• Poets, Priests, and Politicians – my latest column for interactions magazine – In which I address the power of language in many types of interactions
• Mafia Finds Fans on Facebook – Thousands of users have joined fan pages devoted to top Mafia bosses on the social networking site Facebook.. A page devoted to Salvatore “Totò” Riina, the “boss of bosses,” who is serving 12 life sentences, has more than 2,228 fans, some of whom wished him a merry Christmas. Other fans called for the “immediate beatification” of Bernardo Provenzano, who was imprisoned in 2006. Relatives of Mafia victims expressed outrage.

• The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2008! – Amazing year-end roundup. Nice to see a couple of my posts (including the bathroom video I included in the All This ChittahChattah year-end roundup) as well as one of our client projects, HP's Halo teleconferencing system.
• A study of the relationships between self-control and religion – Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals. Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

  “Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said.

• NYT on the meaning of Tokyo Tower, fifty years later – Indeed, the tower seems to have won a new place in the national imagination, this time as a monument to a sepia-toned past. The change comes at a time when Japan as a whole seems to have lost confidence in its future, or has even resigned itself to slow decline. The change also underscores a broader point: how the passage of time can shift the meaning of national symbols — even ones as large as Tokyo Tower.

  “Tokyo Tower stood for a dream of the future, but that dream is gone,” said Masanori Nakamura, a professor emeritus of history at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University. “Tokyo Tower offers no more dreams, just as Japan has no more dreams.”
  …
  In the recent books and films, the tower often appears as a metaphor for what this graying nation feels it has lost in recent decades: the shared sense of purpose and youthful optimism that drove its economic miracle, or even the simpler lifestyles before Japan became an economic superpower.

Tags: tokyo

• interactions magazine summarizes their highlights from 2008
  Including: A column by Steve Portigal that completely shredded our understanding of the “persona” tool in design

• Chirag Mehta of SAP reviews my recent interactions column
  And adds his own thoughts: Look beyond the problem space and preserve ambiguity
• Scouting NY – a blog about noticing
  “I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention. As it happens, it’s my job to pay attention, and I’ve started this blog to keep a record of what I see”

We were excited recently to see the New York Times review of Belkin’s GoStudio portable audio recorder. We led some early user research with target customers that informed Belkin’s overall strategy for this product.

Among other things, our work revealed that people didn’t associate the iPod with the high quality audio they expected a recording device to deliver. As well, the iPod is rarely seen an ingredient technology for another experience; rather most accessories add on to the iPod, and convey that message through form, finish, interface, and even their overall story. We identified that Belkin had two paths they could go by: either embrace the iPod (as in iHome and other iPoddy products) or deny the iPod (and create their own visual and task language). It’s great to see that Belkin’s final design emphasized the aesthetics of professional audio gear. In fact, the New York Times picked up on this embrace/deny tension in their headline: Another Use for the iPod – As a Memory Card.

Tags: audio, belkin, design, gostudio, ipod, music, recording, research, user research

In 2008 All This ChittahChattah hit our seventh anniversary. Here are some highlights from the past year.

• We found a toilet flusher that comes with a memo, I investigate the bathroom for Core77, and Dan gets trapped in the bathroom.
• I consider the culture of financial traders and then what happens when you don’t take that into account
• In world travels, Die Hard is globalized, appetizingness is culturally constructed, the revolutionary IDEO shopping card is old hat in Japan, I am saluted by a bear, Crocs make an appearance, friction never sleeps, some pictures from Japan here, here, and here, the world tour of donuts, how to say maybe, and Tokyo enjoyment
• I publish a year of my column, True Tales, for interactions: Persona Non Grata, Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me, The Journey Is The Reward, Hold Your Horses, Living In The Overlap, and Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• My flickr photos were lost forever and I wrote the obituary
• The nature of art
• Only-in-LA fading kitsch
• Tracking the process of observing cultural artifacts: 1. Bottom Biting Bug and 2. Ayumi Hamasaki
• Dan critiqued an AIGA Gain article about design research
• I’m not the only one who has a mythical mental model for how Netflix processes envelopes
• I’m interviewed by Influx Insights, profiled in a Japanese technology magazine, the Institute of Design student blog, and included in What Insight Does Ethnography Deliver?
• We celebrated Groundhog Day
• Dan reviews talks by Alan Cooper and Stefan Sagmeister
• Body image norms around the world and in Miami
• I notice bananas in London
• A visit to Celebration, Florida
• UPS shoehorns personas into a website user registration and I’m interviewed for a Forrester report on personas.
• A couple of examples of how seemingly simple problems are actually much more complex when it turns that people don’t simply adopt the solutions we’ve decided are best for them: school lunches and banking services
• Tattoos for children as a safety measure
• Advertising imitates art and advertising imitates advertising
• Observational ephemera: the series
• The creative processes of sound designer Ben Burtt and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Untouchable touchscreens, non-interactive kiosks, and advertising forcing functions
• The end of free cookies at Safeway
• The fallacy of measuring innovation
• My keynote from the Design Research Society conference, and my talk Research and Design: Ships in the Night? from User Research Friday
• Dan encounters Cloud Gate
• My workshop on noticing at the Design Research Conference; happiness and noticing; Dan and Steve write about the power of noticing for AIGA Gain
• We contribute to the Stone Cellars wine packaging redesign, new product innovations for BIC, and a new digital recording product for Belkin.
• My chapter was published in Age of Conversation 2
• I’m a guest for Lextant’s Design 40 weekly dialog and featured in a Lunar Design podcast about the speed of innovation and the pace of creativity
• We unearth some old correspondence with Malcolm Gladwell about, well, outliers.

Tags: 2008, blogging, patterns, posts, themes, topics

• Philip Seymour Hoffman on the creative process
  “It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

• giving away time – conceptual IDEO prototyping experiment
  Great example of using an intervention to study an issue. IDEO mocks up a machine that prints up “free time” stickers and gives them out to people on the commuter train. What takes this beyond a piece of conceptual art is the analysis of the reactions. This is a tool that doesn’t need such a grandiose PR-friendly approach to be useful, of course. Tickets that offer a conceptual benefit could be a little activity in any sort of design research process; handing them out to someone and asking how they’d use it. See also “Moving With A Magic Thing”
• Moving With A Magic Thing
  The second technique, “moving with a magic thing” works according to a similar concept. It’s claimed to be useful when finding uses for new technology, by giving users the new thing (or a mock-up of it) and getting them to go away and discover uses for it.

• More than 1/6 of households have only cell phones
  The portion of homes with cell phones but no landlines has grown to 18 percent, led by adults living with unrelated roommates, renters and young people, according to federal figures released Wednesday. An additional 13 percent of households have landlines but get all or nearly all calls on their cells. That means about three in 10 households are essentially reachable only on their wireless phones. The figures, covering the first half of 2008, underscore how consumers have been steadily abandoning traditional landline phones in favor of cells. The 18 percent in cell-only households compares with 16 percent in the second half of 2007, and just 7 percent in the first half of 2005.

Tags: growth, landlines, mobile phones

• Nine women can’t have a baby in one month
  A great collection of so-called project management lingo; it’s the phrases you hear from businesspeople
• Airlines Use ‘Black Boxes’ to Improve Service
  Interesting attempts at disruptive transparency as airlines educate passengers about what data is collected in the “black box” (it’s actually orange), what type of mistakes pilots make, and how that data is used to improve. It’s being used in Japan but being scuttled in the US where admitting mistakes doesn’t seem to be in the traditional best interests of pilot unions, airline management, and the like.

• Black dog bias?
  Shelter officials have dubbed it black dog syndrome — the propensity of dark-coated animals to be passed over for adoption in favor of their lighter counterparts.
• Zappos Launches Insights Service
  Zappos Insights is a subscription video service that lets companies ask questions about the Zappos way and get answers from actual Zappos employees. It will charge $39.95 per month for subscriptions. The service, said CEO Tony Hsieh, is targeted at the “Fortune 1 million” looking to build their businesses. “There are management consulting firms that charge really high rates,” he said. “We wanted to come up with something that’s accessible to almost any business.” (via Guy Kawasaki)

Stephen Anderson’s musings on collaboration and attribution reminded me that a project we worked on for BIC has gone live:

From Business Week

[BIC is] designing disposable cartridges for fuel cells, a kind of power supply that could someday eliminate the need to constantly recharge mobile phones or laptop computers. Electronics makers are drawn to fuel cells because today’s rechargeable batteries can’t keep up with the demands users place on portable gadgets.
…
Bic’s big adventure with fuel cells began in 2002. Ken Cooper, the company’s U.S.-based director of strategic business development, was in a New Haven (Conn.) drugstore and spotted a cordless travel hair dryer with a tiny motor that ran on butane. This got Cooper thinking about fuel cells for handheld gadgets—a hot topic in consumer electronics circles. Few companies in the world package as much fuel every day as Bic does in its butane lighters, he reasoned. So Cooper decided Bic should take a gamble and develop fuel-cell cartridges that are “lighter-like, pocketable, yet safe.”

I know Ken worked with a series of small consultancies over that period. From our workshop, I remember strongly that fuel cells were a key takeway. But was that concept extant before the workshop, or did we generate it? I honestly can’t remember, and ultimately, (as Stephen addresses) it’s not a worthwhile pursuit to frame it that way. In most of our engagements we are trying to inform and inspire talented business people to develop and refine ideas and move them further along, and seeing this story in BusinessWeek 6 years later confirms that indeed we did.

Tags: bic, consulting, facilitation, fuel cell, ideas, ideation, innovation, ownership

• Alternate designs for telephone keypad
  From a report issued in 1960 by The American Telephone and Telegraph Company, just before pushbutton phones went mainstream. In addition to key arrangements, other categories of design features were studied, like force-displacement characteristics and button-top size/design. The focus groups were tested on keying times (error rates were calculated) and asked which they preferred aesthetically.

• The 57 Watt Bulb: Trimming the standards
  Our grocery store has no 60 or 75 watt bulbs, well establish standards. Instead, they have 57 and 71 watt bulbs. GE is productizing the “turn the thermostat down a notch”? Seems like they are almost as bright as the ones they are replacing (which, when you think about it for at least .001 seconds, makes sense). But is this really what we want? If everyone is just slightly more in the dark, then we can save $X billion a year? Why 57 and why not 56? What happens next? 50 instead of 57? In which case, we’ll just all be using 60 (which is the new 75) instead. It’s not a sustainable innovation.

• How do you design: a massive collection of process diagrams assembled by Hugh Dubberly and co.
  In my User Research Friday talk I pointed to this; you can download it from the above link.