto-based DOP Matthew R. Phillips, winner of three CSC Awards for industrial cinematography, shot a series called Moccasin Flats in Regina. And the key grip was some dude named “Steve Portigal.”

Not I, however.

Hmm!

I’m name-checked in course material for a course on Web Interaction Design.

The New Brand of Story is a concise summary of a FreshMeat piece I did a few months ago. Neat to see the stories being retold!

Another Asian drink tasting site

John’s Asian Drink Adventure is a tasting diary of those interesting drinks you can find at Asian grocery stores. I just purchased a beautiful bottle of Basil Seed and Honey - but I wasn’t planning on drinking it.

A review of this blog thinks I’m a French Canadian!? Where the hell do they get that info? Zut alors!

20 seconds of the new Tragically Hip “Vaccination Scar” single are posted, for a time, here

NYT story about European themeparks based on the American Wild West.

They all form part of a multifaceted Wild West subculture in Europe that includes everything from country music festivals and cowboy saloons to an established rodeo circuit. Tens of thousands of Europeans study (or even live like) trappers, American Indians or other frontier archetypes as a hobby. They join clubs, dress up in elaborate costumes and often take to the woods on weekends to live in tepees or sleep ‘cowboy style’ under the stars. ‘People dream of a free, beautiful country, of romantic campfires and heroes in the saddle,’ said Detlef Jeschke, a Nuremberg-born former champion European rodeo cowboy who is Pullman City’s program manager.

Justin Hall blogged his experience with our IDSA panel last weekend.

The Air America Radio FAQ page offers help on the following topics: I forgot my password; How do I change my password? How do I change my e-mail address?
I can’t log-in.

Why? There’s no way on the site to create an account, or log in. How frequently could those questions really have been asked?

If you’re interested in checking out the Dylan Victoria’s Secret ad, it’s here

Putting “fun” in “fungible”
The Takadanobaba district of Tokyo will introduce Astro Boy currency Wednesday as part of local revitalization efforts. Community members said Tuesday that the currency will be measured in horsepower, the unit of measure of Astro Boy’s strength. One horsepower of the currency will be equivalent to 1 yen. Shops, nongovernmental organizations and Waseda University will offer the currency in exchange for citizens’ volunteer and environmental activities, they said. For example, stores will award customers with 10 horsepower if they carry a reused shopping bag.

full story

In 3 months I made $0.19 by having those ads atop the blog, so I decided to cut ‘em out. A neat experiment I guess, but since I’ll never ever get to the minimum $100 you need to get paid, I might as well make the world a slightly more ad-free one.

This moment of reflection brought to you by ExLax.

========================================================
FreshMeat #21 from Steve Portigal

               (__)
               (oo) Fresh
                \/  Meat

People, put your hands together now for FreshMeat!
=========================================================
There’s a party in my mind and everyone’s invited
=========================================================
At the dawn of the eighties, I looked towards my imminent
ritual transition to manhood - my Bar Mitzvah. My
preparations began with the acquisition of a portable
tape recorder (used for listening and practicing the
Torah portion I would eventually chant). My friends and I
immediately put this device to use, creating fake radio
programs, with interviews, songs, commercials, and
closing credits. The post-modern media parodies of
National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live were well-
established at that point, but not to a 13-year-old. To
us, presented with a new enabling technology, pretending
to be on the radio seemed the natural thing to do.

These new technologies continue to appear. Within recent
memory, some products that put previously unachievable
professional-grade abilities in the hands of ordinary
people include video cameras, desktop publishing, teeth
whitening, home theater, hairstyling products, and home
dry-cleaning. Further, consider some of the brands that
offer “professional” as part of their promise: Hummer,
Jeep, Viking, Thermador, SubZero, Bosch, Nikon, and Smart
and Final.

In our culture there is a growing interest in trying to
be like the professionals. As consumers, we’re interested
in how business is done. The popular press reports the
amount of money that a new movie makes in its opening
weekend. Advertisements (most recently Dell) profile the
product designers, user researchers, usability testers,
and others who are behind the scenes for the products we
buy. Many of the ubiquitous reality-TV shows are simply
pulling back the veil on a previously hidden process
(MTV’s Cribs documents the homes of the famous, Take This
Job… tracks the work activities of people with unique
occupations, Airline shows the minutiae of getting
passengers boarded for an on-time departure, and Family
Plots tells all about a family-owned funeral home). The
boundaries between consumer and producer continue to
blur, a change that was massively accelerated by the
Internet. For more about this, check out The Cluetrain
Manifesto. Customers (really, fans) of companies form
communities to debate how those companies and their
products should evolve. For example, Google’s social
networking site Orkut includes two communities with over
1000 subscribers: What Should Google Do? and What Should
Orkut Do?

But beyond simply acting upon that sense of ownership by
talking about the companies, many people are taking
advantage of new enabling technology (i.e., Photoshop) to
go one step further - to create new “products.” And, with
a distribution channel like the Internet, they can also
share their creation with an enormous audience, just like
the professionals.

Fan-created fiction (or “Fanfic”) is artifact of fandom
in general, but the quantity and breadth of Internet
sources further demonstrates the extent of consumers
acting, literally, like producers. The “Lois and Clark”
Fanfic archive has over 2300 stories and is updated
regularly. There are other fanfic sites devoted to NYPD
Blue, Law and Order SVU, Felicity, anime characters such
as Sailor Moon, and video games including Max Payne and
Zork. As well as many, many Star Trek sites.

Similarly, DVD Tracks is a site that was set up to host
alternative commentary tracks for DVDs, recorded as MP3
files by ordinary viewers.

For products, specifically, one of the most popular
formats for consumer-developed concepts is the parody.
SomethingAwful.com runs a regular forum where
participants create realistic, disturbing, obscene,
bombastic and hilarious product concepts, ads, book
covers, movie posters, and more. Check out this for
fictitious recalled food products like Nestle Boogers, or
this for fake religious toys such as Biblical MadLibs and
Erotic Dreidels.

Some people might look at those pages and groan, grimace
and think “Hardy-har, I’ve seen stuff just like that on
comedy TV shows.” That’s exactly the point! Now, ordinary
folks can create parodies of real products and services
as well as commercial media. Ironically (or
frustratingly, if you can’t handle too much recursion)
this trend was beautifully pegged in a Saturday Night
Live parody ad for computer they called McIntosh Jr.
Using the tagline “The Power to Crush the Other Kids” one
young boy earns the envy of his classmates by printing
out a fake brochure for the “pubic library.” See the ad
here.

Beyond straight-up parodies, we can find people crafting
conceptual visions of the future. Look at this to see
wireless coffee delivery and payphones converted to
clean air dispensers, among other imaginings.

But what probably hits closest to home for many of us are
the proposed design evolutions of real products, created
by regular people. A beautiful iPod watch is here. You
can see 150 other iPod concepts - new form factors, new
finishes, skins, features, and more here.

These people obviously have real passion and enthusiasm
for the iPod. We also find a similar energy with an
eagerly anticipated product update, such as the Nintendo
DS. When the public has no idea what their future object
of desire will look like, fake images begin circulating
to feed that hunger. Gizmodo.com, an excellent site for
information about the latest technology products, has
been soliciting concepts for the Nintendo DS (see some
examples here) as part of their campaign to obtain an
actual pre-release image of the product. They are even
offering a bounty (get the details here) for whoever can
provide this image.

A further variation is the how-to information created by
enthusiasts who not only share the result of their
project, but also publish detailed instructions for
others who may want to duplicate their example. They are
publishing their own designs, and the means for others to
complete that same design. Want to build a lit cityscape
for your kitchen window? See how Ryan Hoagland did it
here. Mike Harrison tells you how to build a Nixie Tube
clock here. Physically modifying a PC (or “casemodding”)
has produced a entire subculture of DIY hardware
designers who no doubt are influencing manufacturers like
Alienware. See the process of building a casemod that
looks like an anime girl here, or visit www.moddin.net to
see ultra-custom designs like a toaster, an Underwood
typerwriter, a V8 engine and others that evoke futuristic
technogeek wet dreams. The turn-your-Mac-Classic-into-an-
aquarium meme became so widespread that there is an
entire collection of Mac-based aquariums here.

Product designers may have a negative knee-jerk reaction
to all this. Who do these people think they are? Up to
this point, the limited availability of glorious tools
(and training needed to use them) placed this type of
speculative conceptual activity out of the reach of the
masses. Now the technology, if not the ability, is within
reach of millions. But for designers this is really a
“the-more-the-merrier” situation. These new enabling
technologies (i.e., PhotoShop and its brethren) further
the discourse about what is possible, and what is desired
- and that discourse is an essential ingredient in the
work we do for non-fake clients.

For example, consider how user research methods such as
participatory design (also known as PD) explicitly
harness this desire. PD asks regular people to help
design future products. The designers work directly with
users to identify needs, rapidly prototype solutions, and
iterate those solutions on-the-fly. Although some may
fear that bringing non-designers into the actual pencil-
and-paper moments of design may reduce the design to a
mere sketchmonkey, PD is not consumer-led design. The
designer takes the lead, informed by what the users know
best - the problems they have today with existing
products (of a lack of product). People will offer
alternatives to ideas suggested by designers, but the
biggest value for the designer is in understanding the
needs behind that input (i.e., it’s not clear that people
are ready for an emergency fresh air dispenser as
suggested above, but we can see the connection between
that concept and existing products such as the USB-based
personal ionizers that are sold online).

When someone says, “I want a handle,” that shouldn’t be
taken literally. The need being expressed is, “I need an
easy way to carry this device into another room.” The
designer is not simply implementing a wish-list but is
actively translating and transforming. That is what they
do best: act as a magic engine that takes in needs and
spits out wants - in a way that solves the need. No one
really “needs” an iPod watch, but they may “want” one.
Some people want one badly enough to create a picture of
what it would be like!

Participatory design is a significant shift in how we
approach user research - instead of focusing on the
problem we are now working with users to develop the
solutions. Of course, in the process of creating
products, needs, wants, and solutions are often just
proxies for each other as we struggle to articulate half-
baked ideas. But half-baked ideas are artifacts of the
creative process. It’s exciting that these regular people
are already creating partially cooked concepts on their
own, without a client, without a PD session, without a
designer, or a facilitator. For the designer who seeks to
center their solutions in the world of the user, rest
assured that the users are already headed out to meet you
halfway.

If we ever wanted proof that such a thing is possible,
that everyone really is a designer, we need look no
further than these impassioned expressions of desire to
be involved with products we love.

–

A similar version of this article appears on the Core77
Industrial Design Supersite. Check it out, with pictures
and everything, here.

Tainted Coca-Cola causes hair loss

According to the lawyer, the incident occurred Oct. 19 when Takasu bought and drank two-fifths of a 193-ml bottle of Coke in the South Jakarta district of Bintaro. Soon afterward, he felt a burning sensation in his throat and chest, developed a headache and felt queasy. Upon inspecting the inside of the Coke bottle, he was shocked to find a piece of mosquito coil floating on the beverage. He immediately went to Bintaro International Hospital for medical treatment and filed a complaint with Coca-Cola.

Here’s a website this dude created to get himself chosen for the next edition of the TV showThe Apprentice

Reuters.com offers a link in every story to email the article to someone. After you fill in the usual info, there is a line that says “I confirm that I have the recipient’s consent to provide their email address for this purpose.” followed by Send and Cancel.

This is very strange for a couple of reasons…

You aren’t actually agreeing to their terms, IMHO, because you are not clicking Agree. And there isn’t any language that says “by clicking Send you confirm that….” as you sometimes see.

But further - if you follow their TOS, how useful is the feature? Are you expected to send a separate email to the person and ask them if you can send them an article? And then send it to them after that?

A workaround would be to send it to yourself, and then forward it manually.

But obviously, this is just to cover them from being sued in case you do something wrong.

Yuck.