A few years ago I blogged about my first encounter with a dual-flush toilet

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They are becoming more common, now.

Uppercut, by Sloan, is an interesting, if incomplete design solution. It retrofits into existing toilets. The green handle suggests to the flusher that something is different here. The iconics on the barrel indicate, somewhat, what will happen in different flushing directions. But they’ve also seen fit to provide “attractive instructional placards to educate the user [there’s that phrase again] on proper operation” – UPfor #1 (Liquid Waste), DOWN for #2 (Solid Waste). The Sloan website also provides a customizable memo (.DOC) to help get the word out.

Any change of behavior, especially in such a habitual task, is going to be a challenge. Yet office memos about flushing the toilets belong with training meetings on using the new photocopier in the thundering hell of office life. It’d be interesting to investigate how all these cues (the memo, the green handle, the icon, the placard, the memo) work together (or not) to help people shift behavior (or not).

Any anecdotes to share about new office equipment, toilet memos, or so on? Leave a comment!

In response to Colin McKay’s comment on my last post, I felt impelled to put up this detail of the TRL shirt I was wearing at the PE shoot.

Being the ironic scamp that I am 😉 , I had altered the shirt when I first bought it. (In the original picture, it’s hard to see the alteration–a letter ‘L’ in red marker after the word ‘trivia,’ so no slight on Colin for not having noticed it!)

The interesting thing here is how strongly these kinds of details–T-shirts, logos, cultural touchpoints–broadcast messages, and how easily the messaging can get confused if all the details are not available.

The complexity of messaging and the importance of small details is something worth thinking about in the context of ethnographic research. In any given observation or interaction, are enough of the crucial details coming across? Is the context clear? Are there layers of meaning?

In order to parse what are actual data and what are our own ideas triggered by real world phenomena (which are an important but different kind of artifact), it’s so essential to surface, probe and challenge our interpretations and assumptions.

This probing and clarifying-the separation of observation, analysis, and synthesis–is a significant piece of what makes conducting ethnographic research different from simply going out and watching people.

Some years back, in Boston, I helped out on a shoot for Public Enemy‘s Revolverlution video. It was a lot of fun, and pretty amazing to hang out with such seminal artists. I was going through some old pictures today and came across some fun images from the shoot.

A portrait of Chuck D, the idea man

My wife, Theresa, and me (with permed straight hair!) hanging out during lunch break with Flava Flav

And one of the hardest rocking shows I’ve ever seen, at the Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Excellent times! Public Enemy has been consistently innovative, not only in their music, but in their willingness to experiment with new approaches to producing and distributing their work.

Last year, a large group of people collaborated to produce an e-book called The Age of Conversation. I heard about this when David Armano got involved. The same folks are putting something together for 2008

, and we’re signed up to contribute.

They are still looking for authors and for votes on possible topics, so if you’re interested, check out that last link.

Just over a year ago I blogged about the push approach that Wal-Mart was taking to drive adoption of energy-efficient fluorescent lighting, spending money on persuasive marketing rather than addressing the known barriers to adoption. A year later, it seems to be okay to acknowledge the problems with the bulbs. The New York Times recently looked at the problems that people have with the quality of light created by those bulbs (nothing new, of course, but the fact that the angle of the story has changed is thought-provoking). Most recently, they offered up this this interview with a Sylvania technologist who speaks to the ongoing work to improve the quality of the light that people experience.

Of course the efforts to improve the bulbs were always ongoing. I’m intrigued by the cultural story that was created by marketing and the media, spending money to force a behavior under the guise of “educating” people.

Make a better light bulb, already. One that is energy efficient and doesn’t make us feel (and look) like crap in our own homes. We’ll beat a path to your door.

• Why Personas Matter: Misha Cornes at Organic
  Another thoughtful post, contrasting the cultures of design with advertising, and positing personas as an artifact, not a tool.
• Megapixel Samaritans: Photo clues lead to camera’s owner
  They find the owner of the camera by looking at the pictures. But digital pictures have sufficient resolution that the sleuths could zoom in and read name tags and logos. Very Law & Order without TV-fake image enhancement tech.

This piece in the Financial Times about how anthropology is important to understand the behaviors of bankers is well-timed and relevant (if indirectly related) to the story of Société Générale’s Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader.

For one thing that anthropology imparts is a healthy respect for the importance of micro-level incentives and political structures. And right now these issues are becoming critically important for Wall Street and the City, as the credit crunch deepens by the day.
…
But what is crystal clear is that if you want to understand which banks will emerge as winners from the current mess, it is no longer enough to look at their computer systems and balance sheets. Now, more than ever, investors need to understand a bank’s culture too – and the degree to which it is tribal.

We just wrapped up our second study of traders and it’s really gratifying to see this column. Traders, as a profession, have a lot of strong character traits (humor, macho/aggression, social) and much of their work is competitive and manipulative. The tools they use are pretty straight transaction machines, though, that don’t reflect the complex layers of intention that are driving everything the trader does. The only product that seems to echo or reinforce trading culture is the Bloomberg terminal which, in addition to all the data-oriented tracking and graphic capabilities, also offers an IM/email/Facebook-like platform to a closed, consistent, and co-located (The City in London, Wall Street in New York, and other neighborhoods in major financial markets) community.

There’s enormous potential for the other software tools used by these traders to similarly match their offering to the dynamic culture of their users. It’ll require these vendors to take a fresh look at how their products can really bring exceptional value to the people who make their living with them. Failure to understand and design for these folks will undoubtedly lead to more stories like the current scandal.

SocGen (as it’s known by people in the industry) in London (actual fieldwork photo!)

A new Krispy Kreme located in the heart of London’s The City (the financial district) gives away free boxes of donuts, causing a run

FT story via antropologi.info

• Oops, sorry – 14,000 e-mail accounts get deleted
  Charter makes some horrendous technical error and the contents of 14,000 email accounts is gone. And can not be restored. Of course, users are responsible for their own data, they say. Not us. Read your agreement. Etc.

Taipei 101

Fresh juice

At the market in the basement of Taipei 101, I ordered a fresh juice from a juice stand. The young man who was making the juice rapidly measured and assembled the ingredients in a blender. As he was blending the fruit, he began to pour in honey. After a moment, he grabbed a long spoon, stuck it in what was becoming my drink, tasted and took a taste. Then with one hand he threw the spoon in the sink and with the other he added more honey.

Fruit, of course, is inconsistent. If you want to prepare food to a certain sweetness (or other taste attribute), and the ingredients aren’t exactly the same, how else can you do it without tasting?

In the west, at least, fast food is typically based on sourcing consistent ingredients and building a trainable process so the staff don’t have to use subjective judgments like taste

in order to prepare a good product. As well, we don’t expect that people preparing our food would be eating it. In this case, the spoon was clean and was disposed of right away, so there was no chance of contamination, but the whole concept that this person consumed something and then gave me the rest was just so unfamiliar.

Yet another standard that I hadn’t even questioned until I saw it play out differently in Taipei.

• Personas are NOT a Document
  Jared Spool on personas; attempting to bring some definition and thereby highlight where he sees the value.