We’re looking to bring on a Director of Business Development. If you are interested, let us know. If you know someone else who might be a good fit, please let them know!

About the Job
Portigal Consulting is preparing to enter a new stage of growth and needs people who can bring the right set of skills to guide that growth. As with many small consulting firms, the key abilities we have in-house revolve around the consulting work, not the business of the firm. Indeed, we are asking for a combination of sales and marketing and business development, related but often separate job functions.

Although responsibilities will be customized to the strengths of the candidate, they will likely include a mix of (in descending order of priority)
* lead generation
* sales calls
* evolution of service message
* proposal writing

We envision a 3-month contract, with the possibility of extension or full-time, depending on results and interest.

Location is not an issue.

Qualifications
* Experience in a professional services setting (creative services such as design a plus)
* Experience in generating new business
* Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
* Excellent organizational skills
* Comfortable with Internet communication tools (email, IM)

About Portigal Consulting
Founded in 2001, we are a boutique agency, based in the coastal community of Montara, CA, 25 minutes from San Francisco, and 30 minutes from much of Silicon Valley.

Our clients come from a range of industries and include both B2B and B2C programs. Recent clients include: Avaya, BIC, Bosch, Chevron, France Telecom-Orange, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, SC Johnson, Shure, Sony, and WNBA.

Portigal Consulting brings together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about their customers.

We conduct contextual research with target users in order to uncover their unexpressed needs. We then develop a suite of concepts that can address those needs. We also work with organizations to help them introduce or expand their customer-centric design and development processes, including training and facilitation.

Applying
Send a resume to hr AT portigal DOT com. Important: include a cover letter about yourself, your relevant experience, and what you would like to bring to the role.

A screenshot from the My Itineraries page at United. I’m trying to cancel a flight. Their FAQ suggests you can do it from their site, but I had all sorts of trouble on Friday and ended up sending them an email (nicely enabled from that part of the site, with automatic form filling with my ticket number and all that good stuff). It’s 5 days later and they haven’t canceled it or otherwise responded. So now I’m in limbo. Today I went back to check what itineraries they were showing for me. And here’s what I find - button and other interface text is replaced by labels in the code, probably variable names instead of their values.

Neither the bad service nor the poor attention to detail gives me a great feeling about United.

Last year Nicolas Nova blogged about element of public space that restrict usage - specifically skateboarding, and as one commenter suggested, lying down. Without remembering his post, I took these pictures the other day:

It’s still ugly, but there’s an emotional component (”cute” - “fun” - “neat”) created by the whimsical shapes that counteracts that reaction quite strongly. Many of the anti-sit installations appear as an afterthought, a post-design, without any integration into the original vision. These were probably added after the original design but there’s some attempt to retrofit, conceptually or visually. I’m sure the original planners and architects are horrified, but it kinda mostly works.

• Say It Loud
  With both Kermit The Frog and snot content, you’ve gotta check out my latest guest blog entry at the Sessions Design School blog!

One of our recent clients, MediaMaster just launched their product, that “lets you store all your music on the internet and play it from any internet-connected device.”

Their path from idea to launch has been a fascinating one (and I don’t know most of it, I’m sure). They came to this with a hand-coded technology to rip (via a CD jukebox) many albums in sequence, sort of a mass-scanning technology for CD ripping. But if you are going to rip the same albums over and over again, it’s time- and cost-effective to simply already have a copy of them already ripped and rather than rip, why not just check liner bar codes for proof of ownership and download the songs already on hand? And since the songs are already online, why not tie it to purchase of a new CD, and why not keep the music online permanently?

They dealt with a crazy mess of technological afforandances, changes of behaviors, retail and other partnership challenges and on and on. We did an online survey with some concepts, and then took concept boards out into homes to talk to different types of hypothesized target customers.

The product development process deals with a lot of moving targets, but startup folks deal with an excess of that challenge, collating input and constraints from so many quarters, it must make them crazy.

I’m excited to see the product launch, and to see where they’ve ended up with it, given where we were at during those rounds of research. I don’t know their business model, since the service is free right now. It’ll be fun to watch what happens with it and see if they make it succeed.

My latest Core77 Broadcast has been posted, a great discussion with Nathan Shedroff (just call him Nathan) about meaning and design.

Check it out!

Someone else blogs about the design in Idiocracy. I think I have some different points to make, so I’ll get to that post eventually.

• Self-portrait (at Warhol’s grave)
  Another guest post to the Sessions Design School blog

• A community creates its own currency
  A community in Massachusetts designs and prints and uses its own local money. The edges of the system are still rough, but the experiment seems to reveal the costs, challenges, and benefits of a local alternative system.

• Thinking Big, Real Big
  One of my guest blog entries from this week

Over the next week I’ll be a guest blogger at Notes on Design, the blog for Sessions School of Design.

Last night was San Francisco’s Pecha Kucha night. I showed 20 slides, at 20 seconds per slide, on Unconsumption.

The slides are below.

And this widget will play the audio.

powered by ODEO
(update: if ODEO is not working for you, I’ve also posted the audio here)

There were some problems with the projection at the beginning so it’s not immediately obvious where we go from slide 1 to slide 2, but hopefully by slide 3 you’ll have figured it and can follow along.

And for better visual quality, I’ve put the slides up on flickr..

Update: the slides are also on the Pecha Kucha site

Core77 has launched a broadcast series and the first entry is an interview I did with improv expert Chris Miller of LifePlays.

Check it out!

The Broadcasts will soon be turned into an official iTunes/podcast/RSS whatever thingie, and I’ll also post the link at that point so you can subscribe and get all the auditory goodness as it happens.

• Australia to ban incandescent bulbs
  (via Virginia Postrel) It’s decided. Looks like “push” wins this round.
• Croatia probes Hitler likeness, jokes on sugar packets
  (via DesignObserver) This could be more dictator chic as we’ve talked about here before, but the article is pretty serious and (understandably) one-sided.

You can (with a single download) get 739 mp3s by 739 artists from the SXSW festival. That’s a lot of music. As someone points out
on MetaFilter that’s over 37 hours of music. Someone else bemoans the organizational task that will create (I’m about to do that task myself).

I downloaded about half as many songs last year, and I really enjoyed them, but it’s an intimidating-if-wonderful gift.

Our digital technologies and the massive capabilities they afford us still continue to exceed or at least push the edges of our capacity as consumers. Indeed, the word consume may hold a clue. Do we consume music? Eat it up, digest it, and excrete/delete when we are done, or are we collectors, accumulating more and more? I imagine many of us are in straddle positions, not being ready to delete an MP3, or many MP3s, because we already possess them.

Update: am slowly working through listening to the songs…some real quality control issues with their distribution. One track with a skip in it, and about two dozen that are seriously truncated.

Laughs End With Bizarre Britney in Rehab

Britney Spears has been ridiculed for everything from her 55-hour first marriage to backup-dancer second husband and her recent pantyless partying escapades. Now that she’s entered rehab, though, the joke is over.
…
“This girl is out of control,” Joy Behar, a co-host on ABC’s “The View,” said Monday. “And, she’s in a lot of trouble. A lot of people feel this is self-mutilation.”

Craig Ferguson, host of CBS “The Late Late Show,” said that after seeing photos of Spears’ shaved head, he reconsidered making jokes at the expense of the “vulnerable.”

“For me, comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it,” he told viewers Monday. “It should be about attacking the powerful - the politicians, the Trumps, the blowhards - going after them. We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable.”

Oh, please. Where does this sanctimonious crap come from? Anna Nicole Smith was comedy fodder until her son died (and maybe after then, and maybe even after she died, for some), regardless of how much of a train wreck that was. We consume and mock and laugh and our celebs are rich and tragic because of our adulation. There’s a lot of stuff going on in our celeb culture and I don’t pretend to try and unpack it here in one paragraph, but the media can take their self-appointed respectable tone and screw off, because if Ferguson won’t make Britney jokes, someone else will. And should. Definitely should.

There’s tons of good stuff on business/manufacturing/processes/marketing/company culture/innovation in the fantastic article about Toyota from the Sunday NYT magazine. I’ve picked just a bit to share here.

Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert.

and

The way a farmer uses a truck is different from the way a construction worker does; preferences in Texas (for two-wheel drive) differ from those in Montana (for four-wheel drive). Truck drivers have diverse needs in terms of horsepower and torque, since they carry different payloads on different terrain. They also have variable needs when it comes to cab size (seating between two and five people) and fuel economy (depending on the length of a commute). In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver. Finally, they made archaeological visits to truck graveyards in Michigan, where they poked around the rusting hulks of pickups and saw what parts had lasted. With so many retired trucks in one place, they also gained a better sense of how trucks had evolved over the past 30 years — becoming larger, more varied, more luxurious — and where they might go next.

Obu’s team, which drew on hundreds of engineers, ultimately produced a pickup model with 31 variations that include engines, wheelbases and cabs of different sizes. Design engineers, however, cannot simply create the best truck they can; they need to create the best truck that can be built in a big factory. In other words, Tundra’s design engineers had to confer with Tundra’s manufacturing engineers at every step of the way to create a truck — or 31 trucks, really — that could be assembled efficiently and systematically.

• Mike Kuniavsky on ‘Quantitative Ethnographics’
  The field needs common language desperately (although purchasers of user research may not care, it’s tearing up any sense of community) but differentiation of your services seems to be at odds with that need.
• (via PuttingPeopleFirst) MSFT has families live with Vista as they develop and refine it
  In addition to typical home visits with developers, they also created a “smile/frown” tool where people could easily (it seems) give positive/negative feedback during use, automatically including a screenshot of what is going on at the moment

Steve was recently a guest lecturer at San Jose State University, in the Advanced Design Studio.

• Dell Ideastorm (link via Alok at www.iprincipia.com)
  We’ve seen this sort of thing before, and with increasing frequency, but the addition of Digg-like voting makes the implementation pretty cool looking. Popular, if not necessarily good, ideas rise to top. Will Dell get anything tangible or new out of it and most importantly will they know what to do with the information they get?

Hallmark’s Journeys series of cards offers the right words for a variety of situations not previously explicitly addressed by the “greeting” card industry.

Congratulations
Divorce
Eating Disorder
Friendship
Grief, traumatic loss
Inspirational
Leaving a bad situation
Losing hair from treatments
Miscarriage
Post-partum depression
Quitting a bad habit
Significant anniversary
Thank you for being there
Thank hospice worker
Thinking of you
Tough times
Waiting for results
You can do it!

What is the “new normal” they refer to? The existence of these events in our lifes? Or the appropriateness (as dictated by Hallmark, of course) of acknowledging them directly? Or perhaps a bit of both…

• 40 Years of Design Research (PDF)
  Using the quote from L. Bruce Archer: “Design research is systematic inquiry whose goal is knowledge of, or in, the embodiment of configuration, composition, structure, purpose, value, and meaning in man-made things and systems.” This use of Design Research is about studying the process of making things, not studying people in order to make things for them. Yet both are called Design Research at times.

Designing Sustainable Mobility is an event recently held at Art Center in Southern California. In Northern California (i.e., Silicon Valley) an design-y event about mobility (sustainable or otherwise), is going to be about wireless communications (i.e. cell phone stuff). In Southern California, it’s about cars.

Although, now that I think of it, a conference about sustainability and wireless mobility would be interesting, since I don’t ever hear of the two things put together.

In My Microsoft Google Yahoo Stories we get some comparisons of internship experiences at 3 big tech companies. I don’t recommend the article necessarily, only to provide context for this awesome chart.

I love how the deconstruction of the experiences (related in detailed narratives in the article) into these specific categories give a blunt and amusing summary of, well, the person relating it. What categories we create to represent something qualitative tells a lot about us and how we make sense of those experiences.

• What is a “cultural probe”? Turns out it’s the same as a “diary study”
  Another piece of design researcher jargon. Give participants a tool/structure for recording (i.e., self-reporting) their attitudes or behavior over time. Interesting to finally track down a piece of jargon and find that it’s just another name for something you already know.
• What is a “technology probe?”
  Defined by Hilary Hutchinson (now at Google) in a 2003 CHI paper. Similar to a cultural probe but is targeted at the interaction between the users and technology. Seems like a working prototype that is useful for how it may enable new behaviors (rather than strictly evaluating the design of the artifact itself)

A couple of weeks ago there was some concern over the SF Indian Consulate getting rid of old visa applications in a very insecure manner:

Thousands of visa applications and other sensitive documents, including paperwork submitted by top executives and political figures, sat for more than a month in the open yard of a San Francisco recycling center after they were dumped there by the city’s Indian Consulate.

The documents, which security experts say represented a potential treasure trove for identity thieves or terrorists, finally were hauled away Wednesday after The Chronicle inspected the site and questioned officials at the consulate and the recycling facility.

The article goes on to detail what data about what types of people they found in their examination of the site and the expected quotes from security experts about what type of risk this creates.

Having gone through the visa application process ourselves for our trip to India last January, it’s a little disturbing to read that

a sampling of documents obtained by The Chronicle indicate that the boxes contained confidential paperwork for virtually everyone in California and other Western states who applied for visas to travel to India between 2002 and 2005.

But I was sadly amused by the response from the consulate

Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.

“In India, I would not be alarmed,” he said. “We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number.”

Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they’re no longer able to store.

“In America, you cannot do that,” he said.

You can just hear the bristling bureaucratic response, colored with that cliched “no-problem”!

Snipped from an article today about chemical-based cleaners in the home

Cory McKee, 27, a stay-at-home mom of three in Tridell, Utah, started ordering Seventh Generation brand cleaning products online two years ago after learning that her oldest child, now 7, had celiac disease, a gluten intolerance. Ms. McKee said that although the disease is not caused by toxins in the home, dealing with it raised her awareness about other health issues. [italics mine]

“That really woke me up,” Ms. McKee said. “I really need to make sure our home is safe.” She lost confidence in the cleaners she had been using in part because the labels of some products do not list all of their ingredients. That made it impossible to know what her family was being exposed to when she sprayed the windows, she said.

I love this, even after it’s gone through the journalistic clarifying filter. People’s ideas jump from one arena to the next. We conflate different concerns. Ask someone about their eating habits, and they’ll talk about exercise, or ask about being fit and they’ll talk about bedtime, or how to stay calm and deal with stress. We’re not good at compartmentalizing. And so ethnographers, using a conversational tool, encounter this all the time. A decision about one thing is related to a concern about something else. Even though there was no causal relationship between the celiac disease and the cleaners (and not to mention that they child already has celiac disease) the person being interviewed puts forth a causal relationship.

I hear this sort of thing all the time when I talk with people, and it’s usually much less clear than this. Complex purchase decisions, tasks, and lifestyle choices (of which our lives are full) often are told in slippery stories that start off in one place and end up in another. Teasing those apart (as this writer did here), asking for clarification, and being open to understanding how A could possibly connect to B in someone’s mind are crucial to getting at those applicable insights.

• AIGA primer on ethnography
  Put together by my colleague when she was at Cheskin. People on a discussion group were begging for a PDF, but it was only in (yuck) print for a while. Now Cheskin has posted a file for your viewing. It’s definitely “primer” not “text” but fortunately it’s not “brochure”
• Sociometry - a quantitative method for measuring social relationships.
  It was developed by psychotherapist Jacob L. Moreno in his studies of the relationship between social structures and psychological well-being. He defined sociometry as “the inquiry into the evolution and organisation of groups and the position of indiv

Here’s what is supposedly Fox’s upcoming response to The Daily Show. Even filtering for the point of view, it just feels so incredibly forced, both the humor and the audience laughter. Is the lack of authenticity the problem here?

dux07 has just been announced.

DUX (Designing for User eXperiences) Chicago, November 5-7, 2007

Social media and networks are producing a new set of expectations regarding people’s ability to contribute, create, personalize, and share information.

I think the theme is very timely. I’m also not sure how interested I am in it, and given that my last DUX experience was not quite satisfactory, I’ll have to keep this in the maybe pile.

• Survey Design, Questionnaire Design Tips
  A nice reference to doing a decent survey, instead of garbage in, garbage out.

Steve showed photos at Pecha Kucha - San Francisco. His topic was Unconsumption.

• Neau - No Water (this is an old one, article from 05, product from 03; but new to me)
  From Holland, a brand of bottled water that is an empty bottle. You fill it with tap water. A neat idea for a movement, sort of like an aboveground culture jamming experiment.

Months ago Troy Worman posted a tip where he suggested that I write something about the Singularity.

“What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?” Vernor Vinge, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, 7pm, Thursday, February 15. The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm. Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).

Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge invented the concept that dominates thinking about technology these days. He called it “the Singularity”— the idea that technology (computer tech, biotech, nanotech) is now accelerating so exponentially that it will lead to a massive, irreversible, and profoundly unpredictable transformation of humanity by mid-century.

This Thursday evening Vinge will challenge his own idea for the first time: “I have some plausible, non-singularity scenarios that get us into a human-scale world with long time horizons. I’ll describe the near-term peculiarities I see for such scenarios and then discuss what such a world might be like across ten or twenty thousand years. Finally, I’d like to talk about dangers and defenses related to these scenarios.”

Put on by The Long Now Foundation, with info on seminars (and downloads of previous ones) here. We saw one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen - Will Wright and Brian Eno - at a previous Long Now Seminar.

A few months ago I read The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Now, I grew up reading Golden Age science fiction (Asimov, and others who I can no longer name on a whim), and then moved into Heinlein, Silverberg and the like. I read those books when I was young and the books were old. Even if Heinlein was challenging sexual mores (i.e., Time Enough For Love), it was more about the novel than the ideas for me. The ideas seemed secondary. Maybe I just liked stories about robots, spaceships, and planets.

This changed for me about 10 years ago when I read Snow Crash, a book that took the ideas of right now (or right then) and played with them, taking some things to an extreme, but always with a clear line back to today. Given a lifetime of reading science fiction, this was a sea change. Indeed, much of the sci-fi I’ve read or watched since then has been along those lines (just like I posted yesterday).

But where’s that balance between being a visionary and being a storyteller? I tried to read Accelerando a few months back, but the story merely served as a carrier for the torrent of ideas/social commentary Charlie Stross wanted us to think about. It was fun for the first 50 pages, trying to keep up with it all, enjoying the stimulation, but after that it started to get annoying, then ultimately untenable. I hurled the book across the room, giving up in frustration.

Vinge’s collection of stories didn’t provoke such a strong reaction, and I was easily able to finish it. But it left me cold. The older stories seem more about current ideas, now dated, and less about the characters and the plot. I didn’t care about most of it and I couldn’t connect with most of it. Only the most recent story had any cultural or technological currency (in both senses of the word) and was therefore entertaining to read.

Obviously much of this has to do with where I’m at in engaging with the world when I come across these stories. Comments or ideas about culture are obviously more resonant than when I was 10. But I wonder if this is always how science fiction was read and written, or if the landscape has changed?