• Dave Robertson at Critical Mass asks “What would we do if they banned personas?”
  Good thought exercise to consider the concerns raised by my interactions column. Great list of different ways to represent and share research findings; nice approach to engaging team members in the process
• Participation: Smurf World Record attempt fails
  This story is amusing for its weirdness (Croatian Smurf enthusiasts) but also a great example of the pleasure consumers get from participating in producer space. Like the Smurfs, sure. Be the Smurfs, yeah!

Wired writes about the attempts to reintegrate 600 million scraps of paper from surveillance notes and dossiers torn up by the East German secret police as the wall fell. Some of the article deals with the enormity of the challenge and how technology is playing a role, but the best part deals with the powerful personal and cultural meaning of this part of German history represents to the people it affected so strongly.

Günter Bormann, the BStU’s senior legal expert, says there’s an overwhelming public demand for the catharsis people find in their files. “When we started in 1992, I thought we’d need five years and then close the office,” Bormann says. Instead, the Records Office was flooded with half a million requests in the first year alone. Even in cases where files hadn’t been destroyed, waiting times stretched to three years. In the past 15 years, 1.7 million people have asked to see what the Stasi knew about them.

Requests dipped in the late 1990s but…The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. “Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time,” Bormann says. [T]he Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.
…
The files hold the tantalizing possibility of an explanation for the strangeness that pervaded preunification Germany. Even back then, Poppe wondered if the Stasi had information that would explain it all. “I always used to wish that some Stasi agent would defect and call me up to say, Here, I brought your file with me,’” Poppe says.
…
She was able to match codenames like Carlos, Heinz, and Rita to friends, coworkers, and even colleagues in the peace movement. She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. “If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me,” she says. “It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes.” Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.

Poppe is looking forward to finding out what was in that last, reconstructed 5 percent. “The files were really important to see,” she says, taking a drag on her cigarette and leaning forward across the coffee table. “They explained everything that happened — the letters we never got, the friends who pulled away from us. We understood where the Stasi influenced our lives, where they arranged for something to happen, and where it was simply our fault.”

Steve recently spoke about international market research at the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association Morning Forum.

Steve recently spoke about The Listener’s Journey at the Computer Market Analysis Group meeting at Intuit in Mountain View, CA.

Steve recently led a seminar about improv and ethnography at the IDSA Southern Conference in Savannah, GA.

Economists are talking about repugnance, a crucial, complex, and culturally varied driver of what people will and won’t do, comfortably.

And last week a woman in Ohio whose ad to sell a horse mistakenly appeared under the heading “Good Things to Eat” in a newspaper’s classified section received dozens of calls, some expressing outrage and others from people interested in turning it into dinner. (In Europe and Japan horse meat on a menu would stir no more comment than macaroni and cheese would in an American diner.)
…
“It’s very hard to predict what’s repugnant and what’s not,” Mr. Roth said. Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, agreed. He conducted a two-year study to try to get at why people consider athletes who take steroids to be cheating, but not those who take vitamins or use personal trainers. He and his team offered different possibilities: What if steroids were completely natural? Or were not at all harmful? Or were only effective if the athlete had to work harder than before?

The only change that caused the interviewed subjects to alter their objections to steroids was when they were told that everyone else thought it was all right. “People have moral intuitions,” Mr. Bloom said. When it comes to accepting or changing the status quo in these situations, he said, they tended to “defer to experts or the community.”

Often introducing money into the exchange — putting it into the marketplace — is what people find repugnant. Mr. Bloom asserted that money is a relatively new invention in human existence and therefore “unnatural.”

We’ve written before about how people naturally slip from one idea to the next; our structures for organizing information are not like an Excel spreadsheet. This necessitates a triangulation approach to trying to get at what somebody’s mental models might really be and move beyond monolithic statements like “Steroids are bad!” The example of pulling apart the possible objections to steroids (fairness? composition? safety?) is right on. We might also take the reverse approach and frame it as a participatory-design thought-exercise: “You’re the executive of a pharmaceutical company and you want to find a way to make steroids acceptable to the general public. What could you do?” By looking at what people might change, we can reveal (sometimes more easily) what is stopping them from adopting something now. These barriers are crucial design opportunities that producers must understand and address.

• Transparency: Domino Pizza Tracker
  Where is my order at? Also supports their “fast” brand since you are now mindful of the speed of the process. Bloggers are negative but I think it’s an intriguing user experience
• Transparency:Tracking an Ordered MINI
  Seems much more involved than pizza but appropriate to different price point, complexity, and time to final product.

• Is the Persona still a Best Practice?
  Asking the question from the perspective of the discipline of anthropology

A few years ago I blogged about my first encounter with a dual-flush toilet.

They are becoming more common, now.

Uppercut, by Sloan, is an interesting, if incomplete design solution. It retrofits into existing toilets. The green handle suggests to the flusher that something is different here. The iconics on the barrel indicate, somewhat, what will happen in different flushing directions. But they’ve also seen fit to provide “attractive instructional placards to educate the user [there’s that phrase again] on proper operation” - UPfor #1 (Liquid Waste), DOWN for #2 (Solid Waste). The Sloan website also provides a customizable memo (.DOC) to help get the word out.

Any change of behavior, especially in such a habitual task, is going to be a challenge. Yet office memos about flushing the toilets belong with training meetings on using the new photocopier in the thundering hell of office life. It’d be interesting to investigate how all these cues (the memo, the green handle, the icon, the placard, the memo) work together (or not) to help people shift behavior (or not).

Any anecdotes to share about new office equipment, toilet memos, or so on? Leave a comment!

In response to Colin McKay’s comment on my last post, I felt impelled to put up this detail of the TRL shirt I was wearing at the PE shoot.

Being the ironic scamp that I am , I had altered the shirt when I first bought it. (In the original picture, it’s hard to see the alteration–a letter ‘L’ in red marker after the word ‘trivia,’ so no slight on Colin for not having noticed it!)

The interesting thing here is how strongly these kinds of details–T-shirts, logos, cultural touchpoints–broadcast messages, and how easily the messaging can get confused if all the details are not available.

The complexity of messaging and the importance of small details is something worth thinking about in the context of ethnographic research. In any given observation or interaction, are enough of the crucial details coming across? Is the context clear? Are there layers of meaning?

In order to parse what are actual data and what are our own ideas triggered by real world phenomena (which are an important but different kind of artifact), it’s so essential to surface, probe and challenge our interpretations and assumptions.

This probing and clarifying—the separation of observation, analysis, and synthesis–is a significant piece of what makes conducting ethnographic research different from simply going out and watching people.

Some years back, in Boston, I helped out on a shoot for Public Enemy’s Revolverlution video. It was a lot of fun, and pretty amazing to hang out with such seminal artists. I was going through some old pictures today and came across some fun images from the shoot.

A portrait of Chuck D, the idea man

My wife, Theresa, and me (with permed straight hair!) hanging out during lunch break with Flava Flav

And one of the hardest rocking shows I’ve ever seen, at the Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Excellent times! Public Enemy has been consistently innovative, not only in their music, but in their willingness to experiment with new approaches to producing and distributing their work.

Last year, a large group of people collaborated to produce an e-book called The Age of Conversation. I heard about this when David Armano got involved. The same folks are putting something together for 2008, and we’re signed up to contribute.

They are still looking for authors and for votes on possible topics, so if you’re interested, check out that last link.

Just over a year ago I blogged about the push approach that Wal-Mart was taking to drive adoption of energy-efficient fluorescent lighting, spending money on persuasive marketing rather than addressing the known barriers to adoption. A year later, it seems to be okay to acknowledge the problems with the bulbs. The New York Times recently looked at the problems that people have with the quality of light created by those bulbs (nothing new, of course, but the fact that the angle of the story has changed is thought-provoking). Most recently, they offered up this this interview with a Sylvania technologist who speaks to the ongoing work to improve the quality of the light that people experience.

Of course the efforts to improve the bulbs were always ongoing. I’m intrigued by the cultural story that was created by marketing and the media, spending money to force a behavior under the guise of “educating” people.

Make a better light bulb, already. One that is energy efficient and doesn’t make us feel (and look) like crap in our own homes. We’ll beat a path to your door.

• Why Personas Matter: Misha Cornes at Organic
  Another thoughtful post, contrasting the cultures of design with advertising, and positing personas as an artifact, not a tool.
• Megapixel Samaritans: Photo clues lead to camera’s owner
  They find the owner of the camera by looking at the pictures. But digital pictures have sufficient resolution that the sleuths could zoom in and read name tags and logos. Very Law & Order without TV-fake image enhancement tech.

This piece in the Financial Times about how anthropology is important to understand the behaviors of bankers is well-timed and relevant (if indirectly related) to the story of Société Générale’s Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader.

For one thing that anthropology imparts is a healthy respect for the importance of micro-level incentives and political structures. And right now these issues are becoming critically important for Wall Street and the City, as the credit crunch deepens by the day.
…
But what is crystal clear is that if you want to understand which banks will emerge as winners from the current mess, it is no longer enough to look at their computer systems and balance sheets. Now, more than ever, investors need to understand a bank’s culture too - and the degree to which it is tribal.

We just wrapped up our second study of traders and it’s really gratifying to see this column. Traders, as a profession, have a lot of strong character traits (humor, macho/aggression, social) and much of their work is competitive and manipulative. The tools they use are pretty straight transaction machines, though, that don’t reflect the complex layers of intention that are driving everything the trader does. The only product that seems to echo or reinforce trading culture is the Bloomberg terminal which, in addition to all the data-oriented tracking and graphic capabilities, also offers an IM/email/Facebook-like platform to a closed, consistent, and co-located (The City in London, Wall Street in New York, and other neighborhoods in major financial markets) community.

There’s enormous potential for the other software tools used by these traders to similarly match their offering to the dynamic culture of their users. It’ll require these vendors to take a fresh look at how their products can really bring exceptional value to the people who make their living with them. Failure to understand and design for these folks will undoubtedly lead to more stories like the current scandal.

SocGen (as it’s known by people in the industry) in London (actual fieldwork photo!)

A new Krispy Kreme located in the heart of London’s The City (the financial district) gives away free boxes of donuts, causing a run

FT story via antropologi.info

• Oops, sorry - 14,000 e-mail accounts get deleted
  Charter makes some horrendous technical error and the contents of 14,000 email accounts is gone. And can not be restored. Of course, users are responsible for their own data, they say. Not us. Read your agreement. Etc.

Taipei 101

Fresh juice

At the market in the basement of Taipei 101, I ordered a fresh juice from a juice stand. The young man who was making the juice rapidly measured and assembled the ingredients in a blender. As he was blending the fruit, he began to pour in honey. After a moment, he grabbed a long spoon, stuck it in what was becoming my drink, tasted and took a taste. Then with one hand he threw the spoon in the sink and with the other he added more honey.

Fruit, of course, is inconsistent. If you want to prepare food to a certain sweetness (or other taste attribute), and the ingredients aren’t exactly the same, how else can you do it without tasting?

In the west, at least, fast food is typically based on sourcing consistent ingredients and building a trainable process so the staff don’t have to use subjective judgments like taste in order to prepare a good product. As well, we don’t expect that people preparing our food would be eating it. In this case, the spoon was clean and was disposed of right away, so there was no chance of contamination, but the whole concept that this person consumed something and then gave me the rest was just so unfamiliar.

Yet another standard that I hadn’t even questioned until I saw it play out differently in Taipei.

• Personas are NOT a Document
  Jared Spool on personas; attempting to bring some definition and thereby highlight where he sees the value.

On a recent trip to Maui, I came across car after car, abandoned and disintegrating, on the sides of the roads.

At what point will these dumped cars become interesting historical artifacts?

How long ago were petroglyphs simply graffiti?

So much about value is a matter of framing. Has there ever been a marketing tactic more transformative than the simple passage of time?

• Cyberspace Ethnography
  An anthropology course that considers methods for understanding people in their virtual/online environments. Probably not the first course like this, but as available virtual experiences expand, courses will evolve. Your blog counts for 25% of grade.
• View All This ChittahChattah on your mobile device
  Cleaned up feed for your iPhone or what-have-you
• Fast Company sidebar comparing technology innovation efforts at several firms
  Main article is a profile of Bell Labs; overall the emphasis is definitely on technology and invention over anything user-centered.

Today we “attended” a webinar about innovation in services. The talk was to create some buzz for an upcoming IIR/PDMA conference about Service Innovation Design and Development and was presented by Jeneanne Rae from Peer Insight.

The slides and recorded audio may be forthcoming (although there was a lot of technical problems that really took away from the whole experience) but in the meantime, they’ve got a very detailed report from a study of the service innovation process available as a PDF here. The first few pages will give you a reasonable overview of the talk.

Some tidbits and thoughts:

1. Services are the dominant economic force in developed countries, but the buzz/mindshare/process is around the creation of products.

2. Some of the service companies described were surprising: i.e., Wal-Mart, Home Depot. Is retail a service business? Not in the same way banking is (although it’s interesting that they call their offerings products). Not in the same way hospitality is, either. Maybe this is a commonly understood distinction but it wasn’t clear to me.

Is software a service? If it comes in a box (i.e., Adobe Illustrator)? What if it’s on the web (i.e., Google Docs)? What if it’s tied to a product (i.e., iTunes)? Or resident on a device (i.e., Windows CE)?

3. The IHIP framework dates back to 1978 and is the classic articulation of what differentiates services from goods. IHIP stands for inseparability, heterogeneity, intangibility, and perishability.

• Inseparability - Unlike a product which can be taken home after purchase and used later, services are consumed in the same time and place where they are purchased.
• Heterogeneity - Although each product produced can be identical, the experience of interacting with a service is always going to be different from customer to customer.
• Intangibility - You can see and touch a product before you buy it; you can’t experience a service experience until you experience it.
• Perishability - You can count how many products you have on hand; you can’t taken inventory of a service.

Haven’t seen any posts about The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It? from the weekend NYT. Perhaps it’s because the thesis isn’t novel or well articulated? G. Pascal Zachary reminds us unnecessarily that some products are hard to use and that some products are released but fail miserably. He conflates technology and innovation, and ignores any notion of user experience or marketplace success from his implicit definition of innovation. And he reminds us that getting people to buy and use something new is the big question that all companies want an answer to.

These are good themes to be explored further. Zachary wasn’t given the time or the space to offer anything new on the topic, though, and I end up wondering just why the paper did this particular article anyway.

The Loft store in Tokyo has an entire section that offers a huge range of reusable grocery store bags. Do the Japanese values around “choice” and “sustainability” collide? Does it make sense within that culture? Does it make sense to outsiders?

I had an uncomfortable reaction along the lines of “Oh, crap, something else to buy.” It seemed to contradict my expectations of restraint in a product category that carries a meaning of “sustainable.” Of course, that may not be the meaning that these bags have in Japan.

Our primary giving in 2007 was in support of two organizations: one local, and one in support of developing nations.

Coastside Hope is the “primary provider of safety net services” in our local area. They provide “monthly food harvest, emergency shelter and rental assistance services, crisis intervention and referral services, clothing vouchers, Christmas Adopt-a-Family program, [and] citizenship services.”

The Free Wheelchair Mission has taken an innovative approach to producing wheelchairs for developing countries: “to use components that are manufactured in high volume for other products…He removed every extra feature possible, ending up with the least expensive design that will satisfy a large portion of the world’s need for wheelchairs. This wheelchair design lends itself to manufacture by highly efficient companies where assembly costs are relatively low.”

• Joshua Porter: Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself
  Less a response to my column than a considered attempt to revisit many of the issues that are swirling around good and bad of personas. Includes some samples.
• A complete shot-by-shot redo of Journey’s “Separate Ways” video
  More collapse between consumer and producer.
• Be Kind Rewind - imminent Michel Gondry film
  In which video store employees recreate classic films that they accidentally erased
• Sam Karp’s interviewing tips
  More journalistic than ethnographic in focus, but an awesome list. Thanks to Ben Allen for this.
• Return of the King episode from The Boondocks
  What if MLK was in a coma, not dead, and he woke up in 2006? Sci-fi-like premise for an amazing episode filled with provocative satire and sadness-infused social commentary. I can’t watch the show anymore tho’ - too shrill.

Sign from Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs, in the Taipei airport
The sign reads:
Post only authorized images, music, videos, or writings on your blog, or you could be blogging your way into court! Today’s user is tomorrow’s right owner. Respect others’ intellectual properly rights.

Even before clearing immigration in Taipei, there’s an intellectual property warning for bloggers. Is this really such a big problem? I’d expect them to worry more about CD and DVD piracy first.

Die Hard 4.0 poster, Taipei

It’s not news that movies are released with different titles in other markets. Still, it was curious to see a familiar product under a slightly different brand. Live Free or Die is an American slogan, and so outside North America, perhaps Live Free or Die Hard doesn’t work as well as a title (perhaps the American-ness is not as appealing, or there is less recognition of the reference).

IMDB lists the different titles (and working titles) around the world.

Die Hard 4.0    Australia / Denmark / Finland / Japan / Netherlands / Sweden / UK / USA (working title)
Duro de matar 4.0    Argentina / Mexico / Peru / Venezuela
Die Hard 4    USA (working title)
Die Hard 4: Die Hardest    USA (working title)
Die Hard: Reset    USA (working title)
Die Hard: Tears of the Sun    USA (working title)
Die hard - Vivere o morire    Italy
Die hard 4 - Legdrágább az életed    Hungary
Die hard 4 - Retour en enfer    France
Duro de Matar 4.0    Brazil
Jungla 4.0, La    Spain
Poly skliros gia na pethanei 4.0     Greece
Smrtonosná pasca 4.0    Slovakia
Smrtonosná past 4.0    Czech Republic
Stirb langsam 4.0    Germany
Szklana pulapka 4.0    Poland
Umri muski 4.0     Serbia
Vis libre ou crève    Canada (French title)
Visa hing 4    Estonia
Zor ölüm 4.0    Turkey (Turkish title)

U-Haul, Montara, CA

What use case is eMove targeting? What narratives are implied by this advertisement?

• Talking about Facebook prohibited
  Another quickie example of backlash against a successful (too successful?) product
• Putting people first - first impressions of Interactions Magazine
  Really enthusiastic review makes me proud to be a small part of this effort; can’t wait til my copy arrives
• adaptive path blog: Todd Wilkens: Fear and Loathing in Las Personas
  Todd’s smart commentary on the tradeoffs, power, and risks of personas as part of the research and design process The search for a metaphor for persona design (guns? movies? safety scissors?) goes on.

While in Japan, in a Mitsukoshi food hall, we came across Konopizza, pizza (and desserts!) in a cone.

It’s not just a Japanese company, and they are aiming for the English speaking market with “the future of pizza, the pizza of the future.” I have seen the future of pizza and its name is Kono? Personally, I hope not. Think about biting into one and managing the mass of bubbling cheese goo. I foresee burning messy gagging.

Here are some variations on the hot dog from Ginza.

Coney dog, okay. Cheese dog, sure. Bacon potato, I dunno?

Egg? Zucchini? These are rather elegant reinterpretations of the serviceable wiener, but they read so unappealing and dissonant. I’m all for elegant reinterpretations of fast food but these struck me as very foreign (granted, I was the foreigner, trying to find the symbols of home in another environment).

Stay tuned for our Taiwan snack food experiences.

And one more that I’ve been hanging onto for a very long time. Family Boat appears to be a concept restaurant, with a website intended to appeal to investors and future franchisees. They’ve opened one pilot store in Holland. The concept is all around providing food in “boats.”

Potatoboats

Sandwichboats

Ice boats

Lots of designy stuff on the site as well:

Anyone ever tried any of these foods? What do you think?

• Peter Merholz’s strong and articulate response to Steve’s interactions article on personas
  Some valid critique (yes, a longer article rather than a column would point to alternatives), some points missed (the tool makes it so easy to misuse, maybe rethink the tool), some silly (someone at AP has used that title before)
• (PDF link) The persona’s new clothes: methodological and practical arguments against a popular method.
  Chapman, C.N., and Milham, R. P. (2006, October). A peer-reviewed, academic consideration of the limitations of personas.

A few years ago, Gene asked what happened to the IDEO shopping cart?

Well, look what we saw in Japan!

Anne demonstrates how the basket mates with the cart

Minimal cart hardware stacks tightly

Is this the cart, finally? Or did their design partly reflect a solution already in place in other parts of the world?

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knows of the early Louis Cheskin work, a recent Stanford study established that the more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes.

Expectations of quality trigger activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. While many studies have looked at how marketing affects behavior, this is the first to show that it has a direct effect on the brain.
…
“We have known for a long time that people’s perceptions are affected by marketing, but now we know that the brain itself is modulated by price,” said Baba Shiv, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

When we worked with a wine brand recently, we sought to understand the complete wine “usage” process, from planning, through shopping, to storage, to opening, to serving and drinking. We looked specifically at people who were interested in lower-priced wines and most of them were limited in their knowledge and/or experience.

In other categories when the customer is new and is presented with enormous product choice (the amount of wine choice dwarfs most other categories I can think of) we might feel sympathetic for the learning/selection/usage learning curve they would face; with wine people spoke very enthusiastically about the journey. Each trial experience involved drinking wine…something they liked to do! A social, tasty, and rewarding experience. Even a wine they “didn’t care for” (the typical critique) wasn’t a failure, because it still carried all the symbolic meaning.

The marketers were hampered by a limiting view of their customers; the market had been sliced into ridiculously narrow price points and this inevtiably drove discussions of people characterized exclusively within those $3 slots (as in, “I’m a $7.99 to $10.99 drinker”). While our client no doubt had cash register data to support their segmentation, it was completely at odds with how people saw themselves. They purchased across a much broader price range, and their primary concern was their own knowledge and accumulated experience. We were given a great opportunity to offer this different view and illustrate some of the unmet opportunities this presented.

I thought this advertising bear in Shinjuku was cool, and so stopped to take a picture. The bear saw me and posed with the typical Asian two-fingered V-gesture. After I took the photo, I did my best gaijin attempt at a bow. The bear returned the bow, and then saluted me.

Without a common language (indeed without a common species) we had an interesting opportunity to share our knowledge of each other’s culture in gestures. And although I rarely salute my friends and family, I understood its intent as a gesture-of-Western-origin.

Japan is quite impenetrable to the outsider, and it’s easy to subsist on a parallel layer, free from the possibility or opportunity for everyday interactions. In our two weeks that moat was crossed less than a dozen times (i.e., the couple in a cafe who smiled and waved at me when I peered in the window and inadvertently triggered the sliding door, letting in some very cold air; the couple who saw us eating Taiyaki (cooked sweet batter filled with bean paste in the sahpe of a fish) and explained what it was, what is was called, and compared camera models) and each time was rewarding in its own small way.

But making this connection with a bear, in the land of kawaii, was briefly and intensely magical.

• Never mind the bollocks
  More product backlash: this time it’s dangling truck testicles
• Grant McCracken on advertising messing with social norms: proof that the corporation and marketing still has a lot to learn
  “When you seek to make cultural meanings part of the brand proposition, you are a guest in someone’s house. The moment you start stuffing the silver into your pockets, that’s when we’re going to ask you to leave.”
• Backlash against Citroen Mao ad
  Previous posts on dictator branding here

It’s fascinating how most successful products lead to an ecosystem of supporting products. The Crocs fad has provided the fan-base to support charms, little decorations that attach to the holes on the shoe’s surface and let the wearer further establish their individual identity within the trend of people who have established a unique identity by wearing Crocs in the first place.

Acknowledging that following a trend has a very different meaning in Japan, we bring you the Crocs family, who we saw on a bus in Kyoto, each with their own charms.

Dad

Mom

Son

Baby

In addition to aftermarket personalization, many trends also generate a safety backlash meme (iPod muggings, anyone?). In Taipei, it’s dangerous to wear Crocs on escalators.

Manufacturers like Apple are very savvy about creating/controlling their aftermarket, but I wonder about the backlashes. Are PR people planting those stories or doing damage control or not realizing their significance?

Update: Karl Long on the Crocs backlash (safety and others) here

This article from 2006 suggests this is nothing new, but I still found this to be a strange manifestation of the “For Dummies” brand. It’s not a book, it’s a package of bulbs, ready for planting in the garden.