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.

Tags: analysis, architecture, data, design, family, home, rfid, tracking, 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.

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

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.”

Tags: journalism, life imitates art, onion, surf, surf city, the onion, theonion

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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.

Tags: auction, eBay, phishing, scam

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.

Tags: airplane, airtroductions, blind date, dating, flight, flying, travel

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”.

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

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.

Tags: classification, cph127, design, innovation, labels

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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.

Tags: Alan Ball, Casey McCall, fact checking, Nate Fisher, salon.com, six feet under, typo

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!

Tags: Blog, glamour, Grant McCracken, messy, Postrel, target, Virginia postrel

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 (Update: PDF here), 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.

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

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

Tags: alpaca, alpaca event, Montara, sign

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

Tags: blue, bright, color, house, IKEA, Montara, paint

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…

Tags: earworm, mondegreen, mondeworm, rolling stones, sweet neocon

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.

Tags: benefit, concert, homeless, San Francisco, sf, 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 Fracheur
FOR A SUPERIOR HYGIENE

Renova Fracheur 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 Fracheur, 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?

Tags: luxury, renova, toilet paper