Thanks (one suspects) to the South Park Character Generator, it seems that Air Arabia has been using familiar looking characters on their website. Unexpected things can happen when DIY design tools are put out there. Via MeFi

These feedback forms in the SFO Long Term Parking bus shelter are always empty. Someone has written Ha Ha Ha as a sarcastic bit of feedback, presumably about the implied hypocrisy of an unmaintained feedback mechanism.

There’s a phone number (that would ideally be covered by feedback forms) that you can call from a telephone (if you’re carrying one) or a courtesy phone (once you get into the airport itself, a 10 minute drive away), for parking information. Parking information? You’ve already parked, if you’re seeing this. The sticker is out of sync with the feedback form holding function.

I’ve previously described traffic in India - seemingly chaotic to a Westerner, but with definite rules (despite disregard for lanes, signs, lights and so on). BoingBoing links to a great video that gives you a feel of teetering chaos that almost-mostly-works. Good to watch!

I was in Houston a few weeks ago and saw this Buddha-like Ronald inflatable. Perhaps Ronald is our new prophet.

37Signals responds to my earlier posting (about their mocking of customer feedback on their blog). I’m resposting it here.

I’m the author of the post at Signal vs. Noise.

We didn’t ridicule/mock our customers with this post nor did we intend to. We used our customers own words. We quoted directly. If you feel that quoting someone directly is equivalent to mocking them…well, we disagree.

This is disingenuous. As one example (and there are millions), go watch The Daily Show - it makes extensive use of direct quotes, but the mocking is quite evident. What is said before and after, and what pieces are chosen are highly editorial decisions that convey a point of view. Don’t you know this?

Fwiw, we don’t think the requests were stupid and we do value customer feedback. We showed theses comments so people can see the different realities that exist for individual customers vs. companies vs. the customer base as a whole.

Why share this info at all? The truth is these sorts of conversations are happening all the time in companies all over. Is it better that they be hidden from the public or is it better to have an open, honest dialogue about them?

Why the forced choice question? There are more than two options. For example, the option you guys chose. That wasn’t an “open, honest dialogue” by any means. Why not invite those individuals to participate, let alone consent, if you want such a dialogue?

Spotted on BoingBoing is this special toilet paper just for kids. It’s printed with a puppy paw path that spans five sheets (and then begins again). It’s portion control for toilet paper, presumably there is a need to have kids learn how much to use? I’m a bit confused as to the actual need, and how this solves it. Wouldn’t the amount needed depend on what is being wiped? And who is being wiped?

I’d guess you’d want to teach kids to wipe until they are done - to pay attention to the bodily and other cues (visual?) to ensure that the hygiene need has been handled. Making it such an inflexible system doesn’t teach anyone anything!

And if you use a different amount than five sheets, ever, then the system breaks until you sync up back to sheet zero with the happy puppy. A training system that is intolerant of (highly likely) user error is not a good training system.

You must always use five and only five sheets. Regardless of what’s going on with your po-po! Cottonelle has forgotten that they work for us, not the other way around.

And their site includes this lovely FAQ (which is such as misnomer, since these are not likely to be frequently-asked-questions, but rather info they wish to convey) that suggests some product problems besides the obvious usability failures.

Why is my toilet paper printed on the inside? How do I fix this?
The good news is that this is an easy fix. The toilet paper isn’t actually printed on the inside. What’s happened is that the two plies have become separated, and the inside ply is wrapped around the outside of your roll (you’ll probably also notice that the perforations on the two plies don’t line up). To fix, first make sure your toilet paper is positioned so that it unrolls from the spindle with the sheets coming over the top. Next, steady the roll so it does not move in the spindle. Take the top ply (make sure you are only handling one ply) and unwrap it behind the roll. The print should now appear on the outside, as intended, and the bottom ply should now be longer that the top ply. Tear off the excess bottom plies (approximately 3) and you are ready to go.

and When I tear the toilet paper, the perforations on the two plies do not line up? How do I fix this? which offers the identical answer.

Now we’re taking on toilet paper maintenance tasks? Who the hell wants to fix their toilet paper? This is way too much work and this company hasn’t a clue about addressing real people’s needs.

Mashup or Mashed Potatoes? A report from the Stanford Graduate School of Business looks at haute cuisine for insights about breaking category boundaries to create innovation. Their observations:

1. culture (i.e., music, food, art) is an area where violating categorical lines can lead to perceptions of inauthenticity
2. but authenticity is about following the rules, while still being original - a balancing act
3. the opposing worlds of classical and nouvelle cuisine are based in different philosophies, but as individual chefs began to borrow ideas and techniques the boundaries were lowered
4. The questions they asked their respondents:
   1. How was borrowing possible when boundaries were ideologically charged and authenticity was important?
   2. What were the repercussions of breaching boundaries?
5. The chefs who broke boundaries had influence and were copied by others, suggesting that the leaders of a field have more flexibility in their balance between originality and sticking to the tried-and-true (while still maintaining their audience’s support for being authentic)
6. �Innovation corresponds with the weakening of the power of critics over time;” how palatable is the shift from the established rules - those who mediate and influence the tastes of consumers may be a powerful barrier

And from the report itself

In many cases, says Rao, categories sit on ideological fault lines. In the Italian wine industry, for example, a battle is ensuing between entrepreneurs who are turning winemaking into a chemistry business and those who want to retain the old, slower way of production that reflects an entire traditional way of life. �What managers need to realize is that a lot of times they�re operating in cultural space,� says Rao. �If they don�t come up with new ways of doing things that take this into account, their businesses can sometimes be hit hard.”

I have completed the mammoth task of editing and posting all my Asia pictures to flickr, with the completion today of the set from India (Mumbai and Bangalore). Previously: Bangkok and Hong Kong. All told, about 650 pictures.

Whew.

I’ve written two long pieces (and many smaller pieces on this blog) about our trip. An article for Core77 here and a more personal assessment here.

The process of taking time and reviewing the pictures with increasing distance from the event is pretty interesting, giving me a chance to reflect and revisit, to see things that I certainly didn’t see at the time I opened the shutter, and through the interactions on flickr, to gain insight and clarifications about things I observed but did not understand, especially with the pictures from India, where a pretty good dialogue has emerged (seen in the comments posted on the various pictures in that set Oops, not any more). The document of the experience is scattered, the interactions are scattered, but as the publisher of this content, I’m personally at the hub of all of it, so I’m taking full advantage. But clearly technology (even the ability to take several hundred pictures on a two week trip) is enabling some powerful behaviors; we know this, of course, but stepping back and noticing it is always pretty cool.

From House & Garden comes this awesomely negative review of Karim Rashid’s new book.

Considering the chutzpah of the basic conceit, I expected Rashid to pepper the volume with absurd pronouncements. To my great disappointment, the most shocking thing about the book is the banality of the designer’s advice: “If you’re short, don’t worry about it.” “Clip and trim your nose hairs.” “Make friends online.” “Know yourself.” Try to imagine Dr. Phil grooving on some pharmaceuticals at the Milan Furniture Fair and you start to get the picture. Predictably, the book is rife with evidence of Rashid’s narcissism, but even those passages don’t relieve the painful tedium.

DCamp, an unconference focused on design and user experience, is open to everyone interested in the topics: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and others.

Unlike traditional conferences, there is no program created by conference organizers. What happens at DCamp depends on you. Come share your work and ideas. Tell us about some interesting UX method, explain how design fits into agile development and open source, share your design dilemma, or tell us about your new and interesting design.

I’ve signed up for this, in Palo Alto in mid-May. I fear it being too technical, too software-focused. I’m signed up to give a loose talk I’ve given before, The Overlap: Cultures, Disciplines, and Design - some questions about whether or not some things are better as unambiguously one thing or the other, or if there’s more richness to be mined in the spaces between. Indeed, will it become essential to live, work, and play in that space?

The New Yorker reviews The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds (not currently listed on Amazon) in a provocative summary of cultural changes seen through (and created by) the magazine.

Six hundred and thirteen women are represented, but there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield. Playboy was launched in 1953, and this female image managed to draw, simultaneously, on two opposing trends that have since come to dominate American mass culture: on the one hand, our country’s idea of its Huck Finn innocence; on the other, the enthusiastic lewdness of our advertising and entertainment. We are now accustomed to seeing the two tendencies combined - witness Britney Spears - but when Hefner was a young man they still seemed like opposites. Hence the surprise and the popularity of Playboy.
…
In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media. The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don�t have to. The waist is nipped, the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a “boob job” in The Playmate Book has to do with Miss April 1965, but, like hair coloring, breast enlargement underwent a change of meaning, and hence of design, in the seventies and eighties. At first, its purpose was to correct nature, and fool people into thinking that this was what nature made. But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice�a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates� breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward. Other features look equally doctored.
…
That, in the end, is the most striking thing about Playboy’s centerfolds: how old-fashioned they seem. This whole �bachelor� world, with the brandy snifters and the attractive guest arriving for the night: did it ever exist? Yes, as a fantasy. Now, however, it is the property of homosexuals. (A more modern-looking avatar of the Playmates’ pneumatic breasts is Robert Mapplethorpe’s Mr. 10½.) Today, if you try to present yourself as a suave middle-aged bachelor, people will assume you�re gay.

The whole thing is worth a read, it’s thought-provoking and kind of funny, and I guess slightly titillating in a sort of intellectual-snob manner. Works for me.

Sorry to all the surfers who found this post through Google expecting some free pr0n.

I’ve been involved with some other folks in the planning of a neat little professional meeting - Overlap (subtitled Exploring new methods for business and innovation)

Overlap offers a unique opportunity to join other curious, deep thinking professionals in a spirited discourse on the relationship between business and design and the implications both that may have on our companies and careers.

It’ll be in Asilomar (near Monterey) in May. It should be an interesting event.

Low-cost airline pilot ‘tried to fly drunk’

An Indian low-cost airline suspended a pilot after he was found drunk shortly before he was due to fly an aircraft with about 100 passengers on board, officials said on Wednesday.

The surprise Tuesday check at Mumbai airport — India’s busiest — threw up several minor violations of safety norms by airlines, including an instance of a pilot in another low-cost carrier trying to fly in a T-shirt because his only uniform had gone to the laundry.

“threw up several minor violations” is an interesting choice of words.

Bombay Sapphire, anyone?

37 Signals jumps the shark (if they hadn’t already)

While we appreciate customers who take the time to write in and tell us what they want, the way people phrase things often leads to raised eyebrows. Every feature that’s missing is essential, a must-have, and the fact that it’s missing is killing someone. Yet the #1 thing that people like about our software is how simple it is. To give you an idea of what it’s like to be on the receiving end, here are some excerpts from recent 37signals support emails and forum posts

The exercepts are meant to ridicule the customers/users/people who contact them. For being too intense or too clueless or in whatever way just not as cool as the folks at 37 Signals.

This is a company that makes software but also wants to teach the world about making great products. I’m not sure that their products are really that great, but their credibility for teaching anyone how to do anything is nil once they start using the bully pulpit of their own blog to mock people - customers! And of course, there’s an ensuing pile-in on the comments “hyuk-hyuk, people are morons.” It’s too easy to get your pals to agree with that sort of thing, and ultimately it reveals contempt for the wrong people. That’s a critical failure at the root of what they are setting out to do.

Update: several other bloggers agree with me.

Click picture to see it larger

Some businesses operate on a cooperative model where customers get money back annually, quarterly, etc. Either depending on their activity level (i.e., REI, Discover Card), or on how the business does overall (i.e., co-op grocery stores). AAA doesn’t typically do that, so I was surprised to see a check for $25 from them the other day, thanking me for my business as a policy holder. Sure, they could have discounted my rate at the time I paid (and I vaguely remember them doing this either this year or in the past) but this has a lot more impact. Instead of a brief line item (i.e., LOYAL CUSTOMER DISCOUNT) on my bill, they can communicate a bit more about their intent with the money the are kicking back to me. Call it a dividend and create loyalty with me not only by giving me some cash, but using some rhetoric that suggests a cooperative relationship; that I own a bit of AAA.

Their bottom line (if you ignore printing and mailing costs; which might wash out anyway since some checks won’t be cashed) is pretty much the same, but their chance to have an impact is pretty different.

This isn’t a huge winner or anything, but it’s an interesting example.

Shooting in the Dark - photos by Param
Dates: April 13 (6pm onwards) to 23, 2006 May 5 (7pm onwards) to 15, 2006
Venue: Oxford bookstore at The Leela Palace, Airport Road, Bangalore
Timing: (approx) 11 am to 9 pm

If you’re around, check it out. The work I’ve seen is really great.

And check out Param’s photoblog at Shooting In The Dark.

We opened a bottle of wine the other night, and the interesting wording on the cork prompted some conversation. The cork (above; click to enlarge) was covered with WHOOH WHOOH WHOOH and with one odd COUGH.

What is that about?

Check out the brand of the wine:

Smoking Loon. WHOOH WHOOH COUGH.

It was a nice little detail to carry the brand of the wine (which we were obviously not paying much attention to - I think the decision was basically white) into a fun surprise. Great packaging design.

click image to enlarge

This is bizarre. As if food isn’t expensive enough, Kellogg’s is encouraging kids to do (dumb-ass) crafts projects with Froot Loops. On the back of a box are detailed instructions for Rainbow Layer Art (crush a bunch of Froot Loops and layer each color in a jar) and Tambourine Shaker (put Froot Loops between paper plates).

As my mother would say “Ants will come!” You’re going to put highly-sugared cereal into toys that will sit in bedrooms and livingrooms and playrooms? One is made of crumbs (guaranteed to leak) and the other involves percussing individual Loops obviously creating more crumbs (which will also leak). You’ll have Froot crap all over your house and an immediate infestation of ants, not to mention sticky galore.

The idea is so head-shakingly inappropriate. Why are they suggesting that their cereal (nutrition, sustenance, expensive) is in itself a plaything? Doesn’t that just send every wrong signal to a kid? People are starving in Biafra and you are wasting your breakfast cereal as decoration? It reveals how non-food companies like Kellogg’s really think their product is. It’s just a substance to be manufactured and distributed. It’s not an edible commodity, it’s just some coloring that can be chewed, put in a jar and displayed, or hey, made into a musical instrument. Floor wax or desert topping, anyone?

I mean, really.

BRAINSUSHI - The Mutant Media Agency

Avant-garde technologies, social mutations and cultural turmoil… New York vampyres, Mexican freaks, Silicon Valley nerds, Guatemalan gangsters, London fetishists or Japanese otakus, the Brainsushi agency is specialized in documenting contemporary phenomena that foresee the world of tomorrow.

Interesting idea for an agency. Looking at the team, they are a bunch of cutting-edge/outsider/freaks themselves. It’s not clear what use their clients make of this information, and I see that if you must sign a non-disclosure before you can receive any of their insider cultural information (which makes sense business-wise but does seem at odds with the whole notion of cultural info.

[via Pasta and Vinegar]

I’m glad we’re not the only ones who were amused by Uncle Gene’s Donuts in Hong Kong. Their differentiator seems to be “American”-style donuts although what they serve is a mini-donuts and a variety of dipping sauces, such as chocolate syrup. It was funny to see your own culture misinterpreted and productized in another context. Complete with cartoon mascots aplenty!

From the outer ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

The hang-tag reads:
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JASMINE
I get 14 days,
336 hours,
20,160 minutes,
1,209,600 seconds of
DO-NOT-DISTURB-ME-I’M-ON-VACATION
time a year.
And I’m going to enjoy every one of them.

And, we see Jasmine, lying in a hammock, reading a book. No laptop in sight. But this is an ad for AT&T. What are they telling us? In teeny tiny type at the bottom, we see
Jasmine relies on the most complete and secure network from AT&T so she can have DSL high speed Internet access to find more unique and exciting places to relax and unwind.

So, what’s this an ad for? Using the Internet to find places to sit and relax? Or, in fact, using AT&T’s secure network (and it’s also a complete network) to access the Internet? In order to find places to relax and unwind?

It just doesn’t really cohere for me. It’s almost a good effort - showing the benefit of using a technology by showing what it enables. But the claim that somehow DSL (and not just DSL but the special kind of quality DSL that AT&T offers) has afforded her sitting in a hammock is just too disjointed, and not very credible.

How on earth would we ever be able to relax out in the wild if we didn’t have DSL?! Lame and confusing ad, I think.

After my recent challenges booking with Marriott, I encountered a similar level of weirdness with Starwood. I was trying to book a room (for a conference, using their conference-rate link) and couldn’t seem to log into my account. I haven’t used it for a while and naturally don’t have a clue as to my username and password (more specifically - I can’t remember what format they require my username and password to be in; if I knew that I could probably reconstruct them both). I went through the various helpful links (Forgot your password? Forgot your username?) to try and resolve it. When asked for my membership number I pulled out my Starwood Preferred Guest card and entered the number, only to be told that something to the effect that I needed to enter a number in the proper format. I’m looking at the screeen, I’m looking at my card - the numbers are exact. But no, not valid. Okay, I try something else - I give ‘em my email address and they email me a new password and remind me of my username. I go back and try to log in using the newly issued/reset password. Nope, it doesn’t know who I am.

What the hell?

I finally contact them for help, after screwing around for way too long with this.

The website was not accepting your above Starwood Preferred Guest account number because your account had reached an expired status as of March 31, 2004, resulting in any remaining Starpoints being forfeited.

Starpoints do not expire for active accounts. Accounts are considered active as long as you have earned Starpoints as a result of activities at participating Starwood Properties or as a result of use of the Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card from American Express during the previous twelve months.

I am pleased to tell you that your account has been reactivated to enable you to view your above Starwood Preferred Guest number online.

Whoah. First of all, their technology is absolutely complete broken. If the account is suspended, then the error message should say something like that, not simply reject the account number as not being valid. Or the failure-to-logon info should provide some information that suggests they know who I am but won’t let me on for some reason. And they shouldn’t reset my password and then refuse to let me log on with it.

But really, WTF? Why would they de-activate my online login for inactivity?

And beyond that, it gets really punitive! I have forfeited my Starpoints? The language is just so wrong, so haughty. This is not service, and this is not going to encourage loyalty. Did I have any Starpoints? I have no clue, I don’t care. I’ve held onto their damn card for years, but that isn’t enough of a committment to Starwood, I’m not active, so I’ve been forfeited and also deactivated.

The net effect here is not to motivate me to toe the line and be a good Starwood customer, but rather to vote with my feet. They’ve got my money this time (and it’s actually the conference money but whatever) but next time, I will look for someone else.

Oh, and even though my profile indicated I don’t want to receive marketing email from them, by making a reservation with them they reset that and bury a line about opting-out in the confirmation email.

This is a bad company.

‘Star Wars Kid’ settles out of court

Mr. Raza — who appears on the video as a chubby, ungainly young man — recalled how other students got on tables and chanted taunts at him. ‘There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos…Any opportunity was good enough to shout ‘Star Wars!’ ‘

He said in one class, where a document was shown through a projector, other students scrolled the text, mimicking the opening of the movie, as they sang the Star Wars theme.

And whenever he was in a public place, he said, strangers would call to him.

“Hey! It’s Ghyslain Raza! Star Wars Kid, hey!”

He left the school and eventually, got a private tutor.

The article is fairly sketchy about the specific torment this kid suffered, and we don’t know how detailed the court case was either, of course. It seems from this piece that being called “Star Wars Kid” was the worst of it. On the face of it, that isn’t necessarily an insult? Of course, an insult is a cultural contruction - we give words power and choose how to parse them. The article doesn’t describe physical harm, threats, or any detailed humiliation besides being called “Star Wars Kid.” The headline of the article, of course, calls him “Star Wars Kid.” I’m not saying it wouldn’t suck incredibly to have a video of you on the Internet (although the article focuses on the humiliation that took place locally, in the school itself, rather than what would happen to this poor kid if he walked down the street in any city). Presumably, since the lawsuit dealt with schoolmates, that’s going to be the focus.

Some recent searches leading to this blog

‘Be Kind’ ‘Please Rewind’ sticker picture
blair bartrem
literal grapevine
myanmar.com.tw
gambian websites
tiger power cereal
stickers
wells fargo sucks balls
ogoplex
flip clock
john kimble
messy homes
i need a bigger ass
little people kiss
Andrew Weil Plantidote Mega-mushroom Supplement reviews
susser
spittle train station pictures
mel’s bowl redwood City
jerry hirschberg accountant
UPS Mail Innovations Origin RPF

(click on picture to see it full-size)

Here’s an ad for LG mobile phones that I pulled out of a recent issue of SPIN magazine. It’s sort of odd/interesting to see the rhetoric of design and marketing used to create content for advertising. I’m referring to the need to create personas that represent some aspect of the user category that can be designed for, or marketed to. And sometimes the distinction between designing for and marketing to is blurred through the use of personas. And sometimes the personas represent an aspirational statement of the manufacturer -who they’d like their customers to be, or what they would like their products to be used for. Whether or not the products actually achieve that doesn’t seem to matter, as long as there’s a catchy phrase to represent in the simplest terms possible some key attributes.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on this approach and on LG-specifically. I have no idea if an ad creative repurposed actual content or just picked up on the approach because it reads well and maybe moves product. It’s always interesting to see one form of internal company behavior make its way into advertising, though.