It’s a gorgeous sunny Monday here in Pacifica (stay away fog, stay away!) and we’re on our way into another interesting week.

• Later this week we’re taking our clients and their prototype out into the field to meet users. We’re also exploring how people are using a brand new product, something no one on our client team has any idea about, so we’re expecting a very cool experience. Meanwhile, Tamara is printing out materials, putting incentives in envelopes, charging batteries, picking meetup and debrief locations and other organizing the hell out of the whole process.
• We’ll be launching a new feature here devoted to war stories from field work.
• Steve gets his revising on, hopefully wrapping up the next iteration of the book manuscript.
• We’ve put away all the leftover snacks from our event last week and Tamara will be posting some of the highlights (of the discussion, not necessarily the snacks).
• Out and about: Look for us at the inauguration of the new Orange Silicon Valley office, at SF Service Design Drinks, or the Tangible UX Happy Hour.
• Steve will be heading over to Mozilla to speak with UX researchers and designers about how to synthesize user research data.
• We’ll be making at least one announcement about an upcoming conference presentation, and in a wonderful location!
• While it’s not quite American Idol level of tension and suspense, we’ll be chatting with more people this week about collaborating with and even joining our team.
• What we’re consuming: Roadie, head rubs, margaritas.

• In NYC this weekend 13 Dunkin' Donuts stores will become Tim Hortons – This is the first arrival of Tim Hortons to New York City. There are 427 Dunkin’ Donuts within 10 miles of Times Square.
• Engendering Change in the Silicon Valley – An investigation by our friends at Orange Labs SF into the history, present, and emerging roles of women in technology.

• IxDA SF presents Interaction09 Redux – Saturday, March 14th – I'll be leading a condensed version of my IXDA workshop from Vancouver (Well we did all this research…now what), looking at a framework for transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.
• Steve's photos from Vancouver, Feb 2009 – I was in Vancouver to run a workshop at the IXDA conference and to visit family. Some of the photos will make their way into dedicated blog posts but meanwhile here's the whole set.
• Juice is in the details – Tropicana's redesign is being heralded for the caps that look like oranges. We've got a carton in the fridge and it's as plain as plain can be, so I'm not sure where these great caps are lurking. Meanwhile, back in 2006 we were seeing orange-looking caps on Florida's Natural packaging.
• Tropicana reverts to "classic" packaging after their crappy redesign is met with broad scorn – Mea pulpa: "Asked if he was chagrined that consumers rejected the changes he believed they wanted, Mr. Campbell replied: “I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”"

Construction site, London, July 2008

The hook – a huge metal piece that moves through the site at all heights – is painted Day-Glo orange to increase the likelihood that people will see it, and avoid it.

I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.

Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 1 and part 2.

From Orange, who put on MarCamp, comes Mobile MeshWalk, a “Design Crawl and Walking Camp.” A MeshWalk – well, I’m still learning what that is. Check out the organizer’s description here (the short version is “a conference which is held in motion, outside, documented and captured digitally”).

Last night was a launch party for Pikeo, a new photo sharing application. The product comes from France Telecom-Orange R&D (here in the Bay Area) but the party was at Adobe (since they provided Flex, an ingredient technology), where we had to sign a ridiculous NDA in order to gain access to the party. Food was pretty bad, conversation was pretty good, but seeing a demo wasn’t so easy. However, they had (as the FT-Orange people often do) lots of photography going on, and a few huge screens showing the Pikeo interface. One of them was regularly being updated with images from party, in some slideshow mode. The event was being archived as it was happening, with the archive being fed back into the event itself. You could see who was in the room just by standing in one spot and watching the screen. It wasn’t earthshaking but it was at least provocative to see the normal mode (go to an event, take pictures, go home and upload them, then review other’s pictures) subverted with a bit of technology and effort.

Here’s the setup (on flickr, ironically) before many people showed up.


ZoneTag Photo Tuesday 6:35 pm 12/5/06 San Francisco, California

Originally uploaded by Marc Davis.

A slideshow of photos from the day, running on a TV monitor at the end of the day

Check out a PDF of my talking points from my session at MarCamp/

It was a fun day, met some new people, met some others I’d heard of but never actually met, saw some familiar friendly faces as well. Some good discussions, some not as good. I was frankly really pleased with the session I ran; I talked for a bit and then turned it over to the group to discuss and we had great people who were smart, experienced, opinionated and articulate. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Indeed, some of the themes were echoed throughout the other sessions I was in.

Nice packaging detail. One might not notice the orange-section texture in the screw-top right away; makes for a nice surprise. I was strangely excited to discover this: a detail where none existed previously, a playfully gratuitous bit of decoration, a subtle feature that I felt the rush of discovery when encountering.