In Fast Company’s Green Guru Gone Wrong there’s a sobering examination of sustainability architect William McDonough and the work that he’s doing. I am sure this type of investigation is highly contentious, especially when icons like McDonough are revealed to be less-than-perfect.

But it’s interesting to note that some the project failures are tied to a dramatic lack of understanding of the current behaviors and future needs of target customers.

Shannon May smelled the rot firsthand. An anthropology PhD student from UC Berkeley who lived in Huangbaiyu for nearly two years, May first met McDonough in 2005, the year the project broke ground. But within several months, it became apparent to May that everything from the village’s overall design to its construction was deeply flawed. The homes were suburban-tract style with garages, despite the fact that only four of the expected 1,400 villagers had cars. The backyards were too small for growing feed corn or raising animals, which the villagers needed to make their living. But most absurd to her eye was the plan to use agricultural waste to fuel the biogas plant to power the village: leftover corncobs and stalks were the winter food supply for the cashmere goats, the area’s leading source of cash. Using them meant the goats would starve.

“I started calling Bill and telling him these things, and he would be very responsive and concerned on the phone,” says May, the blonde seen standing behind McDonough in Friedman’s documentary. “What troubled me was that it was as if he knew nothing about the way these people lived. And he seemed concerned, but then nothing would happen after these phone calls.” May says McDonough visited the village only twice while she lived there “for one or two hours at a time, and only when there was a video camera following him.” The supposedly $3,500 homes were costing nearly $12,000 to build, more than 10 times the villagers’ median income. By 2006, only two families had moved in, and they did so because their previous homes had burned down. Even then, they had to use antiquated heating rigs because the renewable energy systems didn’t work.

And even more interesting is that the failure isn’t about a lack of information about these customers, it’s a failure of process to integrate that information into the project decisions.

One of the commercial breaks during the debut episode of Christian Slater’s new TV show, My Own Worst Enemy, started with a little recruiting pitch for the consulting agency that Slater’s character works for on the show, something along the lines of “we’re looking for a few good people.”

The spot listed a website for AJ Sun Consulting, the fictional character’s fictional employer. So of course I checked it out-I’m fascinated by this stuff.

The site was more substantial than I expected, sporting among its pages a mission statement, a privacy statement, and a client-access-only login field. And not a sign of it being a marketing platform for anything other than AJ Sun Consulting, until I had gotten as far as the fifth question on the job application form on the Careers page. But there it was:

Are you interested in learning more about our company’s employee program with Chevy?
___ Yes
___ No

Which Chevy vehicle would you prefer as your company car?
___ Chevy Traverse
___ Chevy Camaro

Looking into the backstory, I found a May 2008 press release from NBC quoting Dino Bernacchi, General Motors’ Director of Marketing Alliances and Branded Entertainment:

“We call it Fusion Marketing – partnering with the creative community around ideas that build relationships with a passionate audience, but done through the lens of the entertainment property.”

And indeed, a quick check of Whois.net shows the site registered to General Electric, NBC’s parent company. (GE, furthering its forays into “fusion marketing,” also appears as Liz Lemon’s employer on the NBC show 30 Rock.)

For a while, there was a lot of buzz around companies and public figures trying to create a presence in Second Life and use that world to spur more action for themselves in this one. (The Second Life Video Gallery at New Business Horizons has some interesting artifacts around some of these efforts.)

So exactly what is it that’s happening, metaphysically, when I’m in “first life” interacting in a fake forum created by a real entity like GM to sell a real product through a fake premise?

I feel a little bit like the girl in the old A-Ha video–inhabiting a place that’s between real and virtual.

Related posts:
This Space Available
Collateral Damage
Field Research … In Second Life

From last Thursday’s SNL, Fred Armisen uses the latest tool for interactive visualization of election data. I love how the entire comedy routine is premised on the demonstration of the interface, essentially without any content.

My latest interactions column, Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff, has just been published.

I propose an incomplete framework for how companies go about making stuff (products, services, miscellaneous). In characterizing this as incomplete, I hope to hear about other approaches that will flesh out the framework.

1. Be a Genius and Get It Right
2. Be a Genius and Get It Wrong
3. Don’t Ask Customers If This Is What They Want
4. Do Whatever Any Customer Asks
5. Understand Needs and Design to Them

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.
Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• 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

• Ed Cotton: the power of analog in a digital world
  “Many of the most successful applications simply take something solid and dependable from the real world and put it onto the phone- flashlights, pints of beer, flames from Zippos and clocks…”

  We were at a concert the other night and while I was surprised at the number of actual lighters I saw held aloft, the singer commented on the number of pictures-of-flames-on-phones he was seeing from the stage.

Foresight’s Mental Capital and Wellbeing report has identified behaviors that can make people feel better about themselves.

Be curious
Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you

See also

• Ever notice? by Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg at AIGA Gain
• Workshop: Tap into your super-noticing power
• London Bananas

(Thanks, Gavin)

• Technology found to strengthen U.S. families – although it seems to be self-reporting data from a poll, so…?
  Researchers reported that family life has not been weakened, as many had feared, by new technology. Rather, families have compensated for the stress and hurry of modern life with cell phone calls, e-mail and text messages and other new forms of communication.
  …
  Wellman said families appreciated the innovations because “they know what each other is doing during the day.” This, he said, comports with his other research, which shows that technology “doesn’t cut back on their physical presence with each other. It has not cut down on their face time.”
  …
  The ease of being in touch has created a phenomenon that Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet project, calls “love taps,” in which couples exchange hellos and touch base with a regularity that did not exist 10 years ago.

• Pareidolia – the propensity to see faces or human characteristics in everything from cars to clouds
  A new study suggests people prefer cars to appear dominant, masculine and angry. Researchers hope to better understand what goes on in the brain when people see faces in objects.
  …
  Study participants assessed cars based on a system known as geometric morphometrics, which allowed the men and women to rate certain traits on a sliding scale (such as “infancy” to “adulthood”). The traits represented maturity, sex, attitudes, emotions, and personality – all things that people infer from human faces at a single glance.

  After rating car traits, participants then answered the question of whether they saw a human face, animal face or no face at all on the cars. They drew facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth on the car images whenever they did see faces.
  …
  They also want to conduct research using people in Ethiopia who don’t have familiarity with modern car models, and eventually extend their research across other countries.

  (via Core77)

• Image Search for XP-tan
  Different moe representations for Windows XP
• Firefox-ko
  A “fursonafication” of the browser Mozilla Firefox
• Moe anthropomorphism
  Japanese anime/manga style anthropomorphizing of non-human beings, objects, concepts etc. including Internet Explorer’s Stop button, Windows ME, Norton Anti-Virus, tanks, ships, aircraft, missiles, World War II military vehicles, trains, passenger jets, Pluto, charcoal, cigarettes, convenience stores, food, washing machines, alarm clocks, blackboard erasers, pillows, first aid boxes, and cell phones.

I was interviewed recently for What insight is ethnography delivering? (PDF). It’s a pretty clear piece, and I think we show well in it. Lots of tidbits but the closest thing to controversy is this:

Portigal accepts that while there needs to be conditions, such as a ban on any logos being worn by the accompanying client, and an agreement to undertake some basic workshop training to introduce them to the principles of field work, he is happy to bring along a member of the client’s team. “It’s the 80/20 rule: we ask 80% questions, you ask 20%. It takes them a couple of practices and then I think they can make a really valuable contribution.”

However, for O’Brien, the very thought of having a non-team member accompany out in the field is a non-issue. “We simply don’t believe in it,” he says. “The fewer people, the better. If you start crowding a room out, how is the participant going to feel comfortable? In fact, we have even lost jobs over it.”

It took me many years to come around to this way of thinking, but as our work has become more about facilitating our clients to take action and less about handing off insights, it seems right on for us. I’d love to hear what you think!