• Is Alain Robert, the "French Spiderman" who ascends skyscrapers, authentic? – The author contacts Christian Beckwith, founder of Alpinist magazine: "'The technical difficulty of what he does is not extraordinary,' he said-but acknowledged an element of sacrilege in his 'shtick." He said, 'The climbers who garner the most respect in the sort of hard-core climbing community are the people who go out an are climbing for the love of it, and they pull off the bitchingest thing anybody's ever done, and they never say a word to anybody.'
  Other prominent climbers asserted that Robert was a member of the community in good standing. 'Climbers tend to say, 'Oh, this is just bogus, it's like a stunt,' and what it is of course, is pretty badass," Ivan Greene said. Alex Honnold: 'I don't have anything particularly inspiring to say about Alain Robert. Except that he's totally badass.' Matt Samet: 'One word: badass.'"

Tags: authenticity, badass, building, climbing, community, newyorker, skyscraper, spiderman

Photos from post-SARS Hong Kong, January 2006.

Tags: behavior modification, disease, epidemic, influence, norms, pandemic, safety, sickness, signs

• Miro Adoption Center: Adopt of a Line of Code – This is a clever adaptation of a familiar community funding approach (i.e., highways) to open-source software:
  "Adopt a line of source code for just $4 a month, and together we can keep Miro alive and growing! You’ll receive a customized page and widgets that display your line of code. Even a little photo of your new buddy, and its personalized name!"

Tags: adopt, business, code, cute, fun, funding, fundraising, opensource

Six months ago my chapter in Age of Conversation 2 was published. Although I’m reprinting my chapter here, it’s for a good cause (Variety) so you might want to buy a copy from Lulu, although I heard Amazon sales may be coming soon, too.

Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret?

We’re in the business of digging for insights and that frequently takes us into the territory where secrets reside. Recently my colleague and I sat in the bedroom of a young rapper and watched as he demonstrated his creative process. While playing a simple backing track on iTunes, he improvised into a hand held recorder for a few minutes. Afterwards, he sat down with a notebook and reviewed his recording, scribbling furiously as he refined the lyrics. Finally, he took the new text and performed it against the same backing track.

Had anyone ever witnessed this particular music-making process before? We didn’t think so. But was it a secret? Probably not. Although it may have been hidden from view, the details of his process were undiscovered, rather than secret.

To reveal the undiscovered, the first thing to do is look. Go where something is happening, and watch. Sometimes we have to do more than look, we have to ask. Find someone who is involved in something that is happening, and ask them.

To get to the “secrets”, we have to do more than ask, we have to listen. Listening is much more complex than asking. It means adjusting our mindset and ensuring that we’re truly giving permission for secrets to be revealed.

It’s easy to fall into the familiar mode where we consider secrets as that which is deliberately hidden because it’s inherently bad or wrong. And although only the Shadow knows for sure what evil lurks in the hearts of men, consider that much of what is kept secret is out of our fear of violating social norms (the unspoken rules of a culture that determine what is and isn’t acceptable) and being embarrassed rather than being sent to jail. As producers of goods and services and experiences, it’s powerful and useful to understand these fears.

Those secrets are not unattainable, but they require a significant listening effort. The engine that drives the Age of Conversation isn’t talking, but listening.

Tags: aoc, aoc2, consumers, conversation, insight, listening, research, secret

• What is the deal with Jughead's hat? – This is something the Internet is truly great at: as an archive for the exploration and explanation of the obscure aspects of the familiar. What will future anthropologists make of the Internet of our generation?
• Karachi, Pakistan manufacturing firm produces corsets and fetish wear (for export) – The brothers said Pakistan’s “stone-age production” worked to their advantage. The country, they said, lacks visionary product development. “Everyone’s still making the same products,” Adnan said.

  Then, they discovered a kind of straitjacket online. At first, they thought it was used for psychiatric patients, but it quickly led them to learn about the lucrative fetish industry.

  Today, they sell their products to online and brick-and-mortar shops, and to individuals via eBay. Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats. The Netherlands and Germany account for the bulk of their European sales.

  “We really believe that if you are persistent and hard working, there is an opportunity, in any harsh environment, even in an economically depressed environment like Pakistan,” Rizwan said.

• Average frustrated chump – for what's a subculture without its jargon? – Often abbreviated "AFC," is seduction community jargon for a heterosexual male who is unsuccessful at finding sexual or romantic relationships with women] This person seeks attraction and longingly desires intimacy, but only finds cordial friendship and platonic love with women. The term AFC is pejorative, and is attributed to NLP teacher Ross Jeffries.
• Seduction? Yeah we've got a group for that – The "seduction community" refers to a loose-knit subculture of men who strive for better sexual and romantic success with women through self-improvement and a greater understanding of social psychology. It exists largely through Internet forums and groups, as well as over a hundred local clubs, called "lairs" Supporters refer to the subculture simply as 'the community" and often call themselves "pickup artists." Origins date back to Eric Weber's 1970 book How to Pick Up Girls.

Tags: archie, clothing, comics, community, culture, dating, export, fashion, fedora, global, hat, hats, history, jargon, jughead, lingo, pakistan, psychology, relationships, seduction, shibboleth, social, style, subculture, trade

• The Global Digital Divide: No Profit From Developing Nation Users – Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

  Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

  “I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

• Omegle: Talk to Strangers! – A social-networking site for people who are burned out on their friends and want to interact with people they do NOT know: "When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like."

Tags: 90%, advertising, anonymous, backlash, botp, chat, communication, developing, digital, global, internet, margin, online, profit, reaction, strangers, village

Harley-Davidson President and CEO Jim Ziemer, Harley-Davidson Annual Report, 2007

My latest interactions column, Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research? has just been published.

While user-research-eschewing Apple is everyone’s poster child for “design for yourself,” I find Harley-Davidson to be a more compelling example (although I may be comparing Apple(s) and oranges). At Harley, Willie G. Davidson is the grandson of the original Davidson. Senior vice president and chief styling officer, he is known as Willie G. And he looks exactly like a guy who rides a Harley: big, bearded, and leather-clad. If we judge a bike by its fairing, the designer is the customer. That’s part of the Harley brand: In a recent Harley-Davidson annual report, executives appear next to their bikes, and we know that they all ride. A crucial part of Willie G.’s role is to preserve the legacy of the brand; the company communicates that it is (and always has been) part of the culture for which it’s designing. People at Harley, we believe, use the products and live the lifestyle. But underneath it all is a sense that Harley-Davidson, through its history, has created the brand (i.e., the products and their meaning) in partnership with its customers. For all the tribal connectedness Apple has facilitated, the company itself is not a participant. It is a benefactor.

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Related: Steve Portigal speaks at User Research Friday – Design and Research, Ships in the Night?

Update: Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design? is now available

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting with Advertising
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity

Tags: apple, customers, design, Harley, insight, interactions, research, user research

• A sociological-framed blog with (like so many others) commentary on images from media and daily life – The sociological imagination is a woefully under-utilized tool. We hope this blog encourages all kinds of people to exercise and develop their sociological imagination and that, between all of us, public discourse will increasingly include a sociological lens with which we can all learn about social processes and mechanisms, critique social inadequacies, and design functional and equitable alternatives.

  We assume that you, our audience, are sociologically-inclined folks. So we do not typically include a lengthy sociological interpretation of the images.

  Images are polysemic and people will view and use them in many different ways, so our commentary, when offered, is never meant to control how people use the images (as if we could anyway). We welcome comments that offer additional or alternative interpretations of images.

Tags: advertising, culture, image, media, photography, rhetoric, semiotics, sociology

• 100-WATT BULBS IN STOCK. (FOR HOW LONG WE DO NOT KNOW) – “Let some government official come in and tell me I can’t sell these,” Jonathan Wright, who has owned Classic Lighting for 40 years, said defiantly as he surveyed his warren of upscale light fixtures and shelves filled with neatly stacked bulbs. “I’ll find them wherever I can get them and sell them for whatever they cost. People are buying in bulk because they want them.”

  In the last two months he has sold 3,000 of the 100-watt bulbs — the traditional mainstay of British light fixtures — more than 30 times the usual. People are buying 10 at a time, the limit per customer, even though their price is nearly 50% higher than it was a year ago.

  Indeed, his customers have a litany of complaints. CFL light is too dim, especially for reading and putting on makeup, the bulbs, which are a bit longer than incandescents, protrude from small light shades; they take a long time to reach full brightness; they cannot be dimmed by switches; they contain mercury and require special disposal.

Tags: bulb, cfl, consumption, fluorescent, forcing, green, incandescent, lighting, protest, rebellion

The latest Pew study asks about what Americans see as luxuries vs. necessities, as part of a longitudinal study of attitudes towards major categories of goods.

Clear majorities in polls conducted since 1973 have said that their TV set is something they couldn’t do without. Yet the latest Pew Research Center survey suggests Americans’ long love affair with their TV sets may be cooling.

Whether prompted by the recession or by the lure of new computers and other devices that can display TV programs as well as other kinds of streaming video, barely half (52%) of the public now say a television is a necessary part of their lives. That’s a decline of 12 percentage points since 2006 and the lowest proportion since 1973 to view a television as essential — even lower than the 57% who said a TV set was a necessity when the question was first asked in 1973.

Young adults have led the march away from the TV screen: Only 38% of those 30 or younger say a TV is a necessity, a 15-point decline since 2006. In contrast, perceptions of a television set as a necessity declined by just 6 points to 68% among respondents or older

Now far be it for me to impugn Pew (who seem like they do really smart and interesting pulse-taking research), but as of 2007 99% of US households had at least one TV, and the average household had 2.24 sets. So what’s the relationship here between what people say and what people do? If you’ve already got a TV set, how hard is it to say it’s not a necessity? [Of course, more people are getting video content online so that's part of the reason for the drop and Pew accounts for that, but I'm looking at the other issue]

I think we place a lot of extra importance on self-reported survey data, where people express opinions, out of context. There’s no behavioral data here about what people are actually doing (i.e., selling their TV sets to buy something more important, or holding off buying new TV sets, etc.) If people respond to the question about the importance of the TV in a new way, does that really mean the perception of the TV has changed or does it point to a different way to answer the question?

What do you think this bit of data means? What are the consequences or impacts? Who should be taking notice of it, and what should they do?

Tags: attitudes, consumers, data, pew, research, survey, television, tv

Widget

During the 2008 Presidential election, colored cherries at this
Minneapolis airport bar let you indicate your political affiliation



Tooltip

Door lock at Hotel Blake, Chicago



Fixed layout

Raised ring in cup lid keeps stacked cups from slipping



Related posts: Interfaces IRL

Tags: 2008 election, airport bar, cup, door, hotel, in real life, interaction design, interface, irl, IX, tooltip, user experience, UX, widget

• Whitney Quesenbery's workshop on selecting user research methodologies (PDF) – This is definitely an FAQ and this paper gives some good frameworks for choosing. Best stuff starts on page 9.
• A business will gain from 10 to 50% more customers using a air dancer inflatable puppet. – Drivers tune out the surrounding signs. They are focused on the road and ahead. If a driver was to read and look at each business on every block he or she drives by, they would simply have sensory overload. An air dancer placed within their field of vision, dancing and waving around with your message simply can not be tuned out.

  Only the best air dancer material (1.3 oz coated ripstop), artwork is cut and sewn with boat sail insignia material. We make them right here in our California facility. Unlike other units that last 6 weeks, our unit will last 6 months. Dancer warranty / 90 days and workmanship warranty / 6 months. Fan warranty is one year. The best dancing balloon warranty in the industry. We only use the 18” fan. Some companies use only a 12” fan.

  Including Air Dancer, Arrow Dancer, Fly Guy and 2 Leg Patented Dancing Man

• Kaboom Advertising – Street Stunts – Whether it’s a huge gorilla chasing a banana through the streets of a major market or a giant smile running and hugging a donor at a major high-end fundraising gala, we create circumstances that attract the attention of the local market and publicity to fuel peer-to-peer recommendations. By inviting or leaking the event to the press, the brand is given a bit more credibility and prolonged exposure to the community at large.

Tags: advertising, air, approach, attention, buzz, dancer, event, fan, gorilla, inflatables, message, methods, research, street, system:filetype:pdf, system:media:document, tools

A morning at the Santa Barbara zoo reveals some interesting frames and reframes.

Donors to the zoo are “Foster Feeders”, a more nurturing and sustaining view of how cash ends up as food.

Adding a card to a parking meter is an attempt to present the payment-for-service device as a donation opportunity. It’s a bit of a leap and maybe not the right connotation for the zoo’s purposes.

You could pay to ride with a plastic giraffe, or you could gaze upon a real one.

Even the benches are up for sponsorship. Here’s a plaque-hole which may simply be a lack of maintenance but gently offers the possibility of Your Name Here.

On display at a new exhibit: Man.

Cockroaches made all the more frightening when a puppeteer-like hand enters the frame to flip them over, pluck out the dead ones, and drop off some food.

Everyone gets the chance to be a zoo animal!

Tags: animal, cockroach, display, donation, donor, egg, exhibit, frame, funding, giraffe, man, money, plaque, reframe, santa barabara, solicitation, zoo

• Large collection of (actual?) screenplay pitches (technically query letters). – Just one:
  Title: Remnants of Hammers
  Logline: Constant bickering drives this comedy-drama as the plots of immature Bill, rabble-rousing Eldon, and ex-Marine George converge upon poor Dr. FitzUrse.
• The Che brand – In "Che’s Afterlife.” Casey has written a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame. It is about how ideas travel and mutate in this age of globalization, how concepts of political ideology have increasingly come to be trumped by notions of commerce and cool and chic, and how the historical Che gave way to other Ches: St. Che, said to possess the ability to perform miracles; Chesucristo, a Christ-like figure revered for his ideals, not his advocacy of violence; an entrepreneurial Che, promoting the lesson “that individuals should honestly strive to produce their utmost for the good of all”; and the Rock ’n’ Roll Che, more representative of youthful anti-authoritarianism than of any political dogma. Che has become a generic symbol of the underdog, the idealist, the iconoclast, the man willing to die for a cause. He has become “the quintessential postmodern icon” signifying “anything to anyone and everything to everyone.”

Tags: abstract, book, brand, business, che, cliche, fame, film, Guevara, history, icon, image, letter, meaning, movies, politics, query, selling, stories

• Vermont's first IHOP gets permission to go beyond standard franchise menu and offer Vermont maple syrup – “You can’t open up a Vermont pancake shop without Vermont maple syrup,” said Sam Handy Jr., who is the restaurant’s general manager and whose family owns the franchis
• Symbols of pot-subculture on the threshold of the mainstream – The significance of April 20 dates to a ritual begun in the early 1970s in which a group of Northern California teenagers smoked marijuana every day at 4:20 p.m. Word of the ritual spread and expanded to a yearly event in various places. For fans of the drug, perhaps the biggest indicator of changing attitudes is how widespread the observance of April 20 has become, including its use in marketing campaigns for stoner-movie openings (like last year’s “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”) and as a peg for marijuana-related television programming (like the G4 network’s prime-time double bill Monday of “Super High Me” and “Half Baked”). Events tied to April 20 have “reached the tipping point in the last few years after being a completely underground phenomenon for a long time,” said Steven Hager, the creative director and former editor of High Times. “And I think that’s symptomatic of the fact that people’s perception of marijuana is reaching a tipping point.”
• Chinese government database doesn't recognize all the language's characters, creating 60 million edge cases – New Chinese government computers are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters. At least 60 million Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new ID cards — unless they change their names to something more common. Since 2003 China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children. A government linguistics said the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.

Tags: 420, brand, character, code, codeword, consistency, database, design, drug, food, ihop, interface, item, localization, maple, marijuana, marketing, media, menu, name, pancake, pot, restaurant, smoking, subculture, symbol, syrup, tipping, UI, vermont