While in the UK recently I took advantage of an extremely rare opportunity to tour the long-closed Battersea Power Station. It’s an iconic part of the London landscape, known to many for appearing on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals.

The tour was basically a community open house, to try and drum up support/input for the redevelopment plans. Visitors were asked to complete a survey…

…and this question caught my eye:

I really got a kick out of the localized UK English choices for the responses.

Also: see my pictures from the Battersea Power Station here and more of my London and Sheffield pictures here.

Previous posts on surveys:

• If you rent from Budget, do you get what you pay for?
• Survey Revenge?
• Son of survey
• Bad Survey Design. Please Stop!

Tags: battersea power station, language, london, norms, slang, survey, terms, UK

We’ve been doing some work lately with an organization who is trying to understand and respond to the evolution in telework – people who are working out of a dedicated home office but have a corporate job and maybe a formal workspace in their corporate office.

As we collected more stories from people, I was reminded of an old science fiction story (and I remembered the title, even) – The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. I didn’t realize it was from 1909! The story powerfully describes a world of people each living alone and communicating with all the people in their network, anywhere on the planet, from the comfort of their chair.

It’s a pretty cool story in terms of how many themes of modern life, home, and work are captured or predicted from 100 years ago.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.

The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

“I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

“Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on “Music during the Australian Period”.”

She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

“Be quick!” She called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”

But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.

Tags: e.m. forster, ethnography, fiction, futurism, science fiction, speculative fiction, storytelling, telecommunication, telework, the machine stops

• Notice and be noticed: riffing on our AIGA Gain piece on, well, noticing
  “As an artist, I think it’s part of my makeup to take in and process as much visual and physical information as I can, and then store it away for future use. I’m kind of a squirrel when it comes to gathering ideas, pictures and stories.”

Trust Your Senses, security poster, London Underground, 2008

Eye Bee M, Paul Rand, 1970

See more of my London and Sheffield pictures here.

Tags: classic, ear, eye, ibm, icon, lips, logo, london, mouth, paul rand, poster, security, senses, UK, underground

• Affordable oasis near the sea / Pacifica’s small-town character makes everyone feel welcome
  A Sunday paper puff-piece, granted, but you can learn a little about Pacifica, CA, where our office is located

I was recently in the UK to give the opening keynote at the Design Research Society’s Undisciplined conference. I detail some of my academic and professional history and talk about the concerns of a practitioner, perhaps an alternate take on what many in the audience (designers from academic settings) are thinking about themselves.

Here are my slides, and the audio in two separate widgets. You can start the audio and advance the slides manually to follow along. The talk goes for about 45 minutes and the discussion for another 25 or so.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Please do let me know if any of this isn’t working correctly so I can sort it out!

Also, see my London and Sheffield pictures here.

Tags: academia, conference, consulting, discipline, drs2008, keynote, practice, practitioner, professional, sheffield, steve portigal, theory, UK, undisciplined

• How does insight work?
  Kottke posts about a New Yorker piece that aligns nicely with our recent column, Ever Notice, at AIGA Gain

• Thank You for Not Smoking: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design
  Ralph Caplan on signs attempting and failing to address design shortcomings. What I’ve been calling “post-design”

Carnaby Street kiosk, London, July 2008

In a previous post I described an interactive display that looked like a static display. Here’s a static display that looks like an interactive display, through the color palette, the type of graphics, and the use of touchable materials (such as the black rubber) from consumer electronic devices.

See more of my London and Sheffield pictures here.

Tags: aesthetics, carnaby street, design, display, england, infographics, information, kiosk, london, map, navigation, UK

• Grot Buster
  Cleaning product for things that are, well, grotty
• Punnet
  A basket for displaying and collecting fruits or flowers. Farmer’s markets sometimes sell fruits and berries in plastic punnets. I saw pricing per punnet at London’s Borough Market and wondered about the word.
• Why Do You Lie? The Perils of Self-Reporting – Freakonomics (thanks, Kathy!)
  4 out of 10 applicants without a toilet said they had one. Chalk it up to embarrassment. People who were desperately poor would not admit to a welfare clerk that they lived without a toilet or running water or even a concrete floor.
• Slideshow: Battersea Power Station
  The iconic building was open for a very rare walking tour yesterday. I’ve never seen so many SLR cameras in one place. Anyway, here are my pictures.

• Ever Notice? A dialogue between Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg at Gain: AIGA Journal of Business and Design
  The importance of being aware and the advantages of tapping into your “super-noticing power” in practicing design and specifically in user research.

A little while ago, I got an interesting email message from Facebook:

To: Dan Soltzberg
Subject: Theresa Soltzberg said that you two are married…

Theresa said on Facebook that you two are married. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, married to Theresa.

To confirm this relationship request, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?home.php

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

Theresa is, in fact, my wife. After briefly considering several possibilities for practical joking, I followed the link, and was presented with this grand choice:

With the price of gas skyrocketing, will we see this replacing the Vegas wedding as the quick solution to getting married?

Anyway, I confirmed, and just wanted to share my nuptial joy with all of you . . .

Tags: email, facebook, gas, las vegas, marriage, nuptial, social networking, Vegas, wedding

Manners poster, London, 2008

Different town, different ideas about public behavior. While I don’t want to smell anyone’s odors (fragrance, bodily, or foodie), the declaration that “smelly food” will be avoided was surprising to me. It’s a rather specific act that I hadn’t really thought about before.

We had a good conversation about this poster today at the BBC. I talked about social norms, and how one tactic to changing behavior is to help more people do something, so that those who choose not to do it are clearly on the outside. They shared the history of these posters, where the specific things being avoided by the characters are not new, but instead of the previous version where a blue-text-on-white authoritative voice warned that smelly food and other actions were prohibited, this has shifted to a more inclusive collective voice – “together.”

It’s also a story about following the rules (for the greater good) rather than not following the rules.

Update: another poster from the campaign here.

See more of my London and Sheffield pictures here.

Tags: group, london, norms, smelly food, tfl, together, transport, UK

• kev/null on How Improv Teaches You to Build a Better Product
  Nicely done. Kevin takes leads with “making a thing” quite strongly and the result complements what I’ve written about improv and ethnography.