• Magritte at Whole Foods
  Brilliant observation by Antonella Pavese

• How To Take Pictures Inside Stores Without Getting Caught (the Consumerist)
  Without getting into the issues of ethical practice, this is a not-uncommon challenge in user research.
• Lorem ipsum – is that Spanish?
  Funny/sad to see this mistake happen with something that shipped. We showed a prototype newsletter in some in-home research a few years ago; one person flipped to the back, filled with “greeked” text and said “oh, good idea to use both languages”

LinkedIn was down for maintenance this evening and this is who announced this on their home page.

Who the heck is that? I have never seen him or anything wizardly on that site. Seems a bit of a leap?

Core77 Broadcasts is off to a great start. I’ve got two interviews posted, another one scheduled for next week, and a couple of others I’m working to try and schedule.

But who should I be talking with? Be as specific as you can be (i.e., give me some names, or even introductions). We’ve got a lot of “names” but that’s not a requirement by any means. People with interesting stories to tell that somehow connect to design, business, culture, marketing, advertising, product development, and so on.

Suggestions definitely appreciated!

About a year ago, an editor at New Design Magazine pursued me aggressively to write an article for them, based on what they’d seen on this blog and elsewhere on the web. We batted around some ideas and I agreed to do it. They weren’t going to pay me, which sucks, but is somewhat par-for-the-course in our content-bloated world.

It got awkward when they did agree to pay an author I referred them to (a colleague of mine), and further awkward when my piece (created under a serious publication deadline) didn’t appear. Indeed, trying to find out what was happening with my piece was difficult; they just stopped returning my messages once they had their free article. As far as I know, they never ran it, but they never communicated any final decision back to me, either.

Perhaps this serves me right for not insisting on payment, and for not having any sort of formal agreement. But if they are going to use karmic currency, they better get their account back in balance. I’m obviously never going to write for them again.

So it was astonishing to see a solicitation in my email today, inviting me to purchase print advertising in their magazine. Now I should give them money? “The cost for each full page would be ¬£950, but new design will go fifty:50 with you on this rate. You pay just ¬£475.”

Shyeah, right.

I wonder what the filmmaker is saying as he approaches people. I didn’t hear sumimasen which I understand to be similar to “excuse me.”

Last weekend I went to an audition for a newly forming troupe from Blue Blanket Improv. I had done a full two hours of improv games for a really long time, and I was definitely rusty, but it was a lot of fun. I was hesitant to attend because there’s a pretty strong focus to the group – non-profit community events, and performances. I’m not sure I care that much about either. With that emphasis on performances comes a need to be funny for an audience. When I interviewed Chris Miller about improv and creativity, he noted the difference between improv and improv comedy, and this is definitely about improv comedy. But Chris also encouraged me to go to the audition, simply for a chance to play

. I’m glad I did, because it was absolutely a chance to play, but it also clarified something for me: that I am fascinated by the problem-solving aspect of improv games…the need to follow the constraints of the game (i.e., a one-minute scene that is improvised, then repeated in 30-second, 15-second, 7.5-second and 3 second versions), be collaborative, and be creative. I love the laughter that comes from the participants in the activity (and even if you aren’t in the scene, you are going to get up and do it yourself next, so you share in that creative act) but I’m not so turned on by improv as a form of entertainment for those on the other side of the proscenium.

I got the call last night telling me that I passed the audition and was invited to join the troupe. I had to decline; I love the process and the way they’ve set up a structure for trust and creativity and collaboration, but I can’t go down the road of committing to performing for others right now.

It was sort of a stunning decision to make; I can imagine at various points in my life I would have given anything to be part of something like this, especially at this nascent stage (essentially they are building a new troupe from scratch in our community).

The day before that call I had seen a posting up at CCA for writing classes at
Killing My Lobster

This class is a six-week boot camp where the main requirement is for you to write funny and keep writing funny. If you’ve always had a curiousity [sic] for comedy writing, had funny ideas and have wondered “what would happen if I actually took this to the next level,” and enjoy learning and creating in a fun environment this may be the class for you. The class will culminate in a live reading of your favorite material.

I really enjoy sketch comedy as an audience and this class (sadly already in progress) sounds really cool. It’s another set of creative problem solving tools with some very different constraints and philosophies than improv, but perhaps a valuable exploration in expanding storytelling skills.

And finally, a piece about laughter and social context

in the NYT today.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”

Mr. Stillman says he got so used to the laughs that he wasn’t quite prepared for the response at a conference in January, although he realizes he should have expected it.

“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”

If you’re sending someone a resume, make sure you turn off track changes in Word.

Seeing that Award winning right brained/left brained marketer was changed to Award winning right brained/left brained marketer and business developer is perhaps more information than this person wanted me to know. There’s all sorts of evil hidden goo left behind in Word documents; to be extra sure, MSFT offers a plugin that creates a clean copy, or just make a PDF. Maybe this person doesn’t even use track changes and didn’t see the same view of the doc that I do. Pretty horrifying for them, as well. Makes me wonder what I’ve done like this myself.

More trouble for the poor guy in his cover letter, that was pasted into email from a text editor where many of the characters didn’t come through correctly on my end.

I?¢‚Ǩ™m a global leader of strategy with strong expertise in how to
tackle new markets and clients. Some highlights included:
?Ǭ? Developed strategy, leadership, innovation for Fortune 500
companies that resulted adding hundreds of millions of dollars in new
sales revenue, plus decreased operational expenses by 27%.

A cautionary tale for all of us!

• More on engaging or distraction while waiting – The Waiting Light
  is a simple device that you wear around your waist. When you turn on the switch it shines a bright orange color behind the bold, black letters that proclaim, “WAITING.” Perhaps it will make waiting less mundane. At the very least, it will give you something to talk about.
• Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying
  Article from the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that if you exercise self-restraint in one situation, you’ll have less self-control available right after that. In an experiment, subjects who tried not to think of a white bear, spent more money in a follow-on task.

I’m waiting for France. If they love you in France, then you’ve really made it!

Mike Press, a professor of Design Policy at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, the University of Dundee gave a lecture at the Southern Taiwan University of Technology, and it seems I was mentioned

as an innovative example of a researcher in this field who covers all the e-bases: foreign groceries museum, flickr photo archive, blog, fresh-meat e-newsletter, and somewhere out there there’s his bog-standard website too. Never met the fellow, but he brings fresh and surprising insights to design.

Nice!