• Twitter's suggested users for you to follow – This lacks any personalization and reinforces the unfortunate star system that (social) media supports, but it's a good example of a "how to get started" scaffolding that I've written about before
• Jimmyjane's Sex Change Operation – my article on Core77 – We were invited to designer-sex-accessory firm Jimmyjane to learn more about their history and their approach. My thoughts on the company and its mission are posted on Core7.

  "Ethan Imboden worked an industrial designer for firms like Ecco and frogdesign, cranking out designs for everyday products (i.e., staplers and monitors), but grew to feel that he had something more to contribute. After starting his own design firm, he went with a client to the Adult Novelty Expo and saw bad design everywhere. He founded Jimmyjane as a response to that, and set out to use form, color, materials and so on to create premium vibrators. Now he's a visionary creative, with strong ideas about the Jimmyjane brand and how to embody those attributes across a range of products. Imboden fits the Be A Genius and Get It Right archetype we wrote about in interactions."

We Need Your Help, Vancouver, February 2009

The Killarney Market in Vancouver, B.C. accepts the inevitable: customers will take shopping carts in order to transport their groceries home. Rather than scolding customers or making the behavior illicit, they give permission and provide an extra service: cart retrieval. Sure, this could be better presented and better implemented, but it’s an interesting response to the common behavior, giving permission and supporting the obvious instead of demanding or forcing it to stop.

And a refreshing contrast from the increasingly common post-design solution (using our friend, technology) that locks cart wheels if they leave the property boundary, deterring removal in a rather unsubtle fashion.

Carts and Borders 1, Oakland, August 2006

Carts and Borders 2, Oakland, August 2006

Oh no, Oakland, August 2006

See also:
Curb Appeal
There is Nothing New Under the (Rising) Sun

I encountered one of those new spam-blocking services from earthlink. The sender’s email is not delivered, but instead placed in email-escrow, meanwhile, they are sent their own message with a link to a website where they can explicitly request that their email be delivered. The receipient gets some sort of request-for-permission from the sender, and if they grant it, the message (and all others) will be delivered.

Many spam messages can’t be properly replied to, so that takes care of a lot of the spam, and then others presumably won’t ask for permission, and of those that are left, well, presumably the recipient won’t grant them permission.

Anyway, this happened to me because I replied to someone. They sent me email. Shouldn’t Eartlink know that their customer made an explicit choice to correspond with me? When all I’m doing is replying, I certainly don’t expect to be challenged. But why should Eartlink care, right? They are protecting their own customers.

Weird.