Last night we went to Stanford to see Roger Martin

from U of Toronto’s Rotman B-school talk about Business and Design. This seems to be the identical talk he’s been giving this year at other events, as many of the slides looked familiar just from blog browsing.

I took a lot of notes but I’m probably not going to type up a summary of the talk if others have done so. For now, I’ll point you to other summaries such as this one (scroll down to “The Highlight of Day One: Roger Martin-Designing in Hostile Territory”), here, and here. You can find his slides from a previous presentation here. Yesterday’s presentation included a final slide that talked about how businesses can become more creative and innovative, essentially by transitioning from a traditional firm to a design shop, at least in part. He identified several categories of change.

In the Flow of Work Life, move from ongoing tasks and permanent roles to projects with defined terms.

In the Style of Work, move from defined roles and waiting til its right to collaboration and iteration.

In the Mode of Thinking, move from deduction and induction to deduction, induction, and abduction (where you ask what might be)

In Status, move from managing big budgets and stuff to solving wicked problems.

In Attitude move from “only what we have budget for” and “constraints are the enemy” to “nothing can not be done” and “constraints increase challenge and excitement”

There wasn’t a ton of shocking new material in his presentation, but it’s a mostly clear framework that explains well. I was definitely reminded a great deal of the presentation that Tom Mulhern and I did back in 2004 at About, With, and For on Buttoned-Down Creativity.

It was a mostly-talking presentation, with a lot of big images that supported stories, so the slides are hardly stand-alone, but maybe worth a quick visit. I think Mulhern and I could have gone further and written an article or two; we still could, of course, because I think we had some good ideas and a more tactical and sympathetic approach than Martin is taking.

• Hybrid Culture – a coffee table book in the planning stages
  “where 2 seemingly unrelated cultures come together. For instance: Christians going on holiday to Religious Theme Parks (yes, Mickey Mouse and co are replaced by religious re-enactments).” I love this stuff, of course.

• Explanation, Not Justification Behind Pet Peeves in Customer Service
  Why are PA systems inaudible? Why can’t home delivery be within a reasonable window of time? Why are hotel minibars so expensive?

Edited from the New York Times. Wasn’t the mall the ultimate in egalitarianism? And even something approximating user-friendliness? So here’s a “trend” to create mystery and exclusivity in order to drive the right customer to increased loyalty.

In malls across the country, the floor-to-ceiling glass storefront – a tradition of transparency in retailing that dates back at least 100 years – is beginning to give way to elaborate walls that make it impossible to see inside.

The outside of Ruehl No. 925, a new chain from Abercrombie & Fitch, is a brick facade that mimics the front of a townhouse. The exterior of its corporate sibling, a clothing store called Hollister, resembles a beach shack, its windows covered by wooden shutters. And the entrance to Martin & Osa, a new retailer from American Eagle Outfitters, is a long wooden wall with a thin strip of dark blue glass.

As retail companies race to open new chains that serve ever-smaller slices of the population – Abercrombie & Fitch has four different stores, each for approximately a decade of life – they are using storefronts cloaked in wood and brick to ward off those who do not belong inside (and whose presence might diminish the shopping experience of those who do).

Retail executives say that by drawing the curtain over their storefronts, they can stand out in mall corridors crowded with glass-encased competitors. The modern mall, said Michele Martin, the head women’s clothing designer at Martin & Osa, “is too transparent, too naked. It’s just a sea of clothing.”

Intrigued by a store they cannot see into, consumers walk in to solve the mystery and stay to shop, executives said.

…

“It has this cool apartment vibe,” said Ms. Palotta. “Instead of being in Bergen County in the middle of New Jersey, we are on a street in New York, and that is where we want to be anyway – living in New York City.”
…
Then came the glass-shattering Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2000, the chain began experimenting with an opaque exterior when it introduced Hollister, a clothing store geared toward high school students.

The outside of the store evokes a California surf shack whose residents have shuttered the windows and hidden the front door to keep out the riffraff.

Or, as Tom Lennox, the director of communication at Abercrombie & Fitch put it: “You can feel yourself on the beach with the sunlight shining through.” (The sunlight being, in this case, the fluorescent mall lights.)

Hollister proved an immediate success, so Abercrombie & Fitch extended the darkened storefront to its namesake stores, placing heavy wooden shades over the existing glass windows.

Finally, there was Ruehl, by far the starkest-looking storefront in the American mall: a brick wall, rising up behind cast-iron gates and guarded at all times by an employee – or, a “model,” as Abercrombie aptly calls its young workers.

Andrew McQuilkin, vice president of design at FRCH Design Worldwide, which designs stores for dozens of retailers from Target to Tiffany’s, said the Abercrombie storefronts amount to a barrier.

“They are sending a message early in the conversation that says you belong or you don’t belong.”

All of which Abercrombie & Fitch freely admits. “We are not targeting middle-aged men,” said Mr. Lennox, the communications director. “To have them flee the store, that is fine with us.”

Tons has been written about Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. He’s an active speaker, with material from the book informing many of his talks. One must give him highest credit for reusing his ideas but not reusing his material. In other words, when he spoke at CCA recently, he didn’t even mention spimes (an important term in the book) and fleshed out the talk with other examples about futurism that are not in the book at all. I haven’t listened to his IDEA presentation, but the comments I’ve seen suggest that this is true here as well.

That notion of the book (well, they call it a pamphlet) as a platform for an ongoing evolving conversation is actually comforting, since the book itself is insufficient. It’s passionate, provocative, confusing, and frankly, unconvincing. The theses stack too high and too wide to keep track of.

And that’s one reason I like to imagine Sterling in a very very large box labeled visionary. We need people like him (with passion, genius, insight, charm, energy, and an audience) to throw wild ideas out there and see what they can hit. He knows more than most of us, he’s seen things further than most of us, and although he wraps his ranting in something that approaches believability, I don’t believe that’s the best use. I hope that his ideas contain germs and seeds and sparks that leave his semi-solid-serious proposals behind but indeed do go somewhere.

But the book itself.

Yikes. Designer Lorraine Wild is given a credit for the book, somewhere it says “lovingly designed.” Sterling talks about his camaraderie with big-name designers and his passion for design as a non-designer.

And the book is horribly designed. Yeah, maybe that’s subjective but it’s really ugly (very subjective) and impossible to use (less subjective). Figures appear at random locations, never referenced in the text. And ambitiously silly visual devices are thrown in but create an acne surface of typographical eagerness.

Different terms are presented in a specific font every time they are used. Oh, and in a different green color, as well. Yes, every time.

It really is hard to read when that’s going on. Not to mention that some of the fonts chosen cause the word to creep to the left or the right (I don’t know the typographical term here) so badly that it appears to be flush with the adjacent word. How readable is that? Is there any thought about how people’s eyes work, how reading happens? Or just a conceit to advance the ideas? Add to this the silly typefaces being used and you’ve just got a mess.

And when a term is used repeatedly you get (instead of the ransom note effect of the above example) this mess. Like someone else has used the book before you and taken a highlighter to it. Does this help or hinder your comprehension?

I haven’t had many conversations with others about this book; I’d be curious to hear what you think.

• Clifford Geertz, eminent scholar in cultural anthropology died at 80 yesterday following heart surgery
  We read and discussed his “thick description” essay in our User Research Theory group a few months back; my first and only exposure to his work so far
• Shaping Things explained by Bruce Sterling
  He uses flickr to create a short slideshow with explanatory text that walks the reader/viewer through the concepts behind the book.

Our CCA class just finished a “user experience audit” of BART and found dozens of aspects of the whole experience that are sub-optimal. I’ll add this one (although maybe one of them saw this as well).

Step 1 – remember your stall number.

Too bad this sign is posted in the ticket-buying area of the station, far far away from your car off in the parking lot. It should read Go back to your car, dumbass, and write down the four digit number and then come back here and look at step 2. Their guidance is not presented at a useful point in the process, at all.

Last week I dialed my cell phone with my 4-digit parking code so that I could “remember” it. There’s one machine for buying tickets, and then through the turnstiles is the next machine for paying for parking (“the paid area”). So even if you walk from your car muttering 3214 over and over again, you still have to use a number-heavy interface to select the value of your ticket, enter your ATM password and so on, and that’s likely to wipe out your short-term memory.

But I only learned this from failure. All of which makes this sign so unhelpful.

Appallingly, the ISP that hosts portigal.com pulled our plug around midnight last night when we exceeded our monthly bandwidth. I am spluttering with rage (really; I am wiping down the screen as I type) and frustration. There was no warning. Indeed, when I got a cryptic automatic warning a month ago and inquired about it, there was no help. I guess blog traffic is pushing me over the edge on bandwidth. That means some form of success, and paying the price for it.

I was able to pay more money and get back into my email, blog, website, etc. And now I’m having Stockholm syndrome. Well, no, but the incredible hassle of moving seems beyond my emotional and technological fortitude at this point – now that this is run with WordPress, I suspect that moving is even hairier than before.

Anyway, very little emailed appeared after this 11 hour absence, and at least one person is reporting a bounceback (that’s not what is supposed to happen, of course). Email is back, so if you sent something and it bounced, please resend.

Classy all the way here. Sheesh. Sorry for any inconvenience.

• A campaign in China to offer free hugs to strangers fails to catch on
  Cultural difference stories are always fun. It’s not clear in the story who is behind this campaign, presumably one of those feel-good societies. It’s not the Chinese government, given that the police hauled away some huggers or profferers of hugs
• PAMELA (Pedestrian Accessibility and Movement Environment LAboratory)
  A simulated pedestrian environment to examine “open space” accessibility. Variable layout, materials, color, texture, lighting, moisture, acoustics.

• Malcolm Gladwell – The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters
  In 2001 I sent Gladwell a fan letter and told him what kind of work I did. In his response, he asked me to pass on leads for stories (a standard response, obviously) and I suggested “prodigies” and “dynasties” as possible topics. Looks like he took my sug