Here’s a nice bit of rhetoric from my local library (sent via email – a nice feature)

Subject: Courtesy Pre-Overdue Notice from Your Library

94037 PORTIGAL, STEVE L

The item(s) listed below are due back soon. This courtesy notice does not list everything currently on your record, just those items thatare due in the next few days. http://catalog.plsinfo.org For questions, please call your local library.

Pre-Overdue? That’s just ludicrous. And insulting. It places the customer’s actions into the category of prohibited, suggesting you are already a violator.

Are we pre-violating the speed limit by driving 2 mph under? Are airline travellers potential terrorists?

For all the protestations about protecting liberty in the face of the Patriot Act we’ve heard by librarians, you’d think the library culture would be a bit more sensitive to the impact of their language choices (being a library, and all that, dealing with words as their primary item of exchange). Screw you, library, for telling me I’ve almost committed a violation. My books aren’t due until they are due, and don’t treat me like an overdue-book-holding-patron until I reach that point.

(chances are this is an automated feature of some IT purchased by the library system by some vendor, where neither the customer (the library) nor the software company gave any thought to thinking about design, brand, communication, customers, etc. but They Love Infstracture and Cost Savings, so off we go. Yuck).

Tags: alert, book, brand, communication, error message, IT, librarian, library, overdue, reminder, violation

Johnnie Moore calls for No Flipcharts

I would like to propose an International No Flip Chart Week. During this period, no one will leap up in the middle of meetings and attempt to capture what’s being discussed on a flip chart

I apologize for ripping on Johnnie specifically (as he is just my own personal tipping point of annoyance), but I’m getting sick of the rhetoric of New Thinking that the blogosphere (and the world of consultants) is bloated with. The formula is simple: take an widely held belief or established behavior and lead off with a screeching pronouncement about how it is untrue, dangerous or wasn’t ever true, or shouldn’t be true or used any more.

Flip Charts are BAD!

They are? I think the frustration is misplaced when directed at a tool. Meeting that are poorly facilitated, with unclear agendas, bad content, different unarticulated motivations for participation, and underskilled attendees – those are the problems we need to focus on. Not by forcing people to use or not use a tool because that tool automatically equates to bad behavior? I’ve been in my share of meetings, and I can’t really think of how the flip chart was ever to blame, or provided a temptation for a behavior that we wanted to avoid.

I mean, sure, you’ve got the dickhead who uses the marker and flip chart to control the meeting. But shouldn’t we get the dickhead out of the meeting (or, better yet, get me out of having to meet with the dickhead) rather than get rid of the flip chart?

So here’s my new proposal. Let’s get rid of the floors in meeting rooms. Haven’t you ever been in a painful meeting where there are no creative ideas or innovative discussion taking place? What else is there to do but tap your toes on the floor! I say, let’s get rid of the floors. Now when the meeting is going south you will have no other choice but step up (carefully) and use your own facilitation skills to get the group headed in the right direction.

You won’t ever be called on the carpet in front of the team, because there will be no carpet! There will be no floor! No floors! No floors! NO FLOORS! I urge you to join me in the new business movement, no floors, don’t settle for the bottom, move to the top, the floors have got to go back to the basement where they belong. And tell ‘em who sent you – Steve Portigal with the Steve Portigal NO FLOORS movement. I am a genius. Please hire me. No floors!

Tags: consultants, consulting, dickhead, facilitation, flip chart, flipchart, genius, meeting, no+floors, tool

Via BoingBoing

Regardless of your perspective on the NYC subway bag searches, one must admit that this is genius. Use tools that put the customization (if not the direct creation) of products into everyone’s hands and use the icon of the product itself to comment on the event. It’s more than a slogan-on-a-t-shirt/button/placard, it’s product as social action.

Tags: backpack, bag, bomb, cafepress, commentary, design, NYC, product, search, subway, threat

A company called 3C will make custom colors for various cosmetics (lip color, blush, eye shadow, face powder, etc.)

We can reproduce your favorite discontinued lip color shades or we can create a lip color for you from a color swatch that you provide. Your ‘recipe’ then remains in our permanent files for easy re-ordering!

If you would like us to re-create your favorite discontinued shade, we ask that you send a sample for us to analyze. HERE’S HOW: Enclose a dime-sized sample of your favorite discontinued lip color in a plastic baggie or small jar (do not swatch the lip color on paper – it will change the color). OR: Enclose your tube in a padded envelope or small box. Your tube will be returned to you with your match.

We analyze your shade for color, texture and coverage and create a formula that remains in our permanent files! If there is anything you would like changed about your color, i.e. if you would like a gloss instead of a matte, or if you would like shimmer added, please let us know (some texture and shimmer options are listed below). Otherwise our formulation will be as close as possible to your original. If you do not have a sample but you remember the brand name and color name of the shade you are looking for, please email us and we can check our archive of over 7,500 shades that we have matched for other clients. If your shade is not in our archives, we can arrange to notify you if we receive it from another client.

To create your own shade
You can have us create your own shade ~ from a splash of nail color in a baggie, a piece of fabric, a paint chip, a photo from a magazine, two lip colors blended together to create the ideal shade… anything!

This is a fantastic service; freeing loyal customers from the capriciousness of fashion/sales volumes/limited availability. Years ago I trailed a friend to every single store in the massive King of Prussia mall, as they pursued in vain a specific shade that just wasn’t available. Anywhere.

Via MightyGoods

Tags: color, colour, cosmetics, custom, mass customization

Just announced: I’ll be leading a seminar on ethnographic research at Creative CanUX, the Canadian User Experience Workshop, to be held at the Banff Centre, 9/23 to 9/26/05.

Tags: banff, canux, conference, ethnographic, ethnography, seminar, user experience, UX, workshop

This PDF file is a (scan of a) short paper version of my 1994 M.Sc. Thesis from U of Guelph. My entire thesis was up on the web in the very very earliest days of web (back when it was NCSA Mosaic that was being used to navigate) as an experiment by a friend at Apple. If I recall, he turned the whole thing into HTML, etc. Anyway, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read it, but if you are really hard up, perhaps this shorter paper might be of interest. If nothing else, I’ll blog it so I can find it later.

Update: full thesis has been found. See PDF here.

Abstract: An experiment compared the effectiveness of auditory, visual, and combination cues to convey document structure. Subjects demonstrated an equivalent level of understanding of the document structure and its content with either a combination cue or a visual cue. Subjects required more time to answer questions in the combination condition than in the visual condition. This suggests a greater cognitive effort is required. A sound-only condition has the poorest performance both in response time and in the subject�s answers to questions about the document�s structure and its content. Subjects were grouped based on whether or not they replayed sounds as a retention tactic. Subjects who replayed sounds did better than subjects who did not. These results contribute to our understanding of potential uses of sound in user interfaces. The specific cues used here for this particular task do not appear promising. Future research to determine how to be make use of sound must carefully consider user tactics for processing sound cues.

Tags: auditory display, earcons, grad school, Guelph, HCI, ICAD, M.Sc., thesis, University of Guelph

A Visit to Adobe is an interesting cultural artifact. From a site focused on Photoshop, a journalist/fanboy/blogger/enthusiast/insider strolls around Adobe and takes pictures of the people behind the product and their offices. There’s little practical information here, but that’s not the point. It puts a face on a corporation and highlights the individuals that make the products that we use (and in this case, that the writer and his readers love).

I paged through it rapidly, and actually came across some mentions/images of my friend Lynn Shade. She and I spoke together at DUX2003 about ethnographic research in other cultures (PDF link here).

And later this week I’ll be speaking at Adobe, to Lynn and her group, in a presentation entitled Buttoned-Down Creativity, about being a creative inside a corporate environment.

Tags: adobe, buttoned-down creativity, creativity, kawaii, lynn shade, participation, Photoshop

STANFORD Magazine writes about Steven Skov Holt, blobjects, and the SJ Museum Blobjects exhibit/book (my previous review of the Blobjects opening night is here)

As an undergraduate at Brown University in the late 1970s, Holt was not only the picture of health, but an avid athlete and cyclist whose pals teased him about his �thunder thighs.� In 1979 at age 20, however, his life took a dramatic turn: for reasons doctors never unearthed, Holt�s kidneys failed. He received a transplant. After five months in the hospital, he battled back to health and finished a degree in cognitive science.

Soon after, in 1982, Holt answered an ad for a low-level job at Manhattan-based ID Magazine, the bible of industrial design. Within a year, the intense Holt was editor of the magazine that spotted and helped shape trends, and it was a time when all sorts of new high-tech products were appearing on the landscape.

Tags: blobjects, design, designer, steven skov holt

In some ways, it’s amazing that TV Guide has hung on this long; I can’t remember the last time I used any sort of printed television guide, and I’ve never paid for one, going back to when they’d come free with the weekly paper (I guess they still do, but that goes right into the recycling in our house). The story is interesting, if not particularly shocking, because it marks a sharp transition point in a slow and inexorable change in technology and associated consumer behavior.

full story

TV Guide is slashing the circulation it guarantees advertisers by about two-thirds and relaunching itself as a large format magazine with far fewer TV listings and more emphasis on lifestyle and entertainment, the magazine announced Tuesday.

The radical changes to TV Guide come as it struggles to remain relevant in an age where many TV viewers get their listings from on-screen guides provided by their cable companies or online.

The new TV Guide, which will launch with the Oct. 17 issue, will contain just 25 percent listings and 75 percent stories, versus the 75 percent listings and 25 percent stories it has now, the company said early Tuesday.

Rich Battista, the CEO of TV Guide’s parent company, Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., said in an interview that the company’s research found that readers would be more interested in reading a magazine with fewer listings and more stories about TV shows and their stars.

Plus, we get the standard PR-speak where the company explains that their business decision was purely informed by research about consumer preference. These things write themselves!

Tags: circulation, era, magazine, PR, press release, technology, television, transition, tv, tv guide, tv listing

PRESS RELEASE The Rolling Stones new CD, ‘A Bigger Bang,’ will be released September 6, 2005, on Virgin Records. Continuing their historic songwriting partnership, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards began the creative process last autumn and were later joined in the recording studio by Charlie Watts and Ron Wood. ‘A Bigger Bang’ features all new songs, and is the first studio album by The Rolling Stones since the 1997 platinum-certified ‘Bridges to Babylon.’ While in the studio recording the album last year, the band came up with the title ‘A Bigger Bang’ reflecting their fascination with the scientific theory about the origin of the universe.

That last sentence is hysterical. PR writers are the funniest people on the planet!

Maybe it went a little something like this

DISSOLVE TO Mick and Keith lying on their backs on the hood of their car, out in the parking lot behind Olympia studios.

MJ: Keef?
KR: Yeh, Mick?
MJ: Do ye ever….
KR: Wuzzat wuzza?
MJ: Ye know, like WONDER
KR: Zzz hwazuh?
…
MJ: Yeah, like wonder about how we all fit
KR: string usUP, lions cage
…
MJ: No, no, I know, I know, but where did it all ye know come FROM
…
KR:
MJ:
MJ:
MJ:
MJ: Exactly man. Big bang theory. String theory. String cheese.
KR: Big bang?
MJ: Bigger bang! That’s it.
KR: Wuzzat wuzza?
MJ: no, you tell ‘er

Tags: album, bigger bang, hype, ludicrous, PR, press release, rolling stones, title, tour

Last week in Newark I was taken to an interesting Portuguese restaurant. One dish we ordered (Rodizio) involves many courses – until you say stop – of huge chunks of meat on giant skewers, three at a time, usually. The skewers were dripping. Many contained something wrapped in bacon.

See more pictures here.

Tags: cuisine, food, iberia, meat, newark, portuguese, restaurant, skewers

I was in Honolulu in December and took pictures of as many of the ABC stores as I could find, and have put then up in ABC Stores – a photoset on Flickr. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s fun to see a whole bunch, anyway.

Tags: ABC, abc store, convenience store, hawaii, honolulu, infill, retail, ubiquity, waikiki

Ahh, a career milestone reached. I’m blurbworthy. Recently, Nikola Design, a one-man firm in Yugoslavia, asked me for a blurb for their exhibit in Belgrade. I had no prior exposure to the principal or his work, but I took a look and offered a brief writeup. Yesterday I watched a DVD of the exhibit. The camera moves around, showing the work, with text and images overlaying the live imagery. At one point, you see the various quotes from the different critics, including myself (credited as Design Strategist and Core77 Columnist). It was pretty neat; especially given the far-flung nature of the event.

Tags: belgrade, blurb, career, design, exhibit, museum, Nikola Design, Nikola Knezevic, Yugoslavia

The DUX conference site is now showing my tutorial.

In this tutorial, you will learn more about improv, participant observation, listening, context, and, of course, how these things all fit together and can be used and experienced.

DUX is this November in SF at Fort Mason.

Tags: design, dux, dux2005, ethnography, fort+mason, improv, innovation, tutorial, user experience

HBO’s The Comeback got some unkind press when it launched, but I finally checked it out. The show is a mock documentary about a semi-faded sitcom star who is cast in a new sitcom (“Room and Bored”) but struggles to get respect. Kudrow’s character is making a reality show (which is the same as a documentary, sometimes, isn’t it?) about her career, and calling it The Comeback (which is also the name of the show that we are watching – how PoMo).

Kudrow is amazing – you almost won’t recognize her. She has twitches and tics and hair and smile and nose that seem light years away from Phoebe. The show is funny and excruciatingly uncomfortable. And gives absolutely no credit to the very similarly-toned Lisa Picard Is Famous (a mock documentary about a never-say-die up and coming young actress who is dealt near-fatal blow after near-fatal blow). (note: there was an actual movie site for LisaPicardIsFamous but they let the domain registration lapse – guess there was no budget a few years post-release).

Tags: comeback, HBO, Lisa Kudrow, Lisa Picard, mockumentary, reality television, reality tv, television, tv