• Discussion thread: Pictures in my blog don't appear in feedburner subscriber emails (not resolved) – People that receive this blog by email are apparently not seeing the images. However, I am. So what is screwed up, and how to fix it? This is daunting and frustrating.
• Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy (in 2009 we appear to need yet another brief yet direct intro to how ethnography supports business) – Recently, Intel ethnographers have veered into strategic questions. Like many high-tech companies, Intel makes long-term bets on how markets will play out. Will television and PC technology converge? Are baby boomers retaining their PC and TV habits as they age, or are they comfortable shifting to new media? Will smartphones take over most of the functions of personal computers? (thanks, Ben Kraal)

From Secret Lives of Comic Store Employees, Wired.com’s aspiring-to-anthropological-but-no-dice exploration of the subculture comes:

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
The perfectionists. Like the clerks with the eggs, inspecting each one.

That makes no sense. They’ve captured literally what they think the interviewee uttered (but not what they said, and certainly not what they meant). They should know enough contemporary culture to remember that Kevin Smith’s 1994 film Clerks featured a customer who would obsessively check every egg in every carton.

DANTE
This guy is going through all of the eggs. Look.

An ODD MAN sits on the floor, surrounded by cartons of eggs, all opened. He grabs a carton from the cooler case, pops it open, and examines each egg carefully.

This is a regular challenge in interviewing. We must embrace enough of the respondent’s context (and Kevin Smith movies are absolutely within the context of a Comic Store Employee) in order to understand what we’re hearing. Simply reporting it will produce misleading garbage.

Also see: Loss of Context – where the interviewer/editor mixes up Digital Equipment Corporation and a digital equipment corporation.

• Everything's amazing, nobody's happy – Thanks to John Zapolski for this one. Louis CK on Conan ranting with disgusted amazement against the dissatisfaction that he sees with what are clearly amazing new behaviors enabled by technology. Once again standup comedy provides some articulate-as-hell cultural observation. I don't encourage producers to take on Louis' attitude (basically, get over it) themselves, but it does provide a provocative point of view
• My latest column for interactions: Interacting with Advertising – There’s a famous saying (attributed to John Wanamaker, the retailing pioneer): “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” And while that’s still true, we propose this corollary: Half our encounters with advertising are dripping with evil; the trouble is, we don’t know which half.

My latest interactions column, Interacting With Advertising has just been published.

There’s a famous saying (attributed to John Wanamaker, the retailing pioneer): “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” And while that’s still true, we propose this corollary: Half our encounters with advertising are dripping with evil; the trouble is, we don’t know which half.

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: Forced Engagement

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
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

Today’s Doonesbury reminded me of a curious incident during my recent trip to L.A.

Getting off the freeway in Gardena, on the way to our appointment, I passed by this place:

Guard dog rental? Amazing heroic mural? I had to stop and take a picture. I did a few U-turns, stuck my camera out the window, took some shots (even from across the street I could hear that kennel sound of a million dogs barking), and headed the last mile to my appointment. Parked in front of our participant’s building and getting our gear ready, I was surprised when a Hummer pulled up beside us. The window rolled down and the uniformed driver, presumably the guy in the mural, said to me “You were taking pictures of my building?”

I really was confused; it was already a few minutes ago and a mile away; I was on to the next thing and it took about 15 seconds to realize that i) he had seen me across the street taking pictures and ii) he had got into his vehicle and followed me for a mile to check into it. Once I realized that he was not asking about the building I was currently standing in front of, but something from a few minutes ago, I explained that he had a beautiful mural. And this was a perfectly satisfactory answer. He told me that some of his puppies had been taken, and then introduced himself and gave me his business card. We wished each other a good day, and he drove off.

I thought about what had just transpired and how it could have been so different. There was nothing threatening about this man or his manner, just his context (a large and physically present individual who runs a security firm in a Hummer); given that he embodied a potential threat, he gave off a pleasing calmness, with no undertone of intimidation. I was not scared or uncomfortable; but I realized very quickly that the scenario was one where those feelings would be typical, and I attribute this guy’s serious coolness for keeping it that way.

See more of Steve’s L.A. photos here.

• What were arcades like? – This thread is making the blogosphere-rounds. The video game arcades that I and many of the posters grew up with are gone; gaming takes place in the home. But the question has produced a lot of good (if not yet thick) descriptions of the environment, the participants, and the social rules that developed. Personally, "arcade" suggests a dedicated business that would provide video games, pinball and billiards. But in high school, we would typically go to local merchants and hang out. Variety (or convenience) stores were obvious candidates, but we spent a lot of time and money in a laundromat/laundry service place. I opened my first ATM account at the bank next door and would take out $5 and get change from the laundry proprietor and play after school for a few hours. Even though we had computers at home with games on 'em, this was more fun.
• WonderCon: Comic book subculture now mainstream – "This is popular culture now," said Ferioli, 41, of Oakland, who attended his first comic book convention in New York when he was 16. "Look at Heath Ledger winning an Oscar for playing the Joker (in 'The Dark Knight'). These things that used to be fringe are now icons. It's not a subculture, it's the popular culture."
• Steve's photos from WonderCon 2005 – There's something utterly delightful seeing an Imperial Stormtrooper at a drinking fountain

Here’s the Nine O’Clock Gun in Vancouver’s Stanley Park

The cannon, safe inside a cage, fires every night at 9:00. And there are warning signs, of course. One is fairly straightforward

And the other looks like a parody example of Bad Visual Design.

Although the entire sign is hideous, confusing, hilarious yet disturbing, the bad copy, perhaps to cross cultures, is my (for lack of a better word) favorite. I love the phrase “Very Loud Please Cover Ears!” — note that the unnecessary quotes are actually included in the copy. It trumps the bad colors, the confusing icons, and the abysmal visual flow. I picture some bureaucrat, for whom English is not a first language, shouting out the copy to the sign designer, who took it down verbatim. Although just a comma would help a lot, but it still just reads embarrassingly wrong.

See more of my Vancouver 2009 pictures here.

• Interaction designer Oliver Bayley's blog about 3 months in a wheelchair while recovering from a snowboarding accident – The soap dispenser and sink were co-located so no problems there. But next I needed to dry my hands. Looking around I discovered that the paper towel dispenser was on the opposite wall from the sink. In order to get to it I had to maneuver my wheelchair, which meant grabbing the grips on the wheels with wet hands. Doing this felt very disjointed and somewhat unsanitary. I was immediately struck by the apparent lack of consideration for wheelchair bound patrons of this restroom within a hospital.
• A designer from frogdesign has her first mammogram and reflects on the experience – Two images came to me as I stood half naked responding to the technician’s requests to hold perfectly still — the first was the entwined bodies of two dancers from an article on choreographer Alonzo King that is currently featured in the design mind Motion issue, so compelling in their unity, singularity and flexibility; and the second was my daughter smiling and dancing with a sculpture at Maymont Park in Virginia — the cold stone made warm from its wave form and her delight in its human character.
• Designer Debbie Millman goes to the beauty salon and reflects on life and aging – As I navigate through these fears, I realize that after all the years of wanting, after all the years of feeling bad about who I was and where I was and what I had, I have recently come to the realization that I don’t want life to end. Ever. And though I grimace when I look at myself naked and I have given up trying to read the small type on a menu, I want to do want to continue to get older. So what, I am nearly 50. Big deal. Whether I am fat or thin, rich or poor or with more hair on my face than I have on my head, with each observation, with each day piled high on top of another, I am reminded that I still get to be right here as it all continues to unfold in front of me.

A few weeks ago I was driving to work and heard a story on NPR about an initiative to use cowboys to clear out the stray yet sacred cattle that roam the streets and marketplaces of New Dehli.

I thought the story was fascinating and wanted to post something about it, but I wasn’t sure which program or even which of several local NPR stations I’d been listening to.

When I did a quick search for the story, I couldn’t find it anywhere. What I did find was one of the best user experiences I’ve had on the Web.

Having trouble finding something? NPR can help you find a story or music you heard on an NPR program.

This was the promise on NPR’s Search page, but all I knew was the general topic of the story I was interested in, and the approximate time and location where I was driving when I heard it. I wasn’t too hopeful, but I filled out the search form anyway.

Three days later, I received this email (excerpted slightly):

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting NPR.

The piece you are referring to was aired on the public radio program Marketplace. Although heard on public radio, Marketplace is neither produced nor distributed by NPR.

Here is the link to the story you have requested: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/02/02/dehli_cowboys/.

For contact information, or to learn general information about the program, please visit http://marketplace.publicradio.org/.

Hats off to NPR for understanding that many of their customers need to engage in the kind of follow-up activity I was, and for creating a straightforward tool to help us get what we want from the experience.

It seems simple, but in so many cases, companies miss these opportunities completely, or offer solutions that don’t work so easily and elegantly.

Some cows I often pass on my way to work

As far as the Indian Cowboy story itself, I find the tradition-meets-attempt-at-purposeful-change aspect intriguing, as well as the way a whole business model has formed around these cows and the way they’re positioned in the culture.

They belong to thousands of unlicensed dairies around the city that make an estimated $120 million a year selling milk and yogurt. The owners of those dairies let the cattle forage for themselves, taking advantage of a Hindu custom of feeding cattle as a spiritual good deed.

It will be interesting to see how New Dehli’s attempts to alter this complex set of relationships plays out.

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