• Poets, Priests, and Politicians – my latest column for interactions magazine – In which I address the power of language in many types of interactions
• Mafia Finds Fans on Facebook – Thousands of users have joined fan pages devoted to top Mafia bosses on the social networking site Facebook.. A page devoted to Salvatore “Totò” Riina, the “boss of bosses,” who is serving 12 life sentences, has more than 2,228 fans, some of whom wished him a merry Christmas. Other fans called for the “immediate beatification” of Bernardo Provenzano, who was imprisoned in 2006. Relatives of Mafia victims expressed outrage.

• The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2008! – Amazing year-end roundup. Nice to see a couple of my posts (including the bathroom video I included in the All This ChittahChattah year-end roundup) as well as one of our client projects, HP's Halo teleconferencing system.
• A study of the relationships between self-control and religion – Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals. Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

  “Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said.

• NYT on the meaning of Tokyo Tower, fifty years later – Indeed, the tower seems to have won a new place in the national imagination, this time as a monument to a sepia-toned past. The change comes at a time when Japan as a whole seems to have lost confidence in its future, or has even resigned itself to slow decline. The change also underscores a broader point: how the passage of time can shift the meaning of national symbols — even ones as large as Tokyo Tower.

  “Tokyo Tower stood for a dream of the future, but that dream is gone,” said Masanori Nakamura, a professor emeritus of history at Tokyo’s Hitotsubashi University. “Tokyo Tower offers no more dreams, just as Japan has no more dreams.”
  …
  In the recent books and films, the tower often appears as a metaphor for what this graying nation feels it has lost in recent decades: the shared sense of purpose and youthful optimism that drove its economic miracle, or even the simpler lifestyles before Japan became an economic superpower.

• interactions magazine summarizes their highlights from 2008
  Including: A column by Steve Portigal that completely shredded our understanding of the “persona” tool in design

• Chirag Mehta of SAP reviews my recent interactions column
  And adds his own thoughts: Look beyond the problem space and preserve ambiguity
• Scouting NY – a blog about noticing
  “I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention. As it happens, it’s my job to pay attention, and I’ve started this blog to keep a record of what I see”

We were excited recently to see the New York Times review of Belkin’s GoStudio portable audio recorder. We led some early user research with target customers that informed Belkin’s overall strategy for this product.

Among other things, our work revealed that people didn’t associate the iPod with the high quality audio they expected a recording device to deliver. As well, the iPod is rarely seen an ingredient technology for another experience; rather most accessories add on to the iPod, and convey that message through form, finish, interface, and even their overall story. We identified that Belkin had two paths they could go by: either embrace the iPod (as in iHome and other iPoddy products) or deny the iPod (and create their own visual and task language). It’s great to see that Belkin’s final design emphasized the aesthetics of professional audio gear. In fact, the New York Times picked up on this embrace/deny tension in their headline: Another Use for the iPod – As a Memory Card.

In 2008 All This ChittahChattah hit our seventh anniversary. Here are some highlights from the past year.

• We found a toilet flusher that comes with a memo, I investigate the bathroom for Core77, and Dan gets trapped in the bathroom.
• I consider the culture of financial traders and then what happens when you don’t take that into account
• In world travels, Die Hard is globalized, appetizingness is culturally constructed, the revolutionary IDEO shopping card is old hat in Japan, I am saluted by a bear, Crocs make an appearance, friction never sleeps, some pictures from Japan here, here, and here, the world tour of donuts, how to say maybe, and Tokyo enjoyment
• I publish a year of my column, True Tales, for interactions: Persona Non Grata, Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me, The Journey Is The Reward, Hold Your Horses, Living In The Overlap, and Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• My flickr photos were lost forever and I wrote the obituary
• The nature of art
• Only-in-LA fading kitsch
• Tracking the process of observing cultural artifacts: 1. Bottom Biting Bug and 2. Ayumi Hamasaki
• Dan critiqued an AIGA Gain article about design research
• I’m not the only one who has a mythical mental model for how Netflix processes envelopes
• I’m interviewed by Influx Insights, profiled in a Japanese technology magazine, the Institute of Design student blog, and included in What Insight Does Ethnography Deliver?
• We celebrated Groundhog Day
• Dan reviews talks by Alan Cooper and Stefan Sagmeister
• Body image norms around the world and in Miami
• I notice bananas in London
• A visit to Celebration, Florida
• UPS shoehorns personas into a website user registration and I’m interviewed for a Forrester report on personas.
• A couple of examples of how seemingly simple problems are actually much more complex when it turns that people don’t simply adopt the solutions we’ve decided are best for them: school lunches and banking services
• Tattoos for children as a safety measure
• Advertising imitates art and advertising imitates advertising
• Observational ephemera: the series
• The creative processes of sound designer Ben Burtt and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Untouchable touchscreens, non-interactive kiosks, and advertising forcing functions
• The end of free cookies at Safeway
• The fallacy of measuring innovation
• My keynote from the Design Research Society conference, and my talk Research and Design: Ships in the Night? from User Research Friday
• Dan encounters Cloud Gate
• My workshop on noticing at the Design Research Conference; happiness and noticing; Dan and Steve write about the power of noticing for AIGA Gain
• We contribute to the Stone Cellars wine packaging redesign, new product innovations for BIC, and a new digital recording product for Belkin.
• My chapter was published in Age of Conversation 2
• I’m a guest for Lextant’s Design 40 weekly dialog and featured in a Lunar Design podcast about the speed of innovation and the pace of creativity
• We unearth some old correspondence with Malcolm Gladwell about, well, outliers.

• Philip Seymour Hoffman on the creative process
  “It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

• giving away time – conceptual IDEO prototyping experiment
  Great example of using an intervention to study an issue. IDEO mocks up a machine that prints up “free time” stickers and gives them out to people on the commuter train. What takes this beyond a piece of conceptual art is the analysis of the reactions. This is a tool that doesn’t need such a grandiose PR-friendly approach to be useful, of course. Tickets that offer a conceptual benefit could be a little activity in any sort of design research process; handing them out to someone and asking how they’d use it. See also “Moving With A Magic Thing”
• Moving With A Magic Thing
  The second technique, “moving with a magic thing” works according to a similar concept. It’s claimed to be useful when finding uses for new technology, by giving users the new thing (or a mock-up of it) and getting them to go away and discover uses for it.

• More than 1/6 of households have only cell phones
  The portion of homes with cell phones but no landlines has grown to 18 percent, led by adults living with unrelated roommates, renters and young people, according to federal figures released Wednesday. An additional 13 percent of households have landlines but get all or nearly all calls on their cells. That means about three in 10 households are essentially reachable only on their wireless phones. The figures, covering the first half of 2008, underscore how consumers have been steadily abandoning traditional landline phones in favor of cells. The 18 percent in cell-only households compares with 16 percent in the second half of 2007, and just 7 percent in the first half of 2005.

• Nine women can’t have a baby in one month
  A great collection of so-called project management lingo; it’s the phrases you hear from businesspeople
• Airlines Use ‘Black Boxes’ to Improve Service
  Interesting attempts at disruptive transparency as airlines educate passengers about what data is collected in the “black box” (it’s actually orange), what type of mistakes pilots make, and how that data is used to improve. It’s being used in Japan but being scuttled in the US where admitting mistakes doesn’t seem to be in the traditional best interests of pilot unions, airline management, and the like.