Posts tagged “core77”

Susan Dray on War Stories

In Lessons from the Front Line, Susan Dray reflects on the impact the War Stories have on her as a researcher.

These war stories are at times inspiring, at times comical, but always interesting. As I have followed them, I have increasingly been figuring out ways I might be able to use them with teams, clients and students. For example, I might share a selection of them of them to give a new team some sense of what to expect when we go into the field together. In addition, when I teach at the Technological University of Panama next year as a visiting Fulbright scholar, I plan to use these stories to help give students a better idea of the variety and nuance of ethnographic work. War Stories are rich not just in data but also in terms of technique, and they have made me think about my own experiences in the field.

Thanks to Susan for such a thoughtful and heartfelt piece, and to Core77 for publishing it!

Excerpt from Interviewing Users on Core77

core77-logo

Core77 has posted an excerpt from Interviewing Users.

From my introduction to the excerpt:

I’ve talked to a lot of practitioners about their own experiences in doing fieldwork and often they try to address challenges when they experience the symptoms, but that’s usually not the right time. Consider this analogy: if you have insomnia, the best solutions are not those that you roll out at 3am when you can’t sleep. To effectively counteract insomnia you have to make specific choices during the day, before you go to bed. Doing research with people is the same thing and ideally you approach this sort of work with a well-defined perspective that will inform all of the inevitable detailed, specific, tactical problem solving.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from julienorvaisas] An iPhone App Helps the Blind Identify Currency [NYTimes.com] – [Feature Evolution: Clever use of built-in iPhone camera and speaker to provide a critical service to the blind.] For the millions of blind people living in the United States, paying for something in cash can pose major challenges because there is no difference between the size and shape of a $1 or $100 bill. To tackle this problem, many blind people set up systems to identify a bill’s value by folding the notes into different sizes and shapes, which then make them easily identifiable later. A new application, the LookTel Money Reader, available for $2 on the Apple iOS platform, hopes to help solve this problem by taking advantage of the devices camera to “read money” and speak the value of the currency out loud.
  • [from julienorvaisas] How Designer Marc Ecko Is Using Foursquare to Spank School Spankers | Fast Company – [App Evolution: Foursquare is being employed as an tool of activism – a check-in at a school gets you user-generated reports of the school's record of corporal punishment. An interesting evolution of the application, potentially turning regular users/consumers/players into citizen-heroes, broadcasting more than just location.] Beyond the Foursquare integration, there's a larger game element at play. "Think of Unlimited Justice as a game, where you're the hero. But, instead of saving some far away, imaginary land, you're doing good, right here, in America," Ecko says in his promotional YouTube video. Users of the service not only find out about school that practice spanking, they rack up points on a leader board as they watch videos, connect over social networks, and voice their discontent over the practice to leaders. "Go viral, spread the word, and build your credibility as the ultimate activist."
  • [from steve_portigal] Core77 Design Awards – [Bring distributed collaboration to the awards game, Core enters the game just as the game is changing. Well done!] Instead of bringing everyone to one location, we took a new approach to assembling the jury, distributing the field globally. No plane fuel, more legroom. Our Jury Captains are based in 13 cities spread around eight countries. Each will recruit four people from their area to form a locally-based multidisciplinary Jury Team. They get to do the judging in their own location, and we’ll provide the snacks. Once their results are finalized and validated, the teams will reconvene for a live web broadcast revealing their Winners, Runners-up and Notables, and the reasoning behind their choices. And they’ll do it all without jet lag.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] What’s up with ewwww? [Lunapads Blog] – [Thoughtful response by the Lunapad folks triggered – in part – by my Core77] What we call the “ewww” factor is a fact of life here at Lunapads (although most of the feedback we receive is overwhelmingly supportive, when it does come up it can kind of wreck your day.) Recently however there have been some interesting examples that have given me pause for thought about how we respond to it. Are washable cloth menstrual pads gross?And yet I certainly didn’t start my journey of consciousness around menstruation where I am today. In fact, I’m sure that once upon a time, had you asked me what I thought of the idea of washable menstrual pads I might well have been totally icked. Apparently, what is and is not gross/disgusting etc to us today is not necessarily true for tomorrow.

Lunapads or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Discomfort


My second column for Core77, Lunapads or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Discomfort is up. Here’s a potentially knee-jerk-reaction-inducing excerpt, so I recommend clicking through to see the whole piece.

There are so many signals here that buck the mainstream norm for “feminine hygiene.” Where current imagery might feature billowing swathes of diaphanous fabric, smiling models and free birds winging on high, here we have two enthusiastic, potentially sexually aggressive women. Instead of handling the product discreetly, they are thrusting it towards us in celebration? Challenge?

If they were selling, oh I don’t know, maybe ice cream, I’d find this pretty hot. If I’m accurate in picking up (subtle for someone with my too-too-straight life) lesbian cues, then even more so. I’m kinda freaked out by these women, but mmm, sexy. But oh, no, it’s not ice cream. It’s definitely not ice cream. It’s menstrual cups (umm, what?) Good Lord, boys, head for the hills!

Also see previously on Core77 Homer Simpson’s Duff Beer: Barley, Hops and Cultural Stories?

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment [NYTimes.com] – [In which the blogger goes to a cafe with a No Computers rule and tries to use his e-Reader, then gets into a debate about whether an e-Reader is really a computer or not. A bit of a tempest in a teapot; looking to connect to a larger social crisis which isn't occurring]
  • [from steve_portigal] Skill Building for Design Innovators (from CHIFOO) [All This ChittahChattah] – Steve will take a look at some fundamental skills that underlie the creation and launch of innovative goods and services. He will discuss the personal skills that he considers to be “the muscles of innovators” and the ways you can build these important muscles, including noticing, understanding cultural context, maintaining exposure to pop culture, synthesizing, drawing, wordsmithing, listening, and prototyping.
  • [from steve_portigal] Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery [UIE Tips] – [This makes a good companion piece to my recent CHIFOO presentation "Skill Building for Design Innovations"]
  • [from steve_portigal] An interview with Eric Ludlum of Core77 [All This ChittahChattah] – The Dutch Master project is a natural extension for Core and also myself. Having gone through the industrial design program at Pratt Institute, and then founding Core77, covering industrial design, with Stu Constantine and myself always being on the outside of the industry in terms of actually participating, but then covering it, watching it from the inside. The Dutch Master, and previous to the Dutch Master, the Blu Fom shoe have been our attempts at doing some product development and design.
  • [from steve_portigal] Announcing the Core77 Flagship Retail Store in Portland Oregon! [Core77] – [Eric Ludlum of Core77 takes some of the themes he shared with us in the recent Ambidextrous interview and pushes them further with the opening of a Core77 retail space. I was surprised to visit it recently and see that it wasn't a curated museum store, but instead a 'Hand-Eye Supply' outlet] If there is a poster-boy, a hero, of Hand-Eye Design, it is Bucky Fuller. Who practiced sustainability, who advocated design-thinking, who studied the needs of the human being, but who understood these as parts of the whole enterprise of doing. He is the guy who, as good designers do, kept all that in his head and in his heart and used it as he MADE THINGS -not for the sake of self-expression or commercialism but because they had to be done. And that work was not birthed effortlessly from within but dragged out of the world in handfuls, built-up slowly into something meaningful through sketches and prototypes, mock-ups and fabrication. That is the design philosophy of Core77's Hand-Eye Supply.

Sexy Ergonomics

I was shopping for laptops recently, and was shocked by how difficult it was to find a reasonably priced model with a comfortable keyboard and trackpad, and a front edge that was wrist-friendly. The experience made me wonder why so little attention seemed to be being paid to such a fundamental aspect of the product.

Why don’t ergonomics have more sex appeal? Shouldn’t a well-designed physical interfacing of human and built object be one of the most valued aspects of design? While in truth ergonomics are interwoven (or should be) with aesthetics and materials, our excitement seems to gravitate towards how things look and feel, or cleverness of concept, rather than how well they work with us.

A quick read through this recent interview with Jonathan Ive on Core77 reveals a worshipful discussion of iPhone 4 materials.

It is this sort of materials obsession and constant experimentation that led to a decision to use scratch-resistant aluminosilicate glass for the front and back of the phone, as well as developing their own variant of stainless steel to edge the device.

I had to travel all the way back to 2007 to find someone talking specifically about a sexy merger of design and ergonomics/usability.

Is it that when ergonomics work, they are invisible? That they generally succeed by creating an absence of negative experience, but don’t extend into the realm of pleasure creation, where they might generate more attention?

Dieter Rams’ “weniger, aber besser (less, but better)” design philosophy – and indeed Jonathan Ive’s as well – heads in a similar direction – the absence of superfluous elements, but yet we still find it sexy.

Perhaps part of the picture is the lack of sex appeal that discussions of ergonomics tend to have. Is this an issue of professional culture? What is more important than objects that – never mind giving us pleasure – at the very least don’t injure us? Maybe that’s it – it’s too serious an aspect of design to engender the fun spirit we find in aesthetics?

The movie Waterworld (one of a handful of movies-most-people-think-are-bad that I like), while over the top and mostly quite silly, nicely illustrates the balletic relationship of person and object that good ergonomics make possible, as Kevin Costner’s character Mariner single-handedly sails and otherwise operates his boat throughout the film. The boat’s steampunk aesthetic won’t be for everyone, but it’s perfectly designed to work with the needs of its user, and to me there’s something really sexy about that.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from Dan_Soltzberg] The clever furniture designs of OOOMS [Core77] – Some wonderfully playful furniture by Dutch firm OOMS. The "Low-Res Chair" at the bottom of the page is sheer genius.
  • [from julienorvaisas] The art of slow reading [www.guardian.co.uk] – [Will unplugging from technology really help us read more attentively, as the article suggests?] First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.
  • [from steve_portigal] Pandora, MOG, Apple, and online music’s future [The New Yorker] – [Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the digital listening experience with clarity and insight] No one knows what the future of the music business will look like, but the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car. That box was once a radio or a stereo; now it’s a computer… Sometimes we will be the d.j.s, and sometimes the machines will be, and we may be surprised by which we prefer.

An interview with Eric Ludlum of Core77


In 2009, Industrial Design supersite Core77 took the extraordinary step of launching its own product: the Dutch Master bicycle, made in New York City. While they had experimented with the Fila Blu Fom sneaker in 2006, this effort was marked by a more deliberate consideration for product design over mere cross-branding. I talked with Core77 partner Eric Ludlum about the Dutch Master effort and what it revealed. A condensed version of our conversation was published recently in Ambidextrous Magazine (view the PDF here) while the complete interview (which explores some other issues around craft production and craft consumption) is below.

Eric Ludlum: The Dutch Master project is a natural extension for Core and also myself. Having gone through the industrial design program at Pratt Institute, and then founding Core77, covering industrial design, with Stu Constantine and myself always being on the outside of the industry in terms of actually participating, but then covering it, watching it from the inside. The Dutch Master, and previous to the Dutch Master, the Blu Fom shoe have been our attempts at doing some product development and design.

In particular, the Dutch Master being more of a story than a product. Our background is as a magazine and place where design stories get told. So if there’s any kind of expertise we have it’s recognizing good stories and promoting them. With the Dutch Master, we actually got to write the story and promote it.

Steve Portigal: Was there an aspect of that with the story of the Blu Fom shoe?

EL: The Blu Fom was just a name, and actually, the concept behind it came from the model-making material designers used to use – mostly. There’s not too much use of it now, but the insulation foam that would be used to make the mock ups, either ergonomic models or actual look models of products. Definitely from my experience in school back in the mid-’90s, it was a staple of the process. With Core77, it was an insider take on industrial design. It was our insider wink-wink product. Very quintessential ID project. I think it was 2005 that we came out with it, and it had 300 pairs made by Fila. We worked with Phil Russo while he was there. Again, it really central to the story of it and the presentation on the web, pushing that out to other blogs, other web based media.

SP: So when you had this opportunity to write the story for Dutch Master, what is that story?

EL: With the Dutch Master, we wanted to take the starting point with New York City manufacturing. The interest level was there for a bicycle in Core77 because we’re all very interested in bicycling. A few of us actually commute by bike, so it was a natural product choice for us. But once we started getting down to the actual decision about what it was going to be and what the story was going to be, we were looking at New York City and the disappearance of manufacturing, and how really stunning it is to find something still made there.

That was the Worksman frame, and made in New York City for over 100 years. It formed the basis of the project. From there, it was like how do we create a product around it and extend the idea of New York City manufacturing and local production, as well as trying to be saleable. Hit some market price points that would make the project economically viable for us.

SP: That makes me think about who is the target customer. Did you have a sense of that?

EL: I guess there would be two. To some degree, we knew that the bike itself wouldn’t a real profit center for us. There’s the market of the consumer of ideas that’s out there on the Internet. In that case, it’s like a branding exercise for us. To be like, “Here is something we feel represents our nature as a company. Here is a way to communicate it to people.” There’s one market there, which is the much broader market. People consume that product by just seeing it.

Then the actual market for the bike itself: Through the process of developing the bike, the market started to move higher and higher based on this being a craft process where there’s a lot of skilled labor involved with actually producing it. It naturally tends to push the market price point higher. That informs the aesthetics of the products as well. Once you start moving into that higher rent neighborhood, it means that certain things are going to have to look a certain way. So inclusion of other accents on the bike, or an overall aesthetic that matches the rough luck look that you’d see out there in trendy restaurants or hotels.

SP: I had this reaction when I saw the bike, and I saw what it was selling for. I was surprised. I’m not a connoisseur of bikes. I haven’t shopped for a bike. I haven’t bought a new bike in a very, very long time, if ever. It wasn’t an informed perspective, but in general, I think of a bicycle as a commodity product. When I saw that it was more of an exclusive product, with some of what you’re describing it and at that price point, I was really surprised.

It makes me wonder in general about commodities going exclusive. Someone was telling me about heirloom chickens. I believe as a consumer that there’s more quality in those things. I wonder if you have any thoughts about this general movement towards many things being created at a level of – I’ve got to be careful with the word – I’ll call it exclusivity.

EL: Yeah, I think maybe in the case of the chicken as well, but definitely in the bike, the marketplace dictates where the opportunities lie for small run manufacturing or small run production. So the people who are very expert consumers of chickens or bikes, they are a tiny fraction of the overall market. They’re the ones who are willing to pay a premium, so now whatever your product is, it’s going to be a fairly low volume item, meaning that if you were going to have it as a sustainable business, the prices are going to have to have a fairly high margin, so you can keep going.

In the case of the bike, we’re doing them build-to-order, and putting them out there for sale on an ongoing basis. We want orders to trickle in a bit, so that production of the bicycle isn’t a chore that we hate because we’re squeaking just a little bit of profit out of it instead of other things we should be doing that would be making money. For it to be a viable product, it has to have some kind of ongoing benefit to the producer.

I don’t know about the gap between craft production and mass-market, how people would be able to bridge that, some kind of manufactured bespoke or semi-exclusive product. It seems like if the market really does kind of push you to one side or the other.

SP: You’re bringing the the producers frame in. I’m glad to get the benefit of your perspective on it because I think of it as a consumer in categories that I’m involved in as a consumer, like chickens or bikes or ice cream. You made an interesting point early on where you said that looking at what the manufacturing process was going to do to the cost, that then informs the design, the details, the trim, the materials, and so on. It has to be chosen in a way that supported the price point. Is that right?

EL: Yeah, definitely.

SP: So if you’re going to choose to do it in a small manufacturing way, it needs to be done in a way that is beneficial to the producer, and then the sort of details of the design have to send a specific message to the consumer. So you create a coherent story. I hate to bring up chickens again, but kind of a chicken and egg between the whole set of decisions. I guess it comes from choosing to be small manufacturing.

EL: Yeah. As an example, perhaps sports cars or other performance related products. Maybe like high-end electronics. The aesthetic becomes one of communicating that added performance, as an exclusivity or surplus of its abilities. I think that’s something that mass manufacturing picks up on and imitates in the mid-market, like in vehicles, for instance.

SP: There’s a look to an organic farmers’ market. You go into your grocery store, you can find some of those visual cues being replicated.

EL: Right now, it is a trend and will have a life cycle within the marketplace. It starts out as a fringe kind of happening, and then it will move, be adopted, and make its way through. I don’t know if we’re seeing that too much with actual consumer products, but we definitely see it with things like the chocolates or the craft brewing, like micro brews with the larger breweries. Budweiser or Michelob, even though they don’t replicate the taste of craft beers, they’re replicating the packaging and coloration.

SP: I read an article in the New Yorker about the craft brewing movement. They pointed out that micro brewing and craft brewing are actually very different. The scale of micro brewing is enormous relative to scale of craft brewing. You had mass breweries, and you had this micro‚Äëbrewery emerge that entered the public consciousness. That lasted for a while, and now you’ve got this even smaller business able to compete in some way for shelf space and for mind share. That wasn’t possible before.

EL: In that example, micro brews came out at a time when Internet wasn’t around. I feel that the Internet is what has helped drive a lot of the craft – the reemergence of interest in craft across the board. Just from DIY stuff that you see on the web to organizing small social groups or craft fairs or whatever. It seems like it really is the marketing or the communications, essentially. It’s the thing that has changed, where as even in the ’80s when you wanted to make alternative beer, if you wanted to continue to do it and make money off of it, you’d have to scale to a certain size to make it viable. Perhaps now, maybe the ethos of it has come around.

If you can just get by and consider “craft” as a profession and make enough money to support yourself with it, it’s a worthwhile thing to do with your time. Maybe it has gone hand in hand with the actual development of the communication channels that would allow you to sell your product or distribute it to a smaller set of stores or venues has gone hand in hand with emergence of that as a respectable or viable or attractive lifestyle.

SP: One of the threads I wanted to explore with this in the fact that we’re in a recession right now. Lots and lots of ink is being spilled about people giving up on this, not buying new stocks. They’re buying more Spam, or whatever it is we think people are doing.

At the same time, we’re learning about heirloom chickens and Core77 is putting out a higher priced bicycle, for example. Do you see any relationship between those two kinds of forces or events?

EL: With us and the Dutch Master, we knew that it wasn’t going to be a blockbuster for us. It wasn’t going to make a bunch of money. We’re doing it for the sake of doing it, being driven by the impulse to create. The economic climate, that contributed to that. If you’ve got a lack of options to really be productive economically, it is counter intuitive, but there’s a little less pressure for us to measure projects economically. Maybe it’s slightly defeatist, but I guess when it comes back to the value system, if the economic value system is being downplayed for companies or individuals within a certain economic time, you look for other value systems that can justify what you’re doing. In the case of the Dutch Master, the first audience that I mentioned that would consume the idea, if part of the idea was that a web magazine could produce a bike, why not. In a way, it’s an empowering idea. Creating things isn’t solely the domain of big companies or companies that have a focus on producing things. It’s just the idea that we’re pushing forward to that first audience – these things are possible. If you can put together a story behind it, you can probably do it on an individual level.

In our case, it’s throwing support behind the value system of craft, which is basically producing. There is value in making things by hand or just for the sake of producing. A form of expression via product. In our case the economic times have lead us to measure this project in those terms. A large part of it is not economic, it’s more ideas that it represents. I think in the case of crafts on the web, or with industrial design or furniture design, and people who are students or fresh out of school people who end up making projects that aren’t necessarily going to be produced ever, but will go out onto the blogosphere and get a fair amount of publicity, they’re being paid in “ego bucks.” Their idea is receiving some kind of play, not necessarily a direct relationship to some benefit to them in the future, either job offers or having their objects picked up. It’s rewarding itself because they do have this new venue that wasn’t there ten years ago. The web allows their ideas to receive some kind of feedback. It allows them to gather some momentum and enthusiasm from the audience. There’s certainly a part in Dutch Master of getting positive feedback. That’s just encouraging that there’s some kind of payment and producing something that people like. It’s untethered from economic – or the marketplace.

SP: A lot of the projects highlighted on Core77 are things that might fall under the label of bottom of the pyramid, really amazing design solutions where somebody takes materials that are worth nothing and solves some incredible problem through a real clever use of design. You guys have highlighted many of those stories. I don’t know what the price of the Nano car in India is, but it’s some manufacturing and design revolution that will create change in that society by producing this affordable vehicle. It makes me wonder about could Core77 create a story around a bicycle or something else. A $49.00 bicycle that has a story, showcases a different set of design values that you guys also champion.

EL: Certainly. In that case, there’d be a different starting point for us. The starting point we took with the Dutch Master, which was the local manufacturing in New York. Our price point was predestined to creep higher and higher. Resetting it to the starting point of a rural Indian manufacturer and their capability, whether it’s metal forming or some other natural resource that is readily available that could be packaged into something, that would definitely lead into an entirely different product.

The story is that the first audience for that would be the same. Ultimately, with the Dutch Master, the story we were trying to tell to our audience, which we always focus on more of the insider aspect of our total audience. So the people who are actually involved in the design that we really want to speak to. I think the Dutch Master might have been one of trying to show that we have some affinity for the values of craft versus the values of mass-market manufacturing, whereas in the case of that project, more of a humanitarian aspect, it would be communicating to the audience that it’s a worthwhile application of design. I think both of those ideas are generally accepted already. It doesn’t need too much pushing from us, either of them. I guess if we do have any thought leadership role within the industry, it would probably be more on that side, the humanitarian side. So perhaps for the next project.

SP: I’m so interested in this idea of a story as a starting point. It’s not what I expected. I think about my own consumer perspective, say being in a grocery store and seeing 28 different kinds of eggs that are 99 cents or $1.29. Next to that on the shelf are eggs that are $7.00. They’re markedly different. When I look at A versus B, the producer of B has some explanation for me about why this thing is better. So my assumption is always that these are the best eggs possible. They’re healthier. They taste better. The chickens aren’t abused. They’re heirloom chickens. The thing you get for paying four or five X of the commodity solution is better. You’re going to experience that. That’s not the point you’re coming from. It’s been really clear that you’re not really thinking about it in terms of those things. You’re starting with a story and a vision for what you want to put out there.

EL: Yeah, I think that it’s the result of who we are as an organization. We’re a magazine. Stories are our strength. For some other organization it would actually be the manufacturing knowledge or the design skills of that. I think it’s the nature of the organization. We try to be self aware our own abilities, what we could actually pull off. Actually make something interesting out of it. Those people who are focused on the ten-cent price difference with their eggs, their organizational capabilities are distribution, efficiencies, or whatever else. Obviously, we’re in a position to just launch things, but they’re not essential to our core business. They have to have some revenue generating aspect to them, but the storytelling aspect, since we’re in the business of generating editorial, if they do have a strong story to them, it could come out of the editorial budget if we’re looking at it that way. The product development is the development of a story, which would then be told in the magazine.

I think I suffer and we suffer at Core77 from the solipsistic tendencies of designers in general. We want to make stuff because we want to make stuff. Your initial response to the bike with the price point and the use of our social capital in support of a cause being misdirected as you point out in your example of with India. We sometimes don’t tend to measure things along that kind of good of the whole, where as maybe we’re just focused on what is going to make our day-to-day more interesting, and what is going to maintain our interest level in something. Given that Core77 is a collection of people, Allan being a definite advocate of the green humanitarian side of things, but perhaps not being involved in the manufacture of something, like with the Dutch Master, this came from a different place. than the editorial face of the organization. It’s just a different thing. If it seems a little perhaps trite in its origin, I think that possibly it is.

Note: Since this interview was conducted, Core77 has alluded to plans to open a retail space in Portland, OR. I can’t wait to see how the ideas Eric was talking about do or don’t manifest in the new store.

Homer Simpson’s Duff Beer: Barley, Hops and Cultural Stories?


My first column for Core77, Homer Simpson’s Duff Beer: Barley, Hops and Cultural Stories? is up. Here’s an excerpt (but click through to see the whole piece):

We were in Rome a few weeks ago – essentially the bonus portion of my trip to Munich to speak about culture at the UPA conference. Turns out it’s cheaper to buy separate return tickets San Francisco-to-Rome and Rome-to-Munich, giving us an extra opportunity to explore. Upon arrival into Rome, we took the train into the city, with jet-lagged eyes upon early morning haze, grabbing clues from the random bits we could see out the window. As we passed through a train station, I spotted a young woman on the platform wearing a sweatshirt that read "Duff Beer" with the typeface and logo that is probably familiar to anyone who’s watched The Simpsons. I was intrigued at the notion that the Simpsons was popular enough in Italy that the young-and-hip would be not only be wearing clothing from the show but something more obscure than, say, Bart exclaiming "Non hanno una vacca, l’uomo!"

While the Duff website (in German) makes liberal use of the (dare I say it) comic Simpsons font, the copy emphasizes just regular beer stuff and offers no content that connects back to the actual Simpsons television show. This may be the most quiet, understated bit of post-modern marketing, evar. Even if the product doesn’t mention Homer or Springfield, we the consumer have Homer in our minds. We bring that experience to it. Sure, that information is not technically present in the product, so in theory one might come upon the product with no knowledge (that was the premise of The Gods Must Be Crazy). But Homer is everywhere in the culture (probably even in the Kalahari) – you probably can not feasibly experience this Duff Bier without that context.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from steve_portigal] On the Road – Complaints of Poor Attitude in Airport Body Scans [NYTimes.com] – [Why does a change in process and design generate such a dramatic change in behavior?] By far, most readers wrote to complain about screeners who were rude. Helaine Fendelman said she felt as if she were in a cage as a screener “yelled at me about why I wasn’t paying attention to those who had proceeded me” through the machine. Elizabeth Wiley wrote of the “generally bullying air of the experience.” Melissa Hickey said a screener “barked orders at me as if I were a common criminal.” Bob Michelet agreed with my view that being ordered around was a “boot camp-like experience,” as he put it. Mary P. Koss said she didn’t like being “yelled at” after a screener decided her fingers were not forming a triangle as instructed while she held her hands over her head. “When I exited the machine, I was yelled at again to stand in place,” she said.
  • [from steve_portigal] Starbucks "Olive Way" test store aggregates Starbucks concepts [The Associated Press] – [While I applaud Starbucks for focusing on the quality of their core product – the coffee – I'm not sure that their secondary product – the experience- will benefit from closeness to the baristas. They need to makeover the staff brand before customers will seek them out] What succeeds at Olive Way will most likely be spread to other Starbucks stores around the country. With muted, earthy colors, an indoor-outdoor fireplace, cushy chairs, and a menu with wine from the Pacific Northwest's vineyards and beer from local craft brewers, this 2,500-square-foot shop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood will reopen in the fall with espresso machines in the middle. The machines at Olive Way will be part of what executives call a coffee theater. Counters will be narrower — a slim as a foot in some places — to bring customers closer to baristas; the machines will brew one cup at a time to extract deeper flavor from beans. The store will be the chain's only location that sells beer and wine in the U.S
  • [from steve_portigal] Introducing New Core77 Columnist Steve Portigal! [Core77] – [I'll be writing something monthly for our friends at Core77]

Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine

Check out Core77 Wiretap: Portigal Consulting talk about the Analog Human and The Digital Machine. Here’s a teaser

Wonder what the conversation is like at someone else’s shop? Ever wanted to go backstage at a design firm? We asked Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas, and Dan Soltzberg of Portigal Consulting to sit down and share what they’re talking about. Here’s their open mike/chin-wag/theory slam.

Dan: I envisioned sitting down here to have this conversation and trying to figure out what we’re really talking about. So I pulled this statement out of some notes Steve wrote the other day: “The Analog Human; The Digital Machine.” I thought that was really provocative, so I wanted to start by asking you to say a little more about this idea?

Steve: I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in business and especially in marketing, this conceit that we can take humans-you know, messy, irrational, organic-and somehow cut them open and figure out the binary, rational, predictable, money-making algorithms that determine what they do. You see all this harnessing of science, you know, whether it’s neuro-this or lie detector-that or psychotherapy-this that gets used in the service of, not helping people, but helping marketers crack the nut of what people want, where is the desire center in the brain. You know, that we can learn things about people in a way that is “true”-that is predictable and true, and will determine consumption patterns. I find the idea that we should be able to do that just fascinating, because that’s not the world of people that we live in as people, so why as marketers or designers or producers do we think that we should turn people into things that they really aren’t?

Julie: There’s another aspect of that that I find really fascinating too: that you’re just talking about it in this dichotomy like there’s “us,” and then there’s “people.” Well, we’re people, right? We’re people trying to understand people and trying to create these scientific methods of doing it is just-I think you’re absolutely right-a conceit, and we often kind of remove ourselves from the situation. And I think empathy is a much more powerful tool than science in that case.

Meanwhile, here’s a few links we’ve come across in the past few days that pick up on some of the themes we explore in our dialog.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • IST2010ENG/ EDEBIYAT / 40 Districts 40 Books by 40 Authors: ‘My Istanbul’ series at Tüyap 2009… – My Istanbul is a monumental project of 40 books in which 40 distinguished authors told their own districts.

    40 authors born and lived in Istanbul wrote their own feelings, thoughts and memories in their own style about 40 districts of Istanbul for this project originated from the idea that every district has a different story, a different identity and a different spirit.

    Realized in cooperation with Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Literature Directorate and Heyamola Publications the project ‘My Istanbul’ will display Istanbul’s recent history by the words of witnesses while each district is being re-interpreted by sui generis views of the authors.

  • Jake Cressman – Part of the Hot Studio team that won the Portigal Consulting/Core77 1-Hour Design Challenge! Congrats, Jake!
  • CONGRATS: Hot wins ‘The Future of Digital Reading’ design challenge – Designers + Beer = Fun: Late on a Friday afternoon, a group of Hot’s designers and a good-natured friend gathered in Hot’s biggest conference room. We spread books of all sizes out on the conference table, salty and sweet snacks in every corner, and several six packs of beer on ice. What more could you need? We watched segments from Portigal Consulting’s video where they outlined their findings, and paused a few times to discuss amongst ourselves. After we got comfortable with the background material, we divided into a couple teams, each focusing on a different approach

    The winning SuperFlyer concept came from a collaboration of Shalin Amin, Holly Hagen, Leslie Kang, and our buddy Jake Cressman.

Reading Ahead: Design Challenge Winners

Reading ahead logo with space above

Our work is about understanding and acting, so our engagements typically include workshops where we facilitate client teams in using our research findings to generate concepts and start prioritizing ideas for further development.

For our self-funded Reading Ahead project, we had no client, so we took this action step by partnering with Industrial Design Supersite Core77 to put our research findings out to the global design community as the basis for a 1-Hour Design Challenge.

We worked with the Core77 team to review all the contest submissions received over the last month, and today are pleased to announce the contest winners.



(via Core77)

The latest 1 Hour Design Challenge, The Future of Digital Reading was based on Portigal Consulting’s Reading Ahead initiative-recent research around books, reading, behavior, and technology. There was great interest in this competition-it’s a hot topic these days of course, with introductions of new e-readers and a constant stream of “end-of-print” articles-and we had tremendous participation from design schools, individuals, and professional design firms.

The research provided for this design challenge was infused with stories about real people, so entries that referenced people and their habits were the most successful. Indeed, entries that embraced story-telling as a way to get their concepts across were much more compelling than those which simply presented a comprehensive list of features. (Yes, we get that the future is OLED displays!) It was daunting to see the number of submissions that were essentially a Kindle with feature statements that did away with the acknowledged limitations, so entries that ran the other way had a good chance of standing out. Still, there was great design thinking here, and a ton of design innovation here, and we were thrilled to see people (and teams) digging deep into the research and trying to refract it through the lens of artifact and experience.

This 1 Hour Design Challenge was a tough one to jury, but here (in suspenseful order…the Winner’s at the end) are the judges’ selections and comments. Congratulations to the Winner and Notables, and thanks to everyone who participated! Portigal Consulting and Core77 will each be donating $300, in the name of the prize winner, to 826 Valencia (a nonprofit that helps kids with expository and creative writing, and San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store). 826 Valencia will put together a celebratory gift bag (i.e., pirate booty!) to honor the winner.

And now for the results:

Notable: The PaperBack
Design: Stephanie Aaron, Kristin Grafe & Eric St. Onge (SVA MFA in Interaction Design, Class of 2011)
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The PaperBack provided several nice design solutions in one package. We were charmed with the notion of displaying the cover of the book on the back side of the device for others to see (of course, we’d expect a “hide cover” option in the preferences!), and the flip-the-book-over action to turn the page is something we liked from a couple of the entries. The user’s ability to customize the form factor to modify the book-from paperback to novel-was a great start, but we felt that it perhaps didn’t go far enough. Maybe combining this with the next Notable entry, “The Page,” would make for the killer concept.


Notable: The Page: Adaptive Delivery Device
Design: Manny Darden, Jae Yeop Kim & Scott Liao (Graduate Candidates, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design)
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It was irresistible to conflate “The PaperBack” device above with this concept, taking the form factor all the way to a newspaper-scale object. And self-supporting no less! The Page embraces some of the graphic conventions we’ve grown to love (in this case The New York Times) but then brings some live navigation and hand gestures into the mix. The photographs make for a compelling presentation, and again, made us dream about a device that folds all the way from a paperback out to a newspaper. Utopian? You bet.


Notable: Gutenberg
Design: Cameron Nielsen
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Cameron’s Gutenberg Local/Global Bookmaker considered a novel solution (pun intended): at-home book-making. Companies like Blurb have sprung up to address this as a service, but could print-on-demand happen in the home? We have the technology to print paper, but we don’t have the ability to make actual books. Provocative, with a sweet rendering, this entry made us think about revisiting a low-tech artifact rather than running immediately to an e-reader device.


Notable: Flipit
Design: Jdouble
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While the thrust of Jdouble’s flipit is (gulp) a Kindle with a different (and better UI), the brilliant innovation was the Tamagotchi-like feature: As the user reads more, the device gives positive feedback (in this case, a facial expression). The design research identified how social the act of reading can truly be, so it was a nice touch that the designer considered how the device itself could participate in the social behavior (a theory that is well supported by the work by Nass and Reeves at Stanford).


Notable: Booklight
Design: Kicker Studios
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Kicker’s Booklight rethinks where the digital data is. The classic solution for an e-book is that the data resides inside the device and comes to us up through a screen. The Booklight form factor, in contrast, is an embodiment of their rethinking: the content is projected down onto any blank book, decoupling the content from the presentation of the content. The Booklight lets the user select the size, heft, and feel of the surface they want to read on, giving back the tactility of the bound book many have grown to love. We were also amused to note that Kicker, known for phrases like “Tap is the New Click,” didn’t fall into the touchscreen swipe-to-turn-the-page interaction ubiquitous in the other submissions. Such restraint!


Notable: Mocks
Design: Stacey Greenebaum
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Stacey Greenebaum’s Mocks doesn’t try to solve everything; it takes one piece of the ecosystem and offers a provocative solution. People need to display their identity through their books, but as books move from atoms to bits, why not have a product that simply displays book titles in the home? The question of whether those titles represent actual or aspirational reading strips the identity issue down to its core: in that social moment at least, it’s not about the content.


WINNER: SuperFlyer 5000
Design: Hot Studio

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And, we have a winner! Hot Studio and Friends, with their concept for shared living room reading, takes the grand prize. There was a serious case of kitchen-sinkism on this (massive entry), but perhaps this was understandable given the large team they convened for the effort. While life in the living room is increasingly fragmented across devices, and media content keeps upping the hyper in order to grab some fraction of our attention span, Hot has a big idea a la Slow Food: bringing reading back into the media room so people can spend time together…with books. This concept reconsiders the entire reading gesture, going from hand-held/one foot away, to hands-free/10 feet away. Research participants told us that they saw books as a respite from their over-connected, screen-based lifestyles; here’s an application of those digital technologies that has the potential to engage people with reading in a new way.

The team also deserves special mention for the quality of their effort. They illustrate their solutions in a variety of ways, showing the power of quick-and-dirty paper and Photoshop prototyping.

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In bringing people together to create and inspire each other, they’ve generated a best-in-class artifact that reveals great process, uses scenarios based on research participants, and a demonstration of how humor can help sell an idea. Hot Studio modeled how it really should be done. Kudos!

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