Books left on floor, Green Apple Books, San Francisco, CA

Notice in school bus window, Pacifica, CA

Sign, Bonny Doon, CA

Sign, San Jose, CA

Sign, San Francisco, CA

Posters, San Francisco, CA

6-panel strip on telephone pole, Chicago, IL

Related Posts:
Framed Framework/Conceptual Art
Words
The End of Things

• Skeuomorphs – things that retain useless or vestigial features of earlier versions of the technology
  • A shutter effect on a digital camera
  • Wood grain on radios, lawn chair arms, and automobiles
  • Lights shaped like candles
  • Shopping cart icons on ecommerce web site
  • The reel-to-reel tape machine icon used on cell phones to indicate a voice mail message

  I can’t find a good definition for “vernacular design” – where the visual of the form echoes something literal about the product’s meaning or use (Oracle’s database-symbol HQ; the printer feed tray that looks like the sheet-of-paper icon)..anyone?

  (thanks, ebacon)

Last year I gave a talk at an IDSA event where I described the practice of personas as user-centered bullshit. In January I expanded that into Persona Non Grata, my first column for interactions magazine. More recently, I was interviewed about the topic by Forrester Research.

Vidya Drego at Forrester has now issued a report – How To Get The Most From Design Personas

– although given her brief, much of our conversation around the limitations and risks of personas, as well as alternatives, does not appear prominently in this document.

About a year ago we worked with a client who designed and developed financial trading software. We were immersed in the arcana of this century’s financial markets, learning about Credit Default Swaps, or as they are known to the financiscenti, CDS

. Our time with our client and their customers (rogueish but not rogue traders) was an educational journey into a power-oriented, confrontational, macho culture. Indeed, this organization was a rocky place where our recommendations could find no purchase.

Now, here we collectively stand with our mutual fund statements as smoking ruins in our fists and the arcana is now mainstreama, with headlines like $62 Trillion Credit Default Swaps Threaten U.S. Government Bonds as common as can be.

Two responses: i) I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything. ii) We told you so.

• Megamovies, TV shows as days-long movies
  Kottke on long-running shows creating a new form of media
• Wired on Leland Chee, the Star Wars Franchise Continuity Cop
  New challenges for creators as stories become complex and long lasting and fans invest

  When the original Star Trek – known to devout fans as The Original Series – went off the air in 1969, acolytes kept the flame alive. They extended the stories with their own fiction. They created technical manuals. Eventually, the series became a movie, and then another, and then another TV series, and a few more after that. Each new iteration produced more canonical information. Spock’s death, Kirk’s son, Picard’s adventures as a cadet … eventually, the writers’ room on a Trek show became a minefield. “Someone would tell you that a Voyager episode last year mentioned a bit of backstory with the Romulans, and now you can’t do this over here.”

  But the many strata of Star Trek books, games, comics, and cartoons haven’t been well tended. Some events in the movies and even later TV shows contradict preexisting lore. (A backward change like that is called a retcon, short for “retroactive continuity.”)

• Shai Agassi’s Better Place || An Innovative Company
  This is more than a vision. It’s something Better Place and its partners are already building. Agassi drew from his entrepreneurial experience and insights from world leaders to formulate a business plan that applies mobile phone industry economics and renewable energy to transportation.

  Better Place’s model means consumers subscribe to transportation as a service, much like they do today with mobile phones. Auto companies make the electric cars that plug in to the Better Place electric recharge network of charging stations and battery swap stations. Energy companies provide the network’s power through growing renewable energy projects. And Better Place provides the batteries to make owning an electric car affordable and convenient.

  And with oil out of the picture, transportation is transformed into a sustainable service we can all subscribe to.

• Wired on Shai Agassi and his uncompromising and innovative vision – with a good chance of becoming a reality – for oil-free transportation
  >A few months ago, I stopped by Agassi’s Palo Alto headquarters to sit in on a three-day strategy meeting. The entire staff is trying to write a mission statement with help from a moderator. He flips through slides on a screen: “Our mission is to transform personal mobility.” “Our mission is to break the world’s oil addiction (before it breaks us).”

  Shai Agassi has only one car, no charging stations, and not a single customer-yet everyone who meets him already believes he can see the future.

• Kendra Shimmell of Lextant summarizes the Design Forty conference call from earlier this week
  I kicked off the conversation with this: While doing in-home research, if someone offers you a drink, take it. The participant is trying to establish norms while you are in their home. Taking the drink builds rapport faster by putting them at ease.

Every drummer knows, it’s hard to find a place to practice.

Drummer, Highway 9, Santa Cruz mountains

So when I drove by this guy rocking out on the side of the road, I thought, “yes, that makes so much sense.” Plenty of space, no neighbors around to get pissed off at you.

So how come the roadsides aren’t dotted with drummers?

Even though it’s a great solution, it takes a certain degree of chutzpah to go drum in the woods.

Lots of seemingly innovative ideas never take hold. Some of these concepts may be asking customers to “drum in the woods”– to behave in ways that might stick out, feel weird, or refute what they’re comfortable with.

Nicolas Nova further explores why ideas do and don’t take hold in his visually rich Inflated/Deflated Futures presentation.

Related posts:
Minding Manners
Open Carry

Here’s another set of examples from our last trip to Tokyo: the frequent and enthusiastic use of the English word Enjoy (also, Let’s Enjoy) to market a product or service:

Enjoy cat

Enjoy photo

Let’s enjoy your life style

Enjoy karaoke

And a few months later, unpacking a new Sony camera, here’s what you see first thing upon opening the box:

Let’s Enjoy Video

Previously:
Pop Culture Osmosis, Tokyo (part 1)
Pop Culture Osmosis, Tokyo (part 2)

• Made To Stick guys on how to brand (i.e,. explain) a new idea
  Column in Fast Company about how to optimize the relationship between the new and the familiar to help an innovation be understandable, palatable and differentiated.

Lextant’s Lauren Serota and Dan Rockwell have recently launched a weekly series of forty minute design-related conference calls. This week’s topic is Design Hacks.

Hacks are all the rage lately. You can never have or know about too many good hacks, we got DIY hacks, programming hacks, weight loss hacks, what are some design hacks?

In this call we’ll talk and share our own design hacks, tips, shortcuts and workarounds to attain great design. These could be new and unique methods, such as the use of online tools, and or new techniques with participatory design, ethnography, contextual inquiry, data analysis and more.

I’m the guest for this week’s call, Wednesday at 12 EST. To participate, you must pre-register here.

Hope you can join us!

Update: A recording of the excellent discussion is now available at that URL or via this direct link (hopefully).