• Indian professional who write letters for illiterate are disappearing due to ubiquitous cellphones
  Maximum City has a great profile of one of these writers; may even be the same guy (I’m in Japan; my copy is at home) as the examples in this NYT story seem very familiar.

I’ve mentioned Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta in a previous post, but thought it was worth its own post now that I’ve finally finished it.

We learned about this book on our 2006 trip to India, but it took me over a year to finally get to it.

The book is Suketu Mehta’s collection of stories from his return to India after 21 years. He’s an insider and an outsider all at once. He shares his own experiences (say, in trying to rent an apartment, or get his kids into a decent school) but also picks a number of different subcultures (life in the slums, commuting, gangsters, Bollywood, sex workers, homeless artists, religion, politics, law enforcement) and goes deep. He develops intense relationships over time and tells the stories of the characters he encounters, many of whom live outside the norms that most of us could tolerate. He goes deep enough that as a writer, he’s pulled into writing a screenplay for a Bollywood film.

Although he goes into these subcultures as individual forays, many of the threads overlap (Bollywood and gangsters, the police and politics and religion, etc. etc.) and collide and so a more complete portrait begins to emerge.

I really appreciated having my own experiences contextualized by the author’s similar (if much more extreme) personal experiences and subsequent explanation, and then the opportunity to see so much further into the city, as an icon of Indian life. This is classic participant-observation. What’s the Hindi word for gonzo? How’s about gonzoti?

There’s a lot of exuberance about India nowadays and I think that needs to be tempered with some other perspectives. It’s not necessarily an easy place to live, work, visit, or develop.

• Misty Garden humidifier – we saw this today in Tokyu Hands
  It’s a large filter cut in the shape of a flower garden and placed in a container. Pour in water and moisture is added to the air in an easy and stylish way that doesn’t create noise or require any power.

• Debunking commonly held beliefs about health
  We don’t need 8 glasses of water, reading in low light doesn’t damage your eyes, shaved hair doesn’t grow back more coarsely.
• False: It Takes Seven Years to Digest Gum
  Another common belief, debunked. How many of these sort of stories drive our behavior and decision-making, regardless of fact?

• Significant Cost of Preservation for Digital Feature Films
  To store a digital master costs $12,514 a year vs. $1,059 for a film master. Storing the data from an all-digital process brings it $208,569 vs. $486 to store physical negatives, audio recordings, photos, and scripts.

• America’s Dirty Little Secret: Are We Getting Worse?
  American Society for Microbiology and their observational study of handwashing behavior in public restrooms.

The 5th guy is a public health awareness campaign from the Florida Department of Health. It

illustrates a simple point – most people respect certain hygienic norms. They stay home when they are sick. They cover their cough with their arm or a tissue. And they wash their hands, especially after using the restroom. There is observational data on that: The American Society for Microbiology sent researchers into public rest rooms to watch what people do. They found that four out of five people wash their hands after using the restroom. Thus was born the campaign’s central character: the “Fifth Guy.” In the ads, this fifth guy – played by a wonderful comic actor named Ben Spring – keeps making the wrong choices and suffering the social consequences as a result. The take-away message is: Unless you are staying home when sick, covering your cough with an arm or a tissue, and washing your hands often, you’re a fifth guy, an outlier. That’s the motivation. No one wants to be a fifth guy – to be that one person everyone whispers about.

It’s interesting to think about the line between playing on social norms and shame-based advertising. Advertising is often about encouraging you to take some action, telling you that you should

take action, telling you that everyone else is doing it are basic forms of persuasion.

Florida is trying to encourage what they claim is a dominant behavior, as opposed to trying to create a new behavior, so pointing to the majority makes sense.

Many years ago I worked on a project for Unilever. They were considering the challenge of “on-the-go cleansing” — people away from the place (the bathroom at home) where they normally use Unilever products. I think the timing was just before “germophobia” went mainstream. The people we observed and interviewed were experiencing a serious tension between the need to protect themselves from germs and the need to behave normally.

You were expected to shake hands with someone in a social setting, but you were also made aware of the fact that that person’s hands were covered in germs. You were expected to share food with colleagues and friends, but you may not know if someone else put their hands in the candy bowl without washing them. And you weren’t allowed to pay too much attention to your own cleanliness, lest you be seen as having a mental illness (i.e., OCD).

We identified several strategies for Unilever to use. One of them, like the 5th guy campaign, involved making things normal by making them common. The box of office tissue that everyone takes from, or the skin lotion pump that is used by colleagues at work are both examples. Everyone uses them, therefore it’s normal, therefore it’s okay.

Another strategy involved creating hidden usage opportunities, where new cleaning behaviors could take surreptitiously, in a pocket, or in the pages of a book.

And a strategy that lived between those two was to mask new behaviors as existing normal activities. For example, makers of insulin pens have begun to make their devices to look more like pens than syringes.

I hope there’s good data with this Florida initiative, but I suspect some of the biggest change has already taken place, within the organization itself. I remember that our clients at Unilever worked hard to grasp the depth of the struggles we shared with them; indeed, they kept referring to the “people with OCD” as we reiterated that most people had these very concerns over germs but did not want to be assumed to have OCD. Our clients were participants in the culture they were seeking to understand and getting to that new perspective took a lot of work on both sides. The (what I presume to be) new thinking exhibited by the Floridians is encouraging.

• The Indian-Jaina dialectic of syadvada offers that “truth” is seven-fold, not binary
  (1) May be, it is; (2) may be, it is not; (3) may be, it is and it is not; (4) may be, it is indescribable; (5) may be, it is and yet is indescribable; (6) may be, it is not and it is also indescribable; (7) may be, it is and it is not and it is also indescribable
• Persona Non Grata, a teaser from my first column for interactions magazine
  The website for interactions magazine is live. And you can now see a little bit about what I meant when I wrote Personas are User-Centered Bullshit.

• Tokyo-Ga, a 1985 film by Wim Wenders
  Didn’t care much for his discussion of the work of director Yasujiro Ozu, but Wenders’ exploration of 1983 Tokyo is fascinating (even its datedness is revelatory). Lingering exploration of pachinko players. Best part follows the process of making fake food to be displayed in restaurant windows.

• GentrificationWatch: Amsterdam to clean up Red Light district
  The city of Amsterdam will clean up its infamous “red light” district to fight human trafficking, money laundering and drug abuse and replace prostitutes’ windows with upmarket boutiques. “The romantic picture of the area is outdated…We don’t want to get rid of prostitutes…
• Steve Portigal teaches one-day Design Research Methods class
  Sunnyvale, CA.
  Saturday March 1, 2008
  10:00 AM-6:00 PM