We found these interesting calendars

(Google translate link) in Japan. They contain different daily activities tied to the room that you’d use them in, including kitchen, bedroom, bathroom (i.e., the room you bathe in), and toilet. I liked that the toilet calendar features a happy individual, presumably using the calendar, sitting on the throne. The calendars offer a small peek into Japanese home life.

My first interactions column, Persona Non Grata, has just been published. In the article, I consider some of the fatal problems with personas and how they can hurt while pretending to help.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

See what else we’ve written about personas.

Other articles

• 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
• 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

• Floating lights for your bathtub (on sale in Japan)
  If you bathe for relaxation, not cleansing, this makes more sense
• USB heating slippers (on sale in Japan)
  And also everywhere. Cold feet while computing? Plug ’em in and heat ’em up. Goofy gadget.
• Hot Belly aka Powa-To Onaka (on sale in Japan)
  No shot of the retail display, sadly, which explained that if you are wearing a short shirt in the cold winter weather, you can rub this goo on your exposed belly and it’ll keep your skin warm.
• The scientific approach to understanding human behavior: still flawed
  All Things Considered offers a brief story examining how so many New Hampshire polls overestimated support for Obama. Quantitative methods like polling are seen as scientific, mathematical, and therefore objective and “true.” But they aren’t.

From All Things Considered

the remote California town of Iowa Hill will finally get land-line phone service. And their cell coverage is spotty, at best. The woman interviewed explains that people in the community have designated areas where there is cell reception as phone booths; a nice colloquialism since we’re likely to envision a purpose-built structure rather than a warchalked wooded area. She also describes the local 911-proxy: fire your gun three times in the air and hope someone comes to your aid.

We saw these kawaii decals for sale in Tokyo. According to the in-store display, they are intended for mobile phones and iPods, but could go on anything.

I was amazed to see the familiar and consistent visual brands of Marvel superheroes so dramatically localized, reflecting the Japanese kawaii (“cute”) aesthetic by infantilizing Wolverine, Spiderman, and the Hulk.

The way things used to be

As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

According to some flickr forum discussions (where others are reporting similar occurrences) Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so. And they’ve failed to implement sufficient countermeasures, technical or otherwise.

Phishing typically targets banking and PayPal information, obviously for financial gain. In my case, someone left a comment on a photo, with a link. And clicking on that link led me to this sad situation. Why did Yahoo let someone post a link that was harmful?

Sure, the forums are also filled with smug posts (not from the flickr staff; they have been instructed to use a soothing tone, while not providing any resolution) from people who insist that the victims of these scams are to blame for not knowing better. I would have thought I did know better, actually.

This miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

flickrbackup is a tool that lets you save the photos, but how does one download all the metadata? Flickr should have an export feature that creates a .flk file on your PC with all the good stuff. LinkedIn lets you export all your contacts in a variety of standard formats (and if you are nervous, maybe you should go do that right now: LinkedIn->My Contacts tab->Export Connections button near bottom), Google Reader (and any of the other RSS readers I know of) exports an OPML file (Google Reader->Manage Subscriptions ->Import/Export).

DataPortability

is a movement to create these tools where they don’t exist. I hope someone creates something for flickr soon.

As for me, I don’t know how to proceed. I was just beginning my Tokyo story, which reached about 1500 pictures (not all worth posting, of course). I’ve got several hundred from Taipei (November/December) and I had a lot of Bali pictures and stories – the cool cultural stuff, the signs, all that great stuff – still unposted. But I’ve also use flickr as a storage for images that I’ve referenced in bios, conference presentations, this blog, other blogs, etc. It’s overwhelming and I don’t know what to do first. Or if I should even do anything. I can’t imagine going to the trouble of writing stuff only to have it disappear again. Maybe one should see it as ephemeral, but I am not there yet.

• Konbini Life: a niche blog about the snacks found in Japanese convenience stores
  The stores are amazingly ubiquitous. Oft-cited stat is that most Japanese live within 3 minutes of one. Pay bills, ship, receive, and many other services that a tourist won’t know about. [via Innovation. Culture. Design.]
• Garbage Bag Art Work: another product we saw at Tokyu Hands
  If garbage is going to sit out in bags, why not make the bags pretty? A very Japanese form of urban beautification. As a research participant once told me, the Japanese have a saying, if a pot stinks, put a lid on it. (I’m sure I’m misquoting that rather badly)

Given my recent post about robots, I thought it worth a mention that today is the birthday of Karel Capek, the Czech writer who first introduced the term “Robot” to the world in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Although Karel is widely credited as the inventor of the word, it was actually his brother Josef who coined the term.)

For all you fans of artificial intelligence–if you’re ever in the Boston area, be sure to check out the MIT museum’s ongoing Robots and Beyond

exhibit. It’s a fascinating collection of A.I.-related artifacts, films and actual machines.

The Enso is a single brush stroke that captures and represents the world at the precise moment the artist makes the stroke.

Traditionally, the circle has a break in it. This is meant to express that the world is at the same time perfect and imperfect, complete and incomplete.

This Eastern philosophical concept influenced both the Dadaists and composer John Cage in their creation of works according to the “Laws of Chance.”

On this rainy day, I’m seeing mostly perfection in the handle of my coffee cup.

Plumber Protects

is an interesting site from American Standard, manufacturer of toilets and other plumbing stuff.

They are taking a stand in support of the work of their main customers, plumbers, casting them as heroes with career advice, and swag such as some well-designed posters, including the obligatory constructivist image

(although one has to wonder about the level of intended or perceived irony).

And of course, the comic book.

American Standard Will Make You a Superhero.
Want a chance to star in your own comic book? Tell American Standard why YOU should be next . You might get to star your own Mega Plumber comic book adventure.

Do you do business with any company that casts you as a hero, even in a less literal fashion?