BusinessWeek describes a curious design research initiative. A UK home builder has a family living in a sensor-filled concept house, where the people are all RFID-tagged. They’ll collect usage data for six months and then use the resulting who/where/when/how-long data to improve the home’s design. Just like using weblogs to redesign a website - you know what people have been doing, but you have no idea why. Unless you ask. And the families in this project will be extensively interviewed by a “consumer researcher” so we figure they’ll get that piece of the puzzle too.

Technorati: design, architecture, home, family, rfid, tracking, data, analysis, user+research

We’ve got BirdBGone spikes to keep the peeps away from gutters and roofs, Stakestoppers to keep the boarders off of guard rails and retaining walls, and now The Anti-Sit Archives documents many ways to keep our tushes from everyplace else. Signs of our (sub)urban times: brutal after-thought products intended to force a fix to an unintended or no-longer-desired usage for the original (often more elegant and integrated) design.

Technorati: design, anti-design, pigeon, boarding, skateboard, urban, skaters, anti-sit

In an article about a dispute between two cities, the SF Chronicle masquerades as The Onion

Campbell pointed out that neither Santa Cruz nor Huntington Beach qualifies to be Surf City, under the terms of the classic Jan and Dean song, as neither place has ‘two girls for every boy.'’
‘I’ve done some research,'’ Campbell said. ‘Neither city has two girls for every boy, so neither should be Surf City.'’

Technorati: onion, theonion, the+onion, journalism, surf, surf+city, life+imitates+art

click to enlarge
Well here’s one I hadn’t seen - a fake “You’ve won” notification. An auction I didn’t participate in - sent to me seemingly from eBay, but of course, it’s not really from eBay. It’s pretty sneaky, if I was buying 30 things from eBay a week I probably would open this without thinking - at which point I dunno, they’ve got my password, or I’ve given them money or something awful.

Evil.

Technorati: phishing, scam, eBay, auction

AirTroductions is something I don’t quite get. How can this possibly survive? You can try to meet a new person online based on your travel plans; then arrange to sit together. Maybe they should just call it NeedyExtrovert.com or something. Let’s combine the hair-pulling ennui of a long flight with the tedium/fear blend of a blind date! It must be the Web 2.0!!!

JenS, 29, Female
USA, Oregon, Portland
I’m a twenty-something public relations professional who travels mostly for work, several times a year. I love my job, my two Chihuahuas, and living in Portland.

I’d like to meet:
I’m looking for fun people to sit next to on the plane. Sharing of books, magazines, and music is encouraged but not required. Sharing of drinks and laughs are a must.

I’m more comfortable with (Pick as many as you like to let people know more about you!):
The W Hotel, Las Vegas on the Strip , Paris at night, The Emergency Exit Row, First Class, Vodka Martini, Diet Soda

I’m searchable as:
both business and personal

I’d be very curious to hear from people who have tried this or would try this; my bias is very personal and I know there’s more stories out there than mine.

Technorati: travel, dating, airtroductions, blind+date, airplane, flying, flight

You can tattoo a pig, but it’s still a pig

As CNN reports, a Belgian artist in China is giving pigs tattoos of mermaids, roses, cherubs, and the Louis Vuitton logo.

The pigs get sedatives before they go under the needle and are carefully raised until their natural deaths. The artist has been inspired by China’s rampant piracy of everything from DVDs to Paris’s latest fashions (i.e., the LV logo).

Video cameras will allow collectors (who may purchase the post-mortem pigskin art) or anyone else to watch the tattooed pigs cavort and sleep live on the Internet, a program dubbed “Pig Brother”.

Technorati: pig, pigs, cnn, pork, porcine, ink, tattoo, tats, china, LV, art, louis+vuitton

I’ve posted a mini-essay called Title Goes Here on CPH127, a blog about design and innovation

We live in a Google world. Information/answers/solutions await us. We want to search, and so other people want to label, categorize, classify. New (and horrific) words like folksonomy emerge to describe the schemes by which we can sort and label the world around us.

I’m a brand new guest blogger there; this was my first post.

Technorati: cph127, design, innovation, classification, labels

click to enlarge

The caption reads Alan Ball, with Peter Krause as Casey Fisher, in the background. Actually, Peter plays Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under and he played Casey McCall on Sports Night. Strange.

Technorati: salon.com, Nate+Fisher, Casey+McCall, typo, fact+checking, Six+Feet+Under, Alan+Ball

Virginia Postrel blogs a nice analysis of my recent entry about Target’s wire-filled ad imagery through the lenses of her work on glamour and an essay by Grant McCracken in his brand-spanking-new book, Culture and Consumption II. Cool!

Technorati: blog, messy, Target, Postrel, Virginia+Postrel, Glamour, Grant+McCracken

My paper Projective Techniques for Projection Technologies has been accepted for the DUX05 Conference. I’ll be sure to link to the final case study when it becomes available, but I will say that it’s about the user research that informed the development of the HP Home Cinema Digital Projector. I wrote about the process in a previous issue of FreshMeat.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll also be doing a tutorial at DUX, Whose Line is it Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography and Improv.

Technorati: dux, dux05, ethnography, research, presentation, conference, paper, tutorial

What is on the agenda when you have an Alpaca Event?

A newly repainted house in Montara. Frighteningly bright. What were they thinking? Looks like we’ve got our own IKEA here on the coast now.

Update: turns out the homeowners are fans of UC Berkeley sports teams

An Earworm is a (usually annoying) song that gets stuck in your head. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric.

Now, I bring you the evil combination - the mondeworm.

Let’s start with an example: The Rolling Stones have been getting a lot of press as of late for their soon-to-released song Sweet Neocon, which most people haven’t heard. We’ve heard about it, just haven’t heard it for real. But it’s easy to picture how the song would go in your head if the chorus sounds like Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. or Sheryl Crow’s Sweet Rosalyn. Just say, in your head, neocon for either Car-o-liine or Ros-a-lynnn - either way, you’ve got yourself a new piece of brain candy.

I’m sure there are others!

Enjoy…

Technorati: rolling+stones, sweet+neocon, mondegreen, earworm, mondeworm

I got a kick out of this great idea for a benefit concert - Sock It To Me: a sock and underwear collection for San Francisco’s homeless program. The only clothing that can’t be given as ‘hand-me-downs’ are socks and underwear. This is where you come in. Check your sock drawer and look for anything with a tag on it, or pick something up at the store on they way.

Technorati: sf, san+francisco, concert, benefit, homeless, socks, underwear

Radar Magazine does a great piece on the growth - elsewhere in the world - of the market for premium toilet paper. Led me to Renova.

Renova Black

SURPRINSING & UNIQUE

Discover today which tissue product is more Fashionable & Unique, just right for your sensual needs.
The very best in luxury bath tissue has a name: Renova Black
Fashionable, Sensual, Sophisticated, Fun, Unique!

and Fra�cheur
FOR A SUPERIOR HYGIENE

Renova Fra�cheur is a pioneer generation of toilet paper thanks to its active softness. Tiny drops of rich cream envelop the fibres of this tissue paper, enriching its structure with moisturising compounds.
Soft fibres start off the process, by cleaning your skin, causing this contact to release a soft moisturising cream.
Renova Fra�cheur, for superior hygiene.

That last one sounds like a delicious chocolate surprise of some sort.

And this ad

Is she going to wipe him once she finishes getting his underpants off?

Technorati: toilet+paper, luxury, renova

I wrote previously about how Q107 had presented a broadcast of live Rolling Stones as if it was a simulcast of a club show in Toronto, and how many of us protested and they responded. Well, they got some press out of the whole thing, too.

From this story

Bartrem maintained that Q107’s intent was never to deceive, but does concede that the station could have been a little more specific in its programming intentions.
…
“I guess the way we positioned it on the air was ‘Celebrating this night at the Phoenix, we’ve got Stones live on air at 9:30.’ People heard ‘live’ and ‘Phoenix’ and put the two together and thought ’simulcasting,’” he said.

“In hindsight, one line would have saved all the problems: ‘While some are enjoying the show at the Phoenix, let’s go back three years and enjoy what was going on.’”

Since he was one of the lucky 1,100 people to attend the show, Bartrem said he can’t speak to what Scholes said on air, but he is taking care to absolve the station’s DJs “of any kind of responsibility in this thing” and accepts full blame for the furor.

As penance, he has volunteered to be morning host John Derringer’s “Tool of the Day” today and will publicly proclaim the whole thing “totally my fault.” He has sent a mea culpa e-mail to everyone who wrote the station.

and from this story

The station evidently never specifically told its listeners it was simulcasting the Stones show from the Phoenix, but one listener, Steve Popichak, who e-mailed the Sun said, “During their broadcast, their announcer came on between songs and made references to this performance happening right in front of him right there at the Phoenix.”

“Well, it was live Stones,” DJ John Scholes told the Sun Wednesday night.

Blair Bartrem, Q107’s program director, yesterday told the Sun that the station received 30 to 40 complaints from fans, via e-mail. He said he takes responsibility for the confusion and that, in hindsight, the e-mail should have been clearer.

“I think a few of our Q listeners felt that we were trying to deceive them, which clearly wasn’t our intent,” Bartrem said. “I mean, there’s a trust that we have with our audience, obviously, and we’re not trying to pull a fast one.”
…
Bloggers on Tuesday and Wednesday were abuzz with anticipation about the perceived simulcast. An Ottawa resident filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council [over the playing of a bootleg? — SP]. He said other fans might do the same.

From discussions online, it appears that few believe that the deception was accidental or that the apology was genuine. I guess I was glad to get any acknowledgement of a mistake from a company.

But desite their claims to have responded to all who complained - I have not heard back from them, and obviously am not going to. I feel singled out!

Technorati: phoenix, toronto, q107, misleading, deception, simulcast, palais+royale, rolling+stones, stones, radio, media

The NYT writes a front-page story about the growth in housing developments in the US in areas that were formerly “the middle of nowhere.” Beyond being generally interesting as a trend, I was intrigued by the (perhaps not novel but at least unique to me) teaser of how they are figuring out what to put into these homes.

One area in which KB Home takes pride is its market research. It asks things like where people want their kitchens and how much more of a commute they can stomach. And it surveys its own buyers to get a comprehensive idea of who they are and why they bought.
…
In its most recent survey of Tampa home buyers, KB asked people what they valued the most in their home and community. They wanted more space and a greater sense of security. Safety always ranks second, even in communities where there is virtually no crime.

Asked what they wanted in a home, 88 percent said a home security system, 93 percent said they preferred neighborhoods with “more streetlights” and 96 percent insisted on deadbolt locks or security doors.

So KB Home offers them all. “It’s up to us to figure out what people really want and to translate that into architecture,” said Erik Kough, KB’s vice president for architecture. And the company designs its communities with winding streets with sidewalks and cul-de-sacs to keep traffic slow, to give a sense of containment and to give an appearance distinctly unlike the urban grid that the young, middle-class families instinctively associate with crime. “I definitely feel safe here. I feel protected,” said Lisa Crawford, who moved to New River about a year ago with her husband, Steve, and their two children.

“And I can tell you that the people in Tampa are a whole lot different than the people here,” Ms. Crawford said. “In Tampa, there’s a faster pace. I like it here, that it’s more of a community, more of a small-town feel.”

Technorati: user+research, market+research, housing, architecture, developer, development

originally uploaded by minusbaby.

Great column that calls out what has tickled the back of my brain but never formed into a real thought - these ads purport to acknowledge and salute the fact that real women have all sorts of body types besides what you normally see in advertising, but the product they are selling is firming cream, designed to conceal or alter the body, making it closer to the “thin” ideal. I’m sure there’s some spin Dove puts on it, but really it’s a great point. Do we (or, at least, women) love ourselves for who we are, or do we try to fix things up? Seems like Dove is doing a pretty good job at having it both ways. Brilliant, yet more than a little evil.

Technorati: dove, body, women, woman, body+image, firming, advertising, ideal

Today the SF Chronicle printed an August 11th essay by Cindy Sheehan. The text of the column is not available on their website, but the editor’s note tells us that the column appeared originally in Arianna Huffington’s HuffingPost.com. In fact, it appeared on HuffingtonPost.com. The Chronicle is sending its readers to a parody-site. Umm, oops.

Update: I sent in an irked correction

Today, page B5 - Cindy Sheehan essay - you list huffingpost.com instead of huffingtonpost.com - since no one bothered to CHECK that - you actually are sending people to a parody site.
Lame job, guys.

and got back

The correct site, as I am sure you know, is huffingtonpost.com
The introduction was written in haste late Friday and, as you noted, not double-checked. Thanks for alerting us to the parody site.

Technorati: huffing, huffington, sfgate, san+francisco+chronicle, fact-checking, sheehan, parody, web, website, link

A big news story today deals with the Crawford, TX guy who fired a shotgun in the air, presumably in protest over the Sheehan gathering near both his and GWB’s place. I was surprised by the rhetoric used by the SF Chronicle to describe the incident (story not available online).

Larry Mattlage hopped into his pickup truck, barreled across his pasture and pulled up to the fence within a few hundred feet of the protests. He then climbed out of the cab, retrieved a a shotgun from the back and fired at least one blast into the air.

Don’t you just get the picture of some angry redneck, hopping and barreling so? Seems like some sloppy journalism; I guess having a point of view is a “good” thing, but it seems rather manipulative to me.

Technorati: sheehan, cindy+sheehan, media, news, journalism, bush, crawford, texas, gun, rifle, shoot, spin, redneck, bubba, mattlage, larry+mattlage

Ben Stein writes in the NYT about fashion. Or culture. Or something. It’s a strange rant; reminds me of the outrage over shaggy Beatles-esque long haircuts in the 60s from stuffed-shirt establishment types who were frightened of the world changing without them and so frothed and stormed in disgust. Ben Stein is old, out of touch, and really really shallow.

TODAY’S business workplace is not a pretty sight. No, I’m not referring to wildly overinflated C.E.O. pay, although I could be. Nor am I referring to the empty desks caused by outsourcing, although I could be referring to that, too. I am not even referring to modern cubicles and their pitiful fiberboard walls. I am referring to the men (not the women) in those cubicles.

To put it as boldly as it needs to be put, men at work these days all too often dress like total slobs, and it hurts the eyes, the spirit and, I suspect, the bottom line.

Sometimes, I get a clue of this when I go to see my lawyer and am shocked to find that men who should be wearing suits - to keep up their propriety and their sense of dignity - are wearing casual jeans and short-sleeved shirts instead. I get a whiff of it when I appear on television and see employees of major networks dressed in casual slacks and sport shirts with no ties.

But the most stunning blow came a few weeks ago when I did an industrial film on a super-advanced videoconferencing system made by a very large, very successful high-tech company. The men who worked at the company’s campus in Oregon were uniformly smart and uniformly courteous, but they dressed like children at summer camp - cut-off jeans, shorts, T-shirts and sandals without socks. I asked if this was some special dress-down day and they all looked at me as if I were insane. “No,” they said. “This is how we dress.”

I see it in airports and on airplanes. I see it when young people come to me for interviews for a summer job dressed in baggies - gangsta-style long shorts with some of their butts showing - and have no idea that they are doing anything wrong.

I see it even at some brokerage firms, although one of the saving graces of investment banks is that the men who work at them do dress like grown-ups, and even dress beautifully in many cases.

…
When a man wears a nice suit of clothes, he feels like a grown-up. He is dressed like Gregory Peck or Clark Gable or Gary Cooper, so, naturally he’ll want to behave like a grown-up.
…

Besides, men at work in casual clothes simply lack authority. We clients really do not trust a man wearing J. Crew casual wear as much as we trust a man wearing a suit from J. Press or the venerable and much-adored Brooks Brothers.
…

In addition, if everyone is dressed for a game of dodgeball instead of a game of “let’s draw up a will,” how will we tell the bosses from the associates? How will we possibly feel as much confidence in a man who picks an exchange-traded fund if he appears at lunch in shorts instead of a suit?

A suit says discipline, maturity, style, respect for yourself and respect for the people you are meeting. Casual clothes say - well, the word “contempt” comes to mind, although maybe it’s too harsh. Maybe just “too cool for school” is what I mean.

…

There is a lesson here. Men look better if they dress for work in a uniform of a suit and a shirt and tie. They feel better about themselves, if I can judge from the moods of those marines at the hospital and at the reunion. Certainly, as a citizen, I felt better about the marines being dressed as if they honored their country and their mission. I can certainly recall that when I worked in a law firm and on Wall Street, I felt a lot better about myself and took myself and my work a lot more seriously when I dressed up like a mensch.

Maybe this is old-fashioned, but there is a lot of good sense in those old fashions.

Technorati: ben+stein, fashion, style, clothing, work, attitude, culture, out+of+touch

Most of the EPIC 2005 Program has been posted.

What do you think?

Technorati: epic, epic2005, ethnography, conference, November, Seattle, Microsoft

The Rolling Stones played their usual end-of-reherasal club show in Toronto. Local station Q107 suggested they were going to be simulcasting the show. Indeed, as the show started, they played a concert and played it very close to the edge of the truth. They didn’t identify the show they were actually playing on the radio as coming from 2002, they simply referred regularly to the show going on right now and their excitement about it. I don’t have any exact quotes but the DJ patter was designed to mislead, not clarify.

I grew up with Q107; I was horrified to see them playing a game like that with listeners. There were indeed fans around the world who stayed up late or got up early to catch this (supposed) simulcast, and were fooled. I wouldn’t have known what it was except that someone familiar with concert recordings posted to my Rolling Stones online community the actual source of the show being played. No doubt that others simply took the station at face value.

I wrote the station and encouraged others on the list to do so.

Come on guys - how’s about respecting your listeners instead of playing stupid games with them? If you aren’t playing tonight’s stealth Stones show, then tell us what show you ARE playing, don’t play coy games where you don’t actually literally directly honestly SAY that it’s tonight’s show but yeah (heh heh heh) you pretend that well, maybe we’ll reach our own conclusions.

That’s no way to treat people. Unless you are a telemarketer or a phone company. Q was never about the fine-print when I grew up listening to you. What the hell happened?

I have not heard back from the station, although others have. The first few I saw looked like this

Our sincere apologies if you are upset by the Q107 live programming with the Rolling Stones last night. We never claimed to be broadcasting the Phoenix show. We did say we were going to air live Rolling Stones. Our intent was not to deceive, but merely give the listeners who could not attend last nights show at the Phoenix, a
healthy dose of live Stones.

Thank you for your email, we appreciate comments from our great listeners.

The intent was absolutely to deceive. By being deliberately vague, they allowed people to come to their own (obvious, but incorrect) conclusions. Isn’t that deception?

Now we get this:

Thank you for your email note. We have received an inordinate amount of negative email concerning the Rolling Stones live broadcast which we aired last night on Q. You may have received a note from Q107’s Assistant Program Director, Michelle Dyer, or Andrew from Club Q…but I got thinking…”why should Michelle or Andrew take the hit on this?” While we did not come right out and say we were doing a simulcast from the Phoenix, we were perhaps vague in the way we positioned the program. I take full accountability for how this show was presented on air. Here�s what I�ve learned. Q listeners are extremely passionate about their music, and at no time should I take this for granted. It�s not like we aired bootleg Wham concert. Music matters here.

Having said this�here�s how I plan to take responsibility. I have asked John Derringer if I could be named tomorrow�s Tool of The Day. He has kindly said yes. So, tomorrow tune in at 8:20 to hear me take my lumps on air and apologize to our audience.

Regards,

Blair Bartrem
Program Director
Q107

This is the most awesome response I’ve ever seen! And hey, they turned into a bit of a PR opportunity as well!

I’m so burned out on corporate misleading and evasion and being ignored and all that - and here we’ve got a company absolutely stepping up.

It’d be great if they got around to writing me back too, but I’ll take this as a victory for the consumer!

All right Q107!

Technorati: rolling+stones, mick+jagger, Toronto, phoenix, club+show, Q107, simulcast, PR, customer, consumer, relationship

Incontinence is the new virility

Poise is a new incontinence-protection product for women, resembling pads more than diapers. Stuart Elliott writes about the product and their new advertising in the NYT. What struck me was the similarity between this ad and the original ads for Viagra.

On second look, you can tell which product is for a woman and which product is for a man, but the message is similar - overcome an embarassing crotch problem and celebrate with renewed intimacy.

Technorati: poise, viagra, incontinence, erectile+dysfunction, advertising, dance

click screenshot to enlarge

This is an interesting new feature from Google. At least, I’ve only noticed in the last few days, and I haven’t seen it mentioned on the usual blogs that hype every new thing that Google does (I guess this is just an improvement in searching and that’s just so - yawn - less interesting than other Google improvements or innovations).

Looks like the top result for a search (but only certain type of searches - it doesn’t work for portigal or portigal.com - is it only for sponsored?) come up with not only the links to the site, but also a selection of links to other pages in that site. Interesting tradeoff between useful and clutter. I’m not sure yet what I think; I imagine I’d typically want to open the page anyway, and then use the context of that page to choose my subsequent links. But I guess if you knew you wanted to do something specific on that site, like check arrival times, if there is enough info in the link shown in the Google result, you might try that.

We’ll see what happens. Nice thing about the web - companies can try out new features easily and take them away or improve them easily (sure, it’s not easy exactly, but if you wanted to do this with a car feature, that’d be a lot harder).

Technorati: google, search, results, link,