I realize I’d been away from Canada quite a while when I saw Campbell’s Gardennay on the grocery store shelves (of course, you know I’m into that stuff). It just seemed like the worst, most awkward faux-Euro brand name. I’m amused to see American DiGiorno appear in Canada as Delicio, but mostly, this Campbell’s soup name just seems weird and strange. But then, I don’t live in the target region. Anymore.

Tags: brand, Canada, gardennay, groceries, markets, naming, regions, soup

The Scott Cook (Intuit) CHI2006 plenary has been blogged

How one creates a culture of innovation.
GO out to your customers first and design from that.

This plenary is the story of why customer connectivity is hugely important – Cook insists this means not doing surveys which can reinforce the company’s existing mindset, but to get out into the customer’s actual space – to get out the old ideas and let new ideas come in

‘before you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes you must first remove your own’

This way, claims Cook, lies innovation.

Conference blogging is the shit these days, especially liveblogging. This seems like it may have been an inspirational talk, but it’s a lot of work to plow through the (typical for this sort of thing) sloppy notes. Does this format/behavior add value? Is it buzz-generating (don’t you wish you were here?) or is it content sharing?

Update: An amazingly well-written essay based on this talk has been posted by Antonella Pavese.

Tags: blogging, chi, chi2006, conference, innovation, intuit, liveblogging, montreal, plenary, scott cook

I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow to give a talk about user research and cultural insight to a group of people working in the food industry (primarily) as sensory scientists; smell-and-taste researchers who I think work on groovy stuff like “mouth feel” and so on. Sounds like a great group; they’ve got a lot of registrants for our workshop and we’re going to do a bit of an observational walk-around exercise in some different neighborhoods in Toronto. I’m looking forward to it, despite taking a red-eye flight tonight.

Tags: astm18, ethnography, food, observational research, seminar, sense, senses, sensory scientist, smell, taste, toronto, workshop

I majorly updated the Portigal Consulting – Expertise page to describe some (?) of my speaking engagements, writings, and press. It’s an interesting information design challenge (especially when you’re as poor at that as I am) – how to best structure and describe and present a lot of stuff.

Check it out, if you like. And I’d love to hear any feedback about information that would help (or that could be cut) etc.

Tags: engagements, expertise, portigal, portigal consulting, press, speaking, steve portigal, writing

What happens to recycled paint?

The oil-based paint is shipped off to companies that burn it to generate electricity. Latex paint deemed salvageable gets a second chance to brighten someone’s day.

Depending on its color, the paint is poured over a screen into one of three 55-gallon drums. Blues, grays and greens go into the “Cool” drum. Beige hues make it into the “Off White” barrel, and reds, tans and browns are destined for the “Warm” container.

“If you didn’t do any sorting, you’d always get a light brown that gets a little boring,” says Paul Fresina, who oversees the center. “If you separate it and play with it, you can come up with more of the colors that people want.” With the three distinct color classifications, center workers can mix the paint into just about any color they want, from pinks to yellows.

The end product, hundreds of 5-gallon buckets of remixed house paint stored in a shipping container, is available free for San Francisco residents, who use it for everything from covering up graffiti to painting their basements, but the supply always exceeds demand. In an effort to spread the reclaimed paint farther, 10 years ago, the mostly immigrant employees at the center proposed sending some of it back to their home countries.

With this in mind, in 1995 the first shipment of more than 700 5-gallon buckets of paint was shipped to Tonga. Since then, similar shipments have made their way, free of charge, to San Salvador, El Salvador; Tepatitlan (or Tepa), Los Cabos and Santiago, Mexico; and Mali, where the paint has been used for schools, churches and other community buildings. The recipients in these countries generally prefer brighter colors, so the paint is remixed from its drab American origins into more vibrant hues.

The shipping costs are about the same as sending the paint to a Los Angeles facility to be blended into cement. SF Recycling picks up the extra costs of sending paint to Mexico or any other countries.

Tags: color, latex, mixing, paint, reclamation, recycling

Fast Company looks at marketing/research/culture proto-guru Clotaire Rapaille and observes “the conversation reinforces what I’d come to suspect: Rapaille is 25% substance and 75% shtick.”

It’s a good piece especially because it challenges the validity/myth/efficacy of a powerful and popular media figure er um I mean consultant. For those of us who aren’t clients, all we see is that 75%, and frankly, that shtick has made my skin crawl for a long time. I really like that simple analysis because it reminds me that one can be an intolerable asshole and still have something valid to say. In fact, for some people, your message carries more weight if you are intolerable when you deliver it. That’s not to my taste, but I guess it works for him.

Rapaille subscribes to the triune brain theory, which describes three distinct brains: the cortex, limbic, and reptilian. Beneath the cortex, the seat of logic and reason, is the limbic, which houses emotions. Camouflaged underneath those is Rapaille’s baby–the reptilian–the layer wired by our biological primal needs like sex, reproduction, and survival.

And gee, only yesterday the Simpsons (in an old-timey episode) had a character describing his reaction as going from “sanguine to bilious.” Humours, triune brain, whatever!

Tags: brain, bullshit, cortex, Fast Company, market research, marketing, rapaille, Simpsons, user research

The New Yorker takes a wry look at the cultural perspectives embedded in information design

When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other.

Tags: design, honorific, ia, information architecture, information design, interaction, interaction design, interface, new yorker, title, website

The Overlap Blog has launched, hoping to start a bit of dialog in advance of the event.

I found inspiration in this quote from the introduction to Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers by Shyam Selvadurai

�What kind of writer do you consider yourself to be? Are you a Canadian writer or a Sri Lankan writer?�

It is perplexing, this matter of cultural identity, and I am tempted, like some other writers of multiple identites, to reply grumpily, “I’m just a bloody writer. Period.”

Yet this response would be disingenuous. I suppose I could answer, “Sri Lankan-Canadian writer,” or “Canadian-Sri-Lankan writer.” But this also does not get to the heart of what i consider my identity to be as a writer (and we are talking of my writing identity here). For in terms of being a writer, my creativity comes not from “Sri Lankan” or “Canadian” but precisely from the space between, that marvellous open space represented by the hypen, in which the two parts of my idenitity joustle and rub up against each other like tectonic plates, pushing upwards the eruption that is my work. It is from this space between that the novels come.

Tags: asilomar, business, Canadian, design, identity, india, overlap, Shyam Selvadurai, story wallah, unconference, writer

A landslide has disrupted telephone service on the Coastside from Montara to Pescadero.

It appears that no calls can be made to or from the Coastside, but that some calls are possible within the Coastside. Sprint and T-Mobile cellular service have also been disrupted.

The landslide – off Highway 92 at 10pm on Saturday night – took out an AT&T fiber optic cable to the Coastside. Sgt. John Gonzales of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office says that the outage is in a location where AT&T can�t take heavy equipment, but are crews are hiking in to fix the problem. He says there is no estimate when phone service will be returned.

We lost DSL about 9:30 last night. I was able to call some 800 numbers for tech support, and even a local number for dial-in access. Was wondering what the heck was wrong with our DSL; then this AM found that a neighbor had the same problem, so that’s reassuring when you find out the problem is bigger than just you (I gave up on SBC last night when the tech support person – which is a generous term) had me rebooting and telling me I would have to contact my router manufacturer since it was their fault – I hung up on ‘em). Now we see that the problem is really big.

Infrastructure here seems so fragile. Devil’s Slide/Highway 1 has been closed for a few weeks and they have no estimate of when it will re-open. Nearby SF is now an hour’s drive away, through much heavier traffic than we’re used to.

Every winter is filled with frequent power-outages. Our cable TV service is low-quality, noisy, and relatively unsupported. We have no cell coverage here. And today we can’t get phone calls in or our, and barely any Internet service. It feels landlocked and info-locked and it’s scary. Looks like email is the best way to reach me right now.

Update: Various news reports said that phone service was restored around dinner time, and our DSL came back somewhere between 9 and 10 pm.

Tags: coastside, Devil’s Slide, infrastructure, landslide, outage, phone, service, telephone

I just struggled to put through some visual changes to the blog. The background should be white instead of blue (which was making some stuff like comments impossible to read). I increased the font size one point, and I added a (really lame) title bar so people that end up on indvidual pages have a painless way to get back to the main blog.

Messing with these templates is really tough when you don’t know much HTML and even less CSS. I can see what I’d like to do, but I don’t have the skills at all to do it. I can’t believe how long it took me to do what I’ve done, and it’s still not what I was trying to accomplish. I was hoping to more visually unify things with my main website, rather than two different sites entirely.

I’d like to pull in some other features from other templates (a nicer way to access archives, a cleaner tag-cloud, a better way of showing comments, titles to individual posts), but I’m way way out of my depth. Sigh.

I tried to turn the title to this page into something in a 48-point font but I could not make that happen. I see where to change the code, but something is over-riding that part of the code, because it has no impact whether I specify 400% or 200% or 48 or whatever. Fixed, thanks for the help.

Feedback, positive and negative (including stuff that is now broken?) greatly appreciated.

Our Courtyard by Marriott in Houston had a nice little freebie – they would take a business card and laminate it into a luggage tag, while you waited. I appreciated the free thing and I got a kick out of the fact that it was travel-related; it reinforced the experience you were having with them. Just a clever customer service thing that someone decided to do.

Tags: business card, courtyard, customer service, free, freebie, hotel, houston, idea, laminate, luggage tag, marriott

You don’t have to wear the bracelet now, you can get a magnetic picture of a bracelet. It’s not about the act of wearing, it’s just about the image of the bracelet? Where does the meaning reside?

Tags: awareness, bracelet, cancer, car, charity, lance armstrong, livestrong, magnet, symbol

Faced with growth that they aren’t prepared to handle, the company that makes Moleskine notebooks is planning on selling itself. An atypical (idealistic? honorable?) response in these days of leveraging brand equity, extensions, cross-marketing, product placement, and the like.
Via brand, business, divest, modo, moleskine, notebook, property, sale, sell, sketchbook

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

Tags: air arabia, airline, arabia, authoritay, cartman, cartoon, character, eric, generator, kyle, logo, south park, stan

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.

Tags: airport, bus shelter, customer, dispenser, empty, feedback, form, maintenance, parking, San Francisco, SFO, touchpoint