Last week saw alarmist news stories about the use of carbon monoxide to keep packaged meat look red, and therefore fresh. Regardless of how old it might be. Well, Lintonizing, from Viands Concerted, is “an all-natural, preservatire free process [that] increases the shelf life of fully cooked vegetables and makes them look freshly cut by changing the cellular plant structure within the vegetable.”

Now that’s gotta be good for us! One food-science article I found explained how the process restores the turgor of the vegetable.

Tags: appearance, food, lintonizing, preservation, technology, turgor

From Psych Central “one of the top 10 mental health and psychology
websites, providing reliable and professionally-reviewed resources since 1995″ comes a strange piece that claims to be about Web 2.0. In fact, it’s sort of a poorly designed and executed usability/findability test of del.icio.us (or whatever) and flickr. But Web 2.0 is clearly the hook/lede/headline to get the Psych-oriented reader to dive in.

He starts with Web 2.0, which then means tagging, which then means flickr and del.iblahblah.us, which then means findability.

But this is Pysch Central. Not web/design/interation Central. Clearly. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go look at AskMetafilter for some help with my personal life.

Tags: 2.0, findability, meme, psych central, usability, web 2.0

I’ve finally finished posting 269355 pictures from Hong Kong. I put every one most of them through Photoshop and tweaked and optimized and cropped. Uploaded ‘em all to flickr, tagged ‘em, titled ‘em, wrote a description, and sent them to various groups. No wonder it’s taken more than three weeks.

Still to come is Bangkok and India.

Here are just a few samples.

Sorta Tasty Snax

Schoolgirls and Bag-Noodles To Go

Panties on the Street

Burning Incense closeup

White Eyeglasses Frames

Busy Signs

Tags: flickr, hong kong, photos, pictures

The America’s Best Restroom contest has selected five finalists.

Organizers do research about the businesses but don’t actually try out the chosen throne rooms before selecting five for the online poll. “We have nominations from all over the place. It would be too hard,” said Bensten.

And the nominees are:

• All Seasons Bistro, East Lansing, MI.
  
• Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, Atlantic City, NJ
  
• Hemenways, Providence, RI
  
• Quad City International Airport, Moline, IL
  
• Wendell’s Restaurant, Westerville, OH
  

Tags: bathroom, clean, customer, restroom, service, toilet, washroom

IMG_1831, originally uploaded by GargoyleMT.

I’ll be in Houston next week for the first time. I’ve hardly been in Texas, actually. The Dallas airport. A day and a half in suburban San Antonio, and one trip to Austin that was airport->hotel->chip factory (computer, not corn)->airport.

I know that barbecue is in the plans!

Tags: houston, texas, travel

Great Wired piece about involving ardent fans/customers in developing future products. Clearly, having the right attitude about your customers, and a whole lot of letting go is essential to innovation (okay almost a bad pun there, sorry).

The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. “Pretty much the comment from all four of us was ‘They’re going to talk to us about Legos, and they’re going to pay us with Legos?’” Hassenplug says. “‘They actually want our opinion?’ It doesn’t get much better than that.”

and

Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products.

After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. “We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting,” Nipper says. “It’s a totally different business paradigm – although they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set.” Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a “right to hack” into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.

Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit’s 727 parts.

Lego’s decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company.

Tags: co-creation, cocreation, consumer, customer, design, fan, hack, hacker, hacking, innovation, lego, mindstorms, user, wired

More hubris for Sony as they sell the Metreon

Lisa Carparelli, a spokeswoman for Sony, said the company pulled out as Metreon’s original owner upon reviewing its corporate strategy and deciding to focus it on electronics, entertainment and games.

‘We had success in Metreon,’ Carparelli said. ‘We attracted an average of 6 million people a year, but the decision is based on corporate resources.’

Sony will continue to operate the Sony Style Store and the PlayStation store inside the Metreon. ‘We’ll be in essence a tenant,’ Carparelli said.

Visitors panned an exhibit based on the book ‘The Way Things Work’ as boring, and it closed in summer 2001. An anchor Microsoft store closed later that year. An exhibit based on Maurice Sendak’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was scaled back to four days a week and later closed. The Discovery Channel store closed in 2003.

The movie theaters flourished. But Sony didn’t receive any revenue from the theaters and in 2002 rebuffed a quiet proposal by the theaters to expand into the by-then-vacant fourth floor.

One industry observer said the complex ended up with a mostly teenage clientele that alienated the upscale families whom Sony had intended to attract.

‘Sony envisioned a much higher-end customer than ultimately wanted to be there,’ Taylor said.

‘The tenants they put in originally were very unique and esoteric. The Discovery Channel had unique things, but they were for affluent people with lots of disposable income for cute knick-knacks. The most successful tenants were ones who catered to the teenage moviegoing crowd, like the pinball arcades. They intimidated the more affluent crowds looking for a more museumlike experience.’

I guess hindsight is 20-20 in situations like these. Sony in Japan offers pretty much every sort of service you can think of; in the US their attempt at a mall mostly failed (despite their positive spin). It never really had any meaning – there was little Sony about it, and the Metreon brand never seemed to grow into anything. And the place itself always lacked coherence as an experience. Let’s see if it’ll become anything I care about now, though.

Also from this story:

I was shown around the building by a Metreon staffer as workers scurried to finish the project in time. Everyone I’d spoken with had gushed about how Metreon was going to reinvent retailing and serve as a model for similar ventures worldwide.

I said to my guide: “So the mall … ”

“It’s not a mall,” she interrupted. “It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

I dutifully described the place as such in the article I’d been hired to write. But I had no clue what Sony meant. Metreon was a mix of stores, eating places and a movie theater.

It was a mall.

Sony never understood this. Nor did it grasp Bryant’s notion of a seamless entertainment-retail experience. Instead, it attempted to package Metreon as a mini-Disneyland, with a handful of attractions and a bunch of ways to spend money.

Tags: hubris, mall, metreon, retail, sale, San Francisco, sony, store

Everything is 2.0 nowadays. There’s endless bandwagoneering (and of course punditry and debate) over the leading member of the 2.0 game – at least on the web – Web 2.0. We could talk about it what means, but that’s not the point.

Core77 is running a series of presentations called Design 2.0. Today there’s some references to Advertising 2.0. Indeed, it was a year ago or more than someone referred to Portigal 2.0 when I outlined my early plans for evolving my consulting business. I have to say I was charmed by the term, but, well, yeah. I guess it’s better than ePortigal or iPortigal.

Update: Library 2.0?

Tags: 2, 2.0, advertising2.0, buzzword, catchphrase, design2.0, jargon, lingo, meme, portigal, two, web2.0

Hong Kong, January 2006

I believe these are phone numbers, but what function are they serving? Interesting mysteries in foreign countries.

Update: as qiawen points out in the comments, these are ads for local services, such as a plumber or appliance repair person.

Tags: graffiti, hong kong, numbers, numerals, phone number, telephone

I was intrigued by this NYT piece about the cultural changes at Fannie Mae (slightly edited here).

Among the mortgage giant’s new house rules:
1. Demonstrate humility.
2. Communicate openly.
3. Make the company a no-spin zone.
4. Respect the views of others.
5. Minimize internal politics.
6. Apologize and quickly fix mistakes.

The company was criticized by investors and lawmakers for making arrogance an art form. It relied on an army of professional lobbyists and powerful strategic alliances in the housing and finance industries to silence critics. And when federal investigators found almost $11 billion worth of accounting errors in 2004, Fannie denied it had any problems, choosing to attack its regulator instead.

Now, Fannie’s chief executive, is trying to change the company’s old ways. But even he acknowledges that it will take far more than a new mission statement to prepare the company for the political and business challenges ahead.

I’ve seen a lot of different company cultures in my work (although I’ve got no experience or opinion about Fannie Mae specifically) and dealing with company culture is a huge part of the gig. I know some folks make an explicit offer to change company culture as part of their explicit outcome; for me, I’ve more looked at ways of influencing individuals within a culture in smaller ways through experiences. The indirect approach. And that seems to be a natural offshoot of trying to succeed as a consultant in a new culture anyway.

I think it’s enormously challenging (and the article makes that case as well) to effect cultural change inside an organization. In many ways its like trying to encourage a certain demographic of the public to adopt a product or service, and in many ways it’s much harder since the outcomes are not so tangible (number of burgers served, number of new subscribers, profit) and since the thing you are looking at is all around you. For most companies – the customers are “out there” but the culture is “in here” with them, and obviously harder to see.

I am intrigued and encouraged to see corporate culture being part of the mainstream business conversation; it’s very important. I don’t have many of the answers, certainly nothing that makes a pithy blog entry, but I know the terrain and I respect those who travel it.

Tags: business, corporate culture, culture, fannie mae, mortgage

I was looking on Craigslist for a car, and I saw one listed in nearby Santa Cruz, so I wrote the seller with a question. Hilarious response (if scary)

Hello there,
Thank you for your interest in purchasing my car . First of all I must inform you that currently I’m in Zagreb, Croatia and the machine is here with me .My faher, who died two weeks ago was the first owner of the car. The machine is in great condition ,no damage,no scratches or dents, no hidden defects,keept in our own garage. The machine is an US model with US specs,it passed the test emissions and comes with all the documents you need to register the item. It has a clear title and it can be registerd into your name. I recently ordered a new car from a dealer down here and i need the cash in the next few days to pay for it. The price I hope to obtain is $10000 USD (this price includes the shipping and insurance) and if you agree with this price we can start to complete the transaction. I have to tell you that I have other serious offers that I have to consider and I will make a decision regarding this sale function of
time of payment and price. i will shipp the car using KLM 7-10 air days delivery, and i will cover all taxes. We can make this COD, but if you want to keep the car for you, then you have to make a down deposit with 1,500 USD. So email me back if you are intersted and you have the cash. The car will be shipped from Croatia and i will cover the shipping costs and insurance.You will not have to pay additional taxes,just only the price for it.
Let me know!

I think Zagreb is pretty much the cue that something is wrong wrong wrong here. Anyway, the posting has been taken down so obviously someone else discovered as well the ridiculous scam. Doesn’t it always involve someone dying? Fortune from misfortune? Silly.

Tags: con, craigslist, croatia, mark, nigeria, scam, zagreb

swearingfestival is some event in SF to look at and experience swearing, of course. But lately I’ve been thinking about the silly words that we create to let us swear with out swearing.

Gosh instead of God
Gee whiz instead of Jesus Christ
Durn/dang instead of damn
Shucks or shoot instead of shit

And now we’ve got the network TV versions. My fave is jagoff (jagov?) for jackoff, appearing on NYPD, Law and Order (I presume), Third Watch, and the like. Anyplace you’ve got cops talking tough about the scum on the street.

It’s just so silly; you can say jagoff, but you can’t say jackoff?

I’m sure there are others I can’t think of right now.

Update: frigging, freaking, fricking all for fucking

Tags: alternatives, jargon, swear, swearing, tv, words

I just love that headline because you can read it a couple of different ways depending on what your expectation is. Perhaps Mr. Cheney felt bad about not getting him the first time so he’s been lying in wait outside the hospital!

Tags: ambush, cheney, confusion, headline, hospital, reading, shooter, shot

Oh to be in Los Angeles! The Kids in the Hall at the Steve Allen Theater

Not having performed together in four years, The Kids are back to rediscover their theatrical roots in three rare performances. As in the early years at The Rivoli, The Kids will come to the table Monday morning, work out new sketches and characters, then put up a show on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It will be a unique opportunity for audiences to travel back in time to the day when The Kids in the Hall first discovered their gift for making strange things happen in normal places.

February 23, 24 & 25
8 p.m.
The Steve Allen Theater
4773 Hollywood Blvd.

Tags: comedy, concert, kids in the hall, los angeles, performance, theater, theatre

For my class in Design Research Methods at CCA, I’ve asked the students to start either blogging or adding pictures to flickr. They are ideally doing this regularly, at least weekly, but I think it’s taking some time to ramp up.

I’ve asked them to think like design researchers and use this as a way to practice noticing stuff, and telling stories. They can blog whatever they want, but at least one piece per week should be something interesting they noticed – something funny or odd or curious or unusual – in their daily lives. An experience, a design, a need, a person doing something odd. Just to learn to pay attention to that alerting part of our judging selves. Ideally, this will help build the muscles they’ll need for making sense out of the fieldwork they start doing.

Anyway, I’m going to link to ‘em all here and maybe some of the folks who read this blog will check out what the class has done. Maybe offer some comments or encouragement. Once they got their feet wet, the hope is that having an audience will actually provide some inspiration, motivation, momentum.

http://blurr1e.blogspot.com/
http://cupanoodle.blogspot.com/
http://dcarchitect.blogspot.com/
http://shambacca.blogspot.com/
http://thegumbyproject.blogspot.com

http://www.flickr.com/people/weberdesign/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dearjy NEW
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12187480@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14812574@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37212535@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74386819@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91006549@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbassat
http://www.flickr.com/photos/justjump/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samdidnotknow/
http://www.myspace.com/homelesswombat

http://www.optionsf.com/blog/

Tags: Blog, blogging, cca, class, design, design research, flickr, school, teaching