My dad received the following offer in the mail: a chance to win a free cremation. If he enters, he’ll have a chance to win each month!

They don’t specify, but I guess that must be each month until you die?

What’s especially fascinating is their connection between cremation and mobility:

“With everyone moving around these days,
placing a loved one in a ‘local’ cemetery
may not be as functional as it used to be.”

Portigal Consulting has been doing some projects recently on mobile devices, but I never thought to include cremation urns in that category.

The best part of the letter is the disclaimer at the end of the second page:

“Please accept our apologies if this letter
has reached you at a time of serious illness
or death in your family.”

How compassionate.

No such thing as a free lunch—or practically a free anything—these days, unless you happen to be a Breatharian. A cafe in San Jose will rent you electricity for $1.00 an hour.

And in Felton, where I live, there’s a protracted struggle going on to buy the town’s water system back from California American Water, a subsidiary of the multinational company RWE. Water is generally quite abundant here (the annual average rainfall is 47.68 inches), and most of us spend time every winter battling its incursion into our living spaces. So it’s particularly ironic that we have to then purchase it from a company based in Germany.

Goodyear, on the other hand, is generous with their resources.

Breatharians eat free!

Big Six
Originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.


Mister Six
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Today is six years of All This ChittahChattah! Woo hoo!

Years ago, back in Boston, I had a housemate named Bitali, from Papua New Guinea. Over root beers in the kitchen one night, he described to me how when PNGers had a long journey to undertake, they would “fold the land,” to decrease the distance between their departure point and their destination. They would fold the land, and then just step over the fold and be at their destination.

Papua New Guinea, by Alf Gillman © All rights reserved.

After a recent San Francisco to Los Angeles trip on United Airlines, with multiple-hour delays in both directions (Not enough planes? Not enough pilots?), Bitali’s way of getting around seems even more appealing. And is it really any less plausible than climbing into an enormous steel bird to get where you’re going?

Came across Flunch when I was in Paris.

I guess it’s popular enough that two of their locations (above) are on the same block. I was amused at how ugly that name is in English, though. Flubber biscuit? Definitely not appealing to my culturally-based linguistic sense.

The other day I was looking for a blender and happened across the “Bowie Collection” at Target.

It’s interesting to see how designer Keenan Duffty has synthesized his interpretation of Bowie’s look—described on the Target page as “edgy and sophisticated”—into a few broad strokes. The hat, the vest, the sashed coat.

Here’s David talking with Dick Cavett in 1974 about a variety of topics, including his clothing. During the interview, Cavett asks Bowie whether he can picture himself at 60. In a manner of speaking, Bowie has let Target and Duffty do the picturing for him. Gee my life’s a funny thing.

watch video

A couple of months ago I spent a couple of weeks in London on-site with a client, meeting with different players and learning about how they did things, and how they were using the products they were developing.

This company is in the finance industry which has a pretty specific culture: high energy, male dominated, very social, very competitive. I was there as an outsider and I was obviously an outsider…strangely dressed, from “Silicon Valley” (one person I met with revealed that they had been anticipating my arrival by referring to me as Silicone Man, because, in part, they didn’t know my name), and of course asking a lot of ridiculous questions.

The trading floor (essentially rooms with rows of desks that have 3-6 monitors each) has a very hierarchical culture. For example, the young guys run out every day and bring back food for the other guys. One day I was working on the floor during lunch; the team I was with asked me if I wanted lunch, so I placed an order with two young traders from France, as they went out to Wagamama (or as they called it, Wags).

When the food arrived, one of the brokers noticed me with my bucket of noodles and announced to everyone “Hey, Steve is having lunch on the desk! Now he’s really and truly one of us!”

Being overtly included is always touching; I was struck by the power of the shared dining ritual (which in this case was simply the ordering, then we all sat at our desks with our computers and ate and worked) to delineate that inclusion.

I responded by announcing that one of the tools I use in my work is participant observation. “Oh…” he said, “We learn something new every day!”

In Suketu Mehta’s stunning Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is the following passage

I ask him about the rituals of the renunciation. He gives me a parable. A long time ago, a man was conducting a wedding. A cat was running around the marriage hall, disturbing things. So he tied it to a pillar. Afterward generations of the man’s family, whenever they had a wedding, found a cat and tied it to one pillar of the hall, believing it to be a required wedding custom. The goings-on around this diksha, the doctor says, are like that cat tied to the pillar: The original meaning has been lost, and people are just doing it because that it how it has always been done.

Reader’s Digest reports, via the New York Times about the growing presence of fake wedding cakes. Average price for a wedding cake is $543, and

“For as low as $100, you can snag a pretty good replica made out of foam, with a secret compartment tucked in the back for hiding that special first piece,” the article states.

It’s intriguing to play an Idiocracy-esque futurist and imagine how the ritual will decay (or is that evolve?) further. In 50 years will we wave a knife around and toss sugar packets, to symbolize the symbols of the cake and the cutting-of-the-cake?

Anne points out the similarity to the Roast Beef story where successive generations cut the ends of the roast beef because that is how they were taught. When they go all the way back to the origin, it turns out they didn’t have a big enough pan and so that “ritual” was simply a coping mechanism.

Learn more about cake rental at CakeRental.com.

Social Technologies is trying to do some of what we looked at last year with CultureVenture.

An interesting new report from Ernst & Young found that there continues to be enormous enthusiasm among investment firms around the world for initiatives and investments in the BRIC markets, “but that only about 29% of deals are completed because executives are not visiting the countries and learning about the local cultures,” according to a recent article in the New Yorker.

We urge our clients to educate themselves about and immerse themselves in the markets they are trying to understand. To help with this, Social Technologies will host a series of Futures Expeditions to Brazil, Russia, India, and China over the next two years.

They’ve taken a bigger risk by committing to the research before they’ve got the clients signed up, but they are also offering a one-size fits all solution. I am sure there will be learning, but I’d still prefer to offer (and participate in) a custom venture.

• More stories about “bad” research
  As we’ve said many times, there’s a difference between the questions you want answers to (i.e., what’s important to you) and the questions you ask in order to reach some conclusions about the first.

Boiled down from a bullet-pointy Fast Company piece that is heavy on highlight but makes me hunger for details.

Get more people to tune in to Court TV

The key has been to think like a consumer-products marketer…create a clear identity for each network.

Research revealed that the viewers of Court TV’s prime-time shows include two main groups: mystery solvers, typically women ages 25 to 54 who enjoy piecing together a story to solve a problem, and “real engagers,” young men who like true stories that take them places they wouldn’t otherwise go.

[So,] change the name. Court TV evokes images of criminals. The channel will relaunch as truTV.

Before truTV debuts, Koonin will send researchers into the homes of target viewers to gather information, much as Intuit famously does with its software.

The Nutella bottle is an iconic sight in Paris, with roadside crêperies displaying the bottle (even without the label) as a visual indicator of what you could and should get there.

These dimmer switches are new and they will always be warm to the touch

Seen in a lecture hall at the Berkeley School of Information. Presumably maintenance got fed up with responding to what they deemed to be false alarms. I’m no electrician, but I do have to wonder about dimmers that are warm enough to warrant a service call.

• Lifted, a short film from Pixar
  Usability and alien abductions. ‘Nuff said.

• Flickr’s soon-to-be-released Places feature will let you explore countries and cities in a new way.
  You’ll also be able to search for interesting photos by tag and place. You can see cultural differences by comparing a search term across different geographies.

Alan Dye, originally uploaded by debbie millman.

Originally uploaded by debbie millman.

Last night I went to the AIGA’sDesign Matters Live featuring Alan Dye interviewed by Debbie Millman (who I did a fun podcast with a few months ago).

I was fairly out of my element; the first presenter gave a tutorial on how to use Illustrator and Photoshop (and InDesign) to do things like Layer Comps. He explained it very well, but there were moments when a nifty way of doing something would evoke yelps of delight from the audience, many of whom who were using the same applications to solve some of the same problems. I’m definitely not one of those people, however.

I didn’t know anything about Alan Dye, either. He’s a creative director at Apple; I’m not entirely sure what that job title refers to. He’s worked at Kate Spade, I would think they make purses, but that’s probably all I knew.

But what Debbie does is get great people in, and have great conversations with them. She and Alan had a great dialog as they walked through his career, with lots of anecdotes that provided insight into one person’s creative process, layered against different work processes and company cultures. This was not any sort of ethnography, but the frisson from hearing someone share their stories was similar.

Two particularly cool points in the interview:

• The Adobe demo used a bunch of Alan’s files (designs for a book cover, and a magazine cover) and when Alan came on stage he expressed some distress over the fact that “all the type was defaulting.” He was referring (I think) to the fact that the his machine and the demo machine were configured differently and the fonts in the demo were not the fonts that he was using in his designs, and so were not appearing correctly. I mostly just liked the phrase; such an insider’s way of putting it.
• Alan related a story about a focus group gone typically wrong, when they showed some Molson labels to some 20-year old guys in Philadelphia. One participant cast himself as the alpha male and declared that it looked like a “gay beer” and of course, no one else in the group was willing to say “Well, I kinda like it…” Alan described his preference to really talk with people and observe them. That comment isn’t so radical, but the fact that it comes from a leader in the graphic design community (not historically the most user-centered of design practices) is awesome.

You can check out archived Design Matters broadcasts here (and these feature one of the best parts: Debbie’s articulate state-of-the-world rants that lead off each episode). No link to Alan’s site because he doesn’t have one (yet, as he told me afterwards).

Update: a short film based on this event has just been posted

Now Bay Area Starbucks shops offer free iTunes access

…
The new service lets customers shop for music wirelessly through iTunes at Starbucks for free.

…
The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store operates on the new iPod Touch, iPhone and Wi-Fi-enabled PCs and Macs using one of the latest versions of iTunes. Users are automatically connected to the coffee shop’s wireless Internet network and can see - and purchase - the song that’s currently playing in the store. Each coffee shop is configured individually so that the song piped through the store’s speakers is the same song that appears on the front page of the user’s iTunes.
…
The free wireless Internet access also only applies to the iTunes Store. Consumers still need to pay to access any other parts of the Web through Starbucks’ partnership with T-Mobile.

This is just terrible writing. Access to the iTunes store is free? How is that newsworthy? There’s news to be had here, but spinning up the free angle is just ludicrous. Did the journalist just swallow the press release and not really think about what new service was? Need they also point out that Starbucks provides free parking, restrooms, and now oxygen?

From our Design Research Methods class, some observations from an interviewing exercise.

The scenario was to conduct interviews in order to uncover opportunities in helping people to manage food, meals, nutrition, etc.

The question asked was
What are the challenges you face in meal preparation?

Of course, that question is flawed because it presumes that there are indeed challenges. This was evident when the respondent struggled with how to answer outside the frame of the question.

An alternative might be
Are there any challenges in meal preparation?
which is is more open-ended.

But better still is
What are your feelings about the experience of meal-preparation?
since it doesn’t put the label challenges into play. It would be important to understand the labels the person being interviewed places on the different aspects of their experience, and to use their terminology to probe further.

Also worth noting is that the original question came right off the sample interview guide I distributed. Sometimes the interview guide is a tool to document “questions you want answers to” rather than “questions you want to ask”; doing fieldwork involves a lot of translation back and forth between the two.

Dumpster graffiti, Montmartre, Paris

The power and meaning of language doesn’t always travel well.

• Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s flavors
  Pairing is the new black. Synaesthesia anyone?