• The Comic Strip Museum in Brussels (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessiné. Belgisch Centrum voor het Stripverhaal) – A really interesting museum; I had no idea of the rich and important history of comics in Belgium, beyond Smurfs and Tintin they've produces an insane number of titles over the decades.
• Comics is the ninth art? – Although this post attributes the source to someone besides Morris, it does offer a bit more explanation about the set of arts
• Maurice De Bevere aka Morris – Belgian comic strip author who (according to the Comic Strip Museum in Brussels) coined the term The Ninth Art to describe comics

Top: Toilet paper (US)
Bottom: Toilet paper (Netherlands)

A research respondent recently described their challenges in redistributing goods from abroad, since it turns out that a “standard” shipping palette is actually a different size in the US and in Europe. Do conflicting standards necessarily inhibit interoperability? Would North American toilet paper operate properly in a Dutch dispenser? And what do those different standards say about our history, perspective, or values? Is the gestural usage different? Are hands or bottoms in different relative proportions here or there? Is there a different tradeoff around cost and (perceived?) cleanliness?

See my Amsterdam pictures here (Note that as of this writing, only a few have been uploaded, but there are plenty more to come in the next few weeks).

• FitFlops – the FlipFlop with the Gym Built In – What we girls really need is something like a flip flop that tones and trims our legs while we run errands. We have no free time…We Want a Workout While We Walk!” FitFlop midsoles incorporate patent-pending microwobbleboard ™ technology, to give you a workout while you walk. One woman reported feeling like she’d had a ‘bum-blasting’ workout after a half an hour of FitFlop-shod walking.

  (Thanks to CPT!)

• Love Land, first sex theme park in China closed before construction completed – Photographs showed workers pulling down a pair of white plastic legs and hips that appear to be the bottom half of a giant female mannequin towering over the park entrance. The mannequin is wearing a red G-string. The park manager, Lu Xiaoqing, had planned to have on hand naked human sculptures, giant models of genitals, sex technique “workshops” and a photography exhibition about the history of sex. The displays would have included lessons on safe sex and the proper use of condoms. Mr. Lu told China Daily that the park was being built “for the good of the public.” Love Land would be useful for sex education, he said, and help adults “enjoy a harmonious sex life.”
• Air Traveler Satisfaction Goes Up? Look Beyond The Data – The airline business scored 64 out of 100 in the first quarter of this year, a 3.2% increase over the same period a year ago. Airlines were still among the lowest-scoring businesses in the index, which measured customer satisfaction with the products or services of hotels, restaurants and 14 other sectors. Full-service restaurants scored highest at 84. Airlines scored far below their own index high of 72, achieved in 1994. "It certainly looks like most of these increases, if not all, are due to lower passenger load," says Claes Fornell, professor of business at the University of Michigan and index founder, noting that the recession has kept many Americans from traveling. The lower number of passengers "means more seat availability, shorter lines, more on-time arrival, fewer lost bags, and all that probably adds up to a slightly higher level of satisfaction." He noted that a reduction in the number of flights offered could erase the slight gains achieved in passenger satisfaction.

• The "Fling" is the first new chocolate bar Mars has introduced in more than 20 years – Wrapped in a shiny pink and sliver package, this delicate "chocolate finger" is intended for women. The word "finger" is an industry term for a long, slim confection, Mars spokesman Ryan Bowling says, but with ads that invite you to "Pleasure yourself" in pink lettering, consumers might come to other conclusions.

• Mass Customization of the Fiat 500 – A number of folks we recently met in Europe mentioned this new (although an updated classic) car as being perfect for their needs. The variation and customizing, while perhaps not unique in today's marketplace (I'm imaging the Mini's variability is similar if not beyond) was still striking: "The 500 is available with four different trim levels: Naked, Pop, Lounge, and Sport. Customers can choose also between 15 interior trims, 9 wheel options, 19 decals, and 12 body colours. There are over 500,000 different personalized combinations of the 500 that can be made by adding all kinds of accessories, decals, interior and exterior colours, and trims."
• Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas – Allison Arieff writes about "inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson" whose "work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues." I'm reminded of my formative experiences with Al Jaffee features from MAD magazine where he's describe future products or technologies, or explain (fancifully) the workings of some current product (i.e. bars of soap that are made with quick disappearing stuff on the outside and then a small interior core that takes a long long time to dissolve).
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt – Suggested to me by René Vendrig at the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, after my talk on looking at cultural differences based on everyday observations. He tells me "It is about traffic, but the real subject is human psychology and how we deal with that kind of situations."
• It's Not TV, It's HBO – HBO's standard-creating slogan, giving words to the premium experience of their programming.
• It's not just coffee, it's Starbucks. – New ad campaign for Starbucks attempts to differentiate on quality, but sounds just a bit familiar.
• All This ChittahChattah | Flying the sneaky skies – (see link for screen grab)

  While checking in online for a United Airlines flight, you may be offered the opportunity to upgrade to Economy Plus. It’s likely that most people decline upsells in many situations, though. The default would be to click “no thanks” and move on to completing the transaction. But United has done some tricky and manipulative interface design. The bright yellow arrow with bold text placed on the right is almost irresistible. E-commerce sites have trained us to envision a transaction moving from left to right (granted that they’ve landed on that model since it corresponds to how we read and other cultural factors); it’s very easy to click on the arrow and make a purchase you didn’t want. It takes cognitive work to search for the preferred option which is a lowly blue-underlined unbolded text link off to the left.

• Evil-interface design in airline website design spanked by European Commission – "Another common problem is the use of prechecked boxes offering services like travel insurance; consumers must uncheck the boxes to remove the unwanted charge." I've written before about United's website being slightly more subtle in their evilness, by offering an upgrade during check-in where the highly visible (colored graphic arrow) button in the default location will cost you tons of money; it's more effort to realize, locate, and decline the offer. Why do we live in a world where major brands want to sell us things that we don't want by tricking us? It's unconscionable that any company can claim to respect consumers and then pull crap like this.
• Cyd Harrell of Bolt | Peters reacts to the ludicrous Dell campaign trying to sell computers to women, in 2009 – "…a woman, with the last Dell I will ever own. It’s my current laptop, and I chose it because I needed a computer powerful enough to run screensharing tools and high-res video; I needed mobile broadband to stay in touch with my clients and employees, and not just my kid (heresy!); I needed my screen to look great when I go to meetings with clients. That is to say, I needed it for work. Dell, let’s make it official: you can bite me and the millions of other women who take themselves and their technology seriously."

  I love the articulate passion here, as well as the insight into what may have happened organizationally/culturally at Dell (ahem, really crappy research) that leads to such a horrendously offensive sales pitch to HALF of their buying population

• Oxfam Worldshake: a juice made from fairtrade produce from Cuba, Brazil, and Ecuador – Treehugger spotted this in Belgium in 2005, I bought one in Belgium last week. I was struck by Oxfam (an organization more well-known overseas than in North America) as a brand on a food product. I wonder what other products could be appropriately developed (and of course also branded) by non-profits, NGOs and charities. I'm not talking about silly cross promos like the United Airlines/American Cancer Society teddy bear I received recently, but where the mission of the organization is absolutely manifested in the production of the item itself. It makes perfect sense and it's what we expect from well-branded/designed products from the profit sector.

I took my last ride in my 1977 Datsun 280Z today. I’ve sold the car, and the new owner is picking it up tonight.

On this last drive, I patted the dashboard and said something like, “Sorry I have to sell you.” Which made me think about how some objects in my life are things I have relationships with, and some are just things.

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have to give up a pet, or a baby, when I feel sad about just seeing my car go.

I really don’t want to own it anymore-it just doesn’t serve my daily needs-but on a deeper, emotional level, I have a warm feeling towards it, and something significant is going on around giving it up.

This feeling about my Z is totally different from the way I felt when I got an iPhone, which was nonetheless strong as well. I woke up early the morning the contract with my old provider expired and drove right to the Apple store. This was like a consumer electronics booty call. Object lust.

But now my phone is just a thing I use. I feel more emotion about my Swiss Army knife.

And I never felt a thing for my computer, even though I probably spend more time with it than anything–inanimate or animate–in my life.

What’s up with that?

Actually, I’ve got some pretty good ideas about why all of this is the way it is, but I’d rather hear your comments about things you

• love
• lust after
• hate
• feel indifferent about

Artpiece made of clocks, Chicago MOMA

This list of 10 workplace skills of the future is going around the various ‘Scapes and ‘Spheres (it came to me on Twitter via Chris23). Without getting into whether the list is entirely correct or comprehensive, I think it’s incredibly thought-provoking.

For anyone involved in designing products–especially work environments and tools–it will be crucial to explore people’s daily lives and see what’s really happening: how these types of shifts are manifesting behaviorally and emotionally, and what new opportunities are being created as a result.

10 Workplace Skills of the Future

(From Bob Johansen’s book, Leaders Make the Future. Originally posted by Tessa Finlev in The Future Now blog.)

Ping Quotient
Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network

Longbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Cooperation Radar
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission

Multi-Capitalism
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual

Mobbability
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration

Protovation
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure

Influency
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique)

Signal/Noise Management
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

Emergensight
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales

Will this…

Magazine kiosk, San Francisco, 2008

be going the way of these…

Dead pay phone bank, Honolulu Airport, 2008

This Engadget piece on R&D efforts at the New York Times got me thinking about what gets lost as technology changes our physical routines. How gestures like folding up a newspaper and putting it under your arm to walk down the street become obsolete.

How many aspects of our behavior are influenced by the differences between how we consume online and print-based media?

What physical routines would you be sorry to see go away?

Sketch for curved shelf ©2007 Dan Soltzberg

There’s a testament to the power of openness as a spur to creative participation nestled in Scott Brown’s piece on early fan fiction in this month’s Wired.

Brown writes about the works Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s more avid readers created around his Sherlock Holmes novels, and how what were really continuity errors provided these folks with points of entry:

Sir Arthur, God bless him, didn’t write with an eye to what today’s nerd would call “continuity.” Crafting Holmes stories bored him, and he frequently lost track of details like the exact location of Watson’s Afghan war wound (was it the shoulder or the leg?) and the precise status of Mrs. Watson. But Sir Arthur’s table scraps, his inconsistencies and random allusions, made for a fan feast. From a throwaway line-a hilariously oblique reference such as “the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared”-scores of amateur yarns have been spun.

Conan Doyle’s omissions and errors left space for others to contribute. Less-than-fully-speced inputs–raw sketches, concept directions, overarching themes–can often leave more space for creative participation than a finely honed departure point.

Of course it depends on where in a development process one is and what the objectives are. (Sing, “a time to diverge, a time to converge” to the tune of The Byrds’ “Turn Turn Turn”).

In semi-related news, San Francisco IxDA will be exploring the use of prototypes at their May 26th event.

Related Posts:
Giving Away Time, and Moving with a Magic Thing (Quickies)
Human Behavior
Trying to find out things we didn’t even know to ask about