We’ll have more to say about this place soon, but for now, the horror of their in-room channel advert. Enjoy.

Dan Soltzberg joins Portigal Consulting. Welcome, Dan!

Today is Dan Soltzberg’s first day here and (at my request) he wrote a little reflective piece about his day, and his background.

Welcome, Dan!

So far, in all the ways I usually measure my days, this has been a great one. I’m at my new desk at Portigal Consulting eating my first lunch (a tasty roast beef sandwich from a little café down the street), Steve and I are preparing for a trip next week which will be our first time in the field together, and there are two Beagles and a Golden Retriever lounging around the office. (The dogs are wonderfully insightful when it comes to developing business strategies.) I’ve just joined Portigal Consulting as a Design Researcher, which is the perfect cap on a year which has been one of those wonderful periods of convergence where everything I’ve done so far in my life adds up to create something new.

I’m refocusing my Masters program at SJSU on a hybrid of Industrial Design, Applied Anthropology and Human Factors, which is to say that what I’m really interested in is the intersection of creative problem-solving, collaborative processes, things, and human beings. Four-and-a-half years living and working in Japan, as well as living in California married to a Midwesterner after growing up in Boston, have taught me to respect how deep culture runs, and how important understanding context is if one wants to understand people’s behavior and desires. I’m really looking forward to working with our clients and helping to decipher and communicate these contexts and the design opportunities they illuminate.

I saw this sign earlier this week in Colorado Springs. Turns out that yes, it’s a real place.

What are the two things people don’t like doing on a regular basis? Why, washing their Vehicle and washing their Dog of course. Both are time consuming and messy. So I created a professional, clean and fun environment where you can bring your vehicle, dog or both and get them clean.

• We Are Made Of Stories
  Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction.
• Réussir en groupe de recherche
  My “Seventeen ways to not suck at research” in French.

• McGlobalization/McLocalization
  A list of variations in the McDonald’s menu around the world
• Icon Advertising Museum to open in Kansas City, MO, in Fall 2008
  (although I’ll be right there in a couple of weeks, oh well). Site has a crappy interface but you can eventually pull up pictures and descriptions of items in their collection.

• Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game
  Some provocative examples of applying game design approaches to creating work tools that are engaging, effective, etc.

(click to enlarge)

An alternative health center with its own Hummer, asking “How do you want to live your life?”

• More Google Syndrome: I blog about Hungry Jack pancakes, therefore, I represent Hungry Jack pancakes
  “I can’t find Hungry Jack in my local super markets in the area of Claremont, CA. What’s happened?” Uh, yeah.

This is an interesting prototype; used to suggest the overall size/space of the house in 3D. This is done for a local design review by the county/community/whatever-other-agencies-get-involved.

• passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers
  Hilarious and cool. Look for one of my photos to appear soon.

I love blog convergence. The discussion on this post fits well with this article in the the New Yorker that I read yesterday. It’s ostensibly a book review, but also a stimulating essay on adoption, evolution, and social construction of technology/innovation. I’ve pulled my favorite pieces out here (it’s not a long article, but the extracts make for a long blog post).

It’s common to think of technology as encompassing only very new, science-intensive things—ones with electronic or digital bits, for instance. But it’s also possible to view it just as things (or, indeed, processes) that enable us to perform tasks more effectively than we could without them. The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn’t much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: “Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all.”

…

The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in historical terms we customarily see it as a driving force of progress: every so often, it seems, an innovation—the steam engine, electricity, computers—brings a new age into being. In “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900” (Oxford; $26), David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology, offers a vigorous assault on this narrative. He thinks that traditional ways of understanding technology, technological change, and the role of technology in our lives, have been severely distorted by what he calls “the innovation-centric account” of technology. The book is a provocative, concise, and elegant exercise in intellectual Protestantism, enthusiastically nailing its iconoclastic theses on the door of the Church of Technological Hype: no one is very good at predicting technological futures; new and old technologies coexist; and technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same—indeed, a given technology’s grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives. Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”

…

Learning how to make new technologies is one thing; learning how, as a society, to use them is another. Carolyn Marvin’s illuminating book “When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century” (1988) notes that, during the early years of the telephone, there was confusion about what codes should regulate faceless and socially clueless speech. The telephone operator, typically female, often had the responsibility of waking up the master of the house, and so joined the wife as a woman who could talk to the man in bed; Marvin writes that “sweet-voiced” telephone girls at the turn of the century “were often objects of fantasy.” It was also thought that, if just anyone could use the new device, its utility would be completely undermined. Marvin notes the firm opinion of the British postmaster general in 1895 that “the telephone could not, and never would be an advantage which could be enjoyed by the large mass of the people.” He was wrong, but understandably so. The story of how we came to terms with the new technology—how we adjusted to it, adapted to it, domesticated it, altered it to suit our purposes—didn’t come with the technical spec sheet. It never does. No instruction manual can explain how a technology will evolve, in use, together with the rhythm of our lives.

…

The tendency to exaggerate the impact of technological innovation follows from an artifact of historical consciousness. When we cannot conceive what life would be like without e-mail, say, we correctly note the pervasiveness of the new technology, but we may incorrectly assume that the things we now do through e-mail could not have been done in other ways. Of course, we must know that many things now done through e-mail were once done, and to some extent are still done, by telephone, fax, snail mail, or actually stopping by to see someone. But we can never know how the technologies that existed before electronic communication would have developed had e-mail not become dominant, or what other technologies might have come along whose development was forestalled by e-mail.

…

In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. “In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,” Edgerton writes. “In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.” John Powell’s marvellous [sic] study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, “The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers” (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: “As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair.” Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.

Maintenance has implications for the identity of technological artifacts. There’s a traditional conundrum about “my grandfather’s axe”: over its lifetime, it has had three new heads and four new handles, but—its owner insists—it remains his grandfather’s axe. Philosophers have their proprietary version of the axe problem: “Locke’s socks” developed a hole, which he had darned, and then darned again. The socks kept the philosopher’s feet warm, but they troubled his head. Many people make their living repairing things; a very few make their living pondering whether repaired things are the same.

…

The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” If he meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works, he was right—there’s an enormous gap between the knowledge of makers and the knowledge of users—but this is exactly as it should be. As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don’t want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all.

• Kranzberg’s laws of technology
  1st - Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
  2nd - Invention is the mother of necessity.
  3rd - Technology comes in packages, big and small.
  4th - Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
  5th - All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
  6th - Technology is a very human activity - and so is the history of technology.

Transit Chief Plans to Ask Riders to Grade Subway and Bus Lines

Riders on each line will be asked to grade different aspects of service, including the cleanliness of cars and stations, safety and the responsiveness of employees.

He said he would also ask riders to list the three things that they thought most need to be improved.

“I want to know what passengers want,” Mr. Roberts said yesterday during a wide-ranging interview that touched on topics as diverse as dirty subway cars and his affinity for the poetry of Robert Frost.

“I think too often people sit around in offices like this and say, ‘O.K., I know better than the customer what it is they want and so this is what we’re going to do.’ I want the customer to drive the priorities.”

…He envisions cards that would be handed out to riders as they exit stations, and which they could fill out and mail in at no cost.

The impulse is good, but broken. Roberts realizes that the truth about riders/customers is not in his office but is “out there.” In the subway. With the riders. The real people.

So what does he do? He sits in his office and creates a piece of paper that will be given to those riders. The paper will be sent back into the office where people in the office will look at the paper and make decisions about what to do.

Why not go out of the office and talk to the riders while they are riding? Take that impulse, Roberts, and follow it to the next level!

I saw this Nokia ad in Wired: A man and an attractive woman are seemingly out on a date together. A connection can happen anywhere, Nokia reminds us. How nice for these two people, enjoying each other’s company. Oops, what’s that? The man is holding a portable electronic device just below the table edge, where’s looking at a baseball game. The connection the man is experiencing isn’t with another person, but with media.

Nokia is encouraging us to use their technology to emulate this cad? To surreptitiously play with their digital appendages while half-faking an interaction with another person? If this technology has merit, why doesn’t he put it on the table so they can look at it together?

We often hear that technology has no inherent good or bad attributes, and it’s the way it ends up being used that determines that. But what about design, based on use scenarios? Or advertising, putting those stories out there in order to drive interest and adoption? It’s one thing when advertising plays “naughty” and we’re in on the joke, but that’s not the tone I get from this; I just see a guy being a jerk and Nokia encouraging the rest of us to follow suit.

• A review of Joost that is more a commentary on the struggle to focus on anything these days
  “By the time we turned off Joost and Babelgum…we also had turned on our regular television, two laptops and BlackBerrys.” I identify with the temptations and pleasures of multi-tasking, but lament the loss of peace that comes from focused immersion.

That Mall’s Sick And That Store’s Dead! is a blog that documents shuttered stores, office buildings, restaurants, malls…failures in commercial real estate that remain like small scars on our landscape. Nice niche!

I stumbled on a new upgrade to my backup software (they never let me know that it’s been updated; when I actually open the app from time-to-time, sometimes there’s a new button or widget). Isn’t this an interface widget that has been designed a million times? Why not leverage someone else’s solution rather than invent your own ugly and confusing alternative? Isn’t this what pattern libraries are about?

I’ll be on the road a fair amount over the next few weeks:
Colorado Springs
Kansas City
Seattle
Richmond, VA

I’m not sure I’ve done so many trips back-to-back before. It’ll be an interesting challenge keeping my brain alert, my clothes clean, myself rested and healthily fed.

These trips also inaugurate a new collaborative relationship and I’m very excited about the other players and the work and seeing where it all goes!

It’s won’t be until October, but I’ll be giving another talk about the overlaps and intersections between ethnography and improv at the CONNECTING’07: Icsid/IDSA World Design Congress. It’s here in San Francisco, from October 17-20. More info as it it’s available.

(Yes, my face and voice both are part of the website. Connecting!)

Steve presented Connecting The Play Of Improv With The Work Of Ethnographic Research at the CONNECTING’07: Icsid/IDSA World Design Congress in San Francisco.

• Mayberry’s Finest, a line of packaged comfort foods based on the Andy Griffith Show
  Debuted this week at the Food Marketing Institutes’s annual supermarket convention. There’s an event I’ve got to find my way to one of these years!

No doubt you’ve already read about this, but I couldn’t believe/resist this:

Simpson’s attorney, Yale Galanter, said the incident was about race, and he intended to pursue the matter and possibly go after the restaurant’s liquor license.

‘’He screwed with the wrong guy, he really did,'’ Galanter said this week.

Umm, Galanter, you’re fired?

The IRS has an online version of form SS-4, Application for an Employer Identification Number. One fills out the info and submits it. First time, I got back poorly written and insulting error warnings. Turns out if you indicate something in box 8, you must not put anything in box 33, etc. etc. How should I know? And no commas in your street address, ever!

But okay, you fix those things and resubmit, and voila! You see a page with your provisional temporary EIN. With an official document to follow in the mail in 15 days. A button at the bottom invites you to review and print - nice! But clicking the button opens a printable version of the form you just filled out! Not the real useful stuff - the result of the form, the precious EIN!

Oops, just go back in the browser and double-oops, the results page is gone and you’ve caused an error by going back there. You can’t reload without causing an error and you can’t even successfully go forward again. The result of the form submission is gone to browser-cache hell. Every attempt to return to that page produces an irs.gov warning that frightens and disheartens. Starting the process anew could lead to weird legal complications, perhaps, since there are questions about having ever applied for an EIN before, and a big under-penalty-of-perjury button.

Got our EIN, but don’t know what our EIN is, and now I must wait, and wait, for the document in the mail.

Lame, IRS, just lame!

Many years ago we worked with a client who wanted to help people with “out-of-home personal cleansing.” It was surprising in our interviews to learn that some people worried about the germs left behind on a shopping cart handle. Then last year at a high-end grocery store in Tucson I saw this:

A dispenser for cart wipes. Finally a product that addresses the anxiety, if not removing it.

[Recently some students in our Design Research class at CCA came up with some stats around this same issue that I can’t remember, but they were disturbing/gross - the handle was the dirtiest item we’d touch in a typical week??]

Last week I was in my local Safeway and saw this pathetic effort:

Safeway has shifted the problem definition, allowing you to clean your hands instead of the cart? If the cart is dirty, what do you get out of cleaning your hands before you shop? Maybe a hand wipe on the way out, after you return your cart? But still, if the cart is (seen as) dirty, then clean the cart.

They’ve put it right in the entranceway in a location that is filled with other things that people need to access (drinking fountains, DVD vending machine, bubble gum, hallway to restroom). And really, the whole thing is poorly executed: it’s all about the poster; with little focus on the thing you need to grab - the wrong-sized wipe dispenser and then it’s finished off with the inappropriate, ugly, exposed garbage bin.

Maybe it was a prototype to see how people used it, but I think they’ve created something so pathetic and so much about failure (theirs, and your own) that the results wouldn’t be worth too much to me.

• Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) has acquired Radar Communications.
  “Radar will join CP+B’s very talented Cognitive and Cultural Studies (Cogs) department to form Cultural Radar.”
  This seems like a rare event in recent business history. Maybe I’m forgetting about something similar.

BusinessWeek’s Customer Service Champs supports my plan for innovation through empathy that I outlined previously: Everyone - EVERYONE - will go through the process that their “clients” go through, on a regular basis.

But new research from Katzenbach Partners offers an updated metaphor. The firm stresses the importance of an “empathy engine,” which looks at the role of the entire organization, including middle and senior management, in providing great service. If that engine is thought of as a heart, “the whole company has to pump the customer through it,” says Traci Entel, a principal at Katzenbach Partners who recently studied 13 leading service companies’ best practices. “It starts much further back, with how they organize themselves, and how they place value on thinking about the customer.”

Helping employees become more empathetic with customers was a common focus among the brands on our list. For instance, USAA, whose home and auto insurance are only open to military members and their families, serves new employees MREs (meals ready to eat) during orientation so they can better identify with military life. All frontline workers at Cabela’s, the outfitter famous for its massive retail shrines to hunting, fishing, and camping, partake in a free product-loaner program. Staffers are encouraged to borrow any of the company’s more than 200,000 products for up to two months, so long as they write a review that’s shared via a companywide software system when the goods are returned. That’s not only a perk for employees; it also helps them better empathize with product issues customers might have.

But few places make empathizing with customers quite as luxurious an experience as Four Seasons Hotels. At most of its properties, the final piece of the seven-step employee orientation is something the chain’s executives call a “familiarization stay” or “fam trip.” Each worker in these hotels, from housekeepers to front-desk clerks, is given a free night’s stay for themselves and a guest, along with free dining.

While there, employees are asked to grade the hotels on such measures as the number of times the phone rings when calling room service to how long it takes to get items to a room. “We bill it as a training session,” says Ellen Dubois du Bellay, vice-president of learning and development. “They’re learning what it looks like to receive service from the other side.”

I spoke recently at Shift, the IDSA conference held at RISD. I outlined seventeen ways to not suck at research:

1. Quit worrying about jargon
2. Think more broadly about which people you want to learn about
3. Garbage in, garbage out
4. Give other people the space to tell their stories
5. Follow up, and then follow up, and then follow up
6. Do you really want to use a survey? Probably not.
7. Collect and use natural language
8. Don’t forget that any research process with real live humans is hard
9. Breathe their air
10. Learning anything new requires rapport, and building rapport takes time
11. Finding insights requires pattern matching, creativity, synthesis
12. Personas are user-centered bullshit
13. Phil McKinney says “You’re probably not listening.”
14. Practice noticing stuff and telling stories (updated: read more here)
15. Do some improv
16. Embrace pop culture
17. Don’t forget about culture and social norms

The presentation was very well received, and I hope to share this material with another group before too long.

This restroom-last-cleaned-at status box is a digital device that replaces a familiar paper version. I’m not totally clear what the function of this has been: enforce compliance by employees who are responsible for doing the cleaning, remind the public that (appearance notwithstanding) the institution does indeed care about restroom cleanliness?

How does making it digital improve the performance? Is it the meaning of digital (to the public, or the monitored staff?) or the usability of the technology (one button press replaces writing by hand?) or the affordances of the technology (networked data tracking to look for patterns over time/location?)…