Well, hello!

• I’m getting on a plane to Minneapolis in a very short time. Last week’s fieldwork was very interesting but the whole experience was really hampered by poor communication, a challenging recruit, oh and poor communication. Day by day, I didn’t know what – if anything – was happening the next day and so I wrapped up each day by booking another hotel room for that night. Certainly a draining experience. And while I was pretty clear I couldn’t do this two weeks in a row, I really only found out Thursday afternoon what’s happening Monday. Indeed, it’s still in flux, but it’s not possible – within the scope of the project we negotiated – to make a bunch of last-minute trips around the country. This aspect of things feels tense, but that may just be the exhaustion.
• I’m a good chunk of the way through posting my pictures of Australia and New Zealand to Flickr. There’s about 275 pictures up there now, and definitely a whole bunch still to come.
• Later this week, I’m off to Up To All Of Us, a retreat type of event that I was invited to go to. I like the people and the energy but I’m honestly unsure what it’s going to be like and what I’m doing. I took a deliberate leap of faith when signing up, feeling the need to broaden my connections into less familiar places – but now I’m having to deal with that leap.
• Ten years gone: From March 2004 – Blood dichotomy, the worst salesman in the world, The bento – a scrumptious expression of love.
• What we’re consuming: House of Cards (Season 1), Douzo Sushi, Global Entry.

Happy March!

• I’m on a plane to Boston right now. To my great surprise (to put it politely) I got an email after close-of-business on Friday – after little-to-no communication for a couple of weeks – saying that we’re doing fieldwork this week. Details are still scant (say, the where and when?) but it’s been a scramble over the past few days to get the travel logistics sorted out (hint: it’s not economical to buy a cross-country airfare two days before you need to fly), and an initial draft of a fieldwork plan in place. There’s no longer a window for the team to align on the details of the fieldwork or even the mechanics of doing interviews together. For all my knowledge (and speaking on) best practices it’s a frustrating reality check on the challenges we all face in this work.
• Some recommended reading: Design-driven businesses have outperformed the S&P by 228%; The Empathy Vacuum by Greg Knauss examines our culture of desperate-mob-pile-on-criticism; a profile of Red Associates emphasizes the intellectual/academic trappings of their founders although I was more interested in other aspects of the firm; You Are Being Crushed by Data and Losing the Consumer; a good riff on the problems that designers face in their work, trying to do right; dana boyd’s new book It’s Complicated.
• Ten years gone: From March 2004 – People pick purebred dogs that resemble them, Going through Stanley Kubrick’s stuff, Debunking the myth of prisoner’s final meals.
• What we’re consuming: Girls, Blue Apron, Make Your Maker, Dull Rock ‘n Roll Anecdotes

Here comes the end of February – 2014 is racing along.

• Our project schedule may be in jeopardy which is the kind of thing that makes me worry. We already lost a week to getting our hospitals scheduled and I haven’t heard much since then (except that they expect it to be difficult). The team is pretty busy with a number of other efforts (specifics unknown to me) so even getting a response to my request for a quick check-in is a challenge. I’m eager for us to start learning but there’s a huge logistics hurdle that needs to be overcome.
• Really looking forward to an internal corporate summit I’m going to be part of, probably in April. From what I’ve heard so far it should be a pretty exciting event.
• On the town this week, I’ll be at Arrogance in International Research this Wednesday in San Francisco.
• Ten years gone: From February 2004 – Franchise Zeitgeist, Pickle Paraphernalia, Li’l G n’R.
• What we’re consuming: Enough Said, EQ3, Hangman Jury, Tara’s Organic Ice Cream.

More news about technology eating its predecessors:

Moviefone is shutting down its phone-in ticketing business to focus on its app, according to Jeff Berman, president of BermanBraun, which runs the declining movie ticket service. “The call-in service has been in pretty steady decline… Our customers are much more interested in our award-winning app, and we need to invest our resources in the future, part of which involves a major reimagining of Moviefone.” This weekend, callers were informed that the service would soon go silent. Once a dominant force in the world of movie ticketing and listings, the service is best known for the voice of “Mr. Moviefone,” provided by founder Russ Leatherman, that greeted callers.

It’s part of the human condition to see things go by the wayside. In many cases what is lost is replaced by something that is better. A dial-in voice-based movie-listing service is hardly the best solution available to us, and the usage numbers for Moviefone show that. So it’s disappearance makes sense in terms of utility (and business). But with many of these disappearances, what we might mourn is the cultural loss (yes, Moviefone was an element on Seinfeld), recalling the affection we have for the familiarity, even considering it as tradition. Sometimes this collective sense of loss is enough to produce an outpouring that convinces a company that there’s a good-will business case around preservation. While I don’t expect that here, these occurrences are common and are interesting to look it through the lenses of function, business and meaning.

Full story

Back in 2012, this video appeared on YouTube, with disc drives playing Soft Cell’s version of Tainted Love (did you know it was a cover?).

This sort of thing does go back decades; some folks got an IBM 1403 printer to play pop songs in 1970 (check out the actual songs here).

In a delightful twist, Marc Almond of Soft Cell recently came across the video, and decided to add his vocals to the disc drive music!

I’m reminded of when Gotye created his own remix (on YouTube) of the ubiquitous covers (also on YouTube) of Somebody That I Used To Know.

Platforms like YouTube enable the collapse of the separation between consumer and producer and it leads to interesting and surprising outcomes. These small examples highlight the disruption that is occurring today.

Credit card issuer Capital One isn’t shy about getting into customers’ faces. The company recently sent a contract update to cardholders that makes clear it can drop by any time it pleases. The update specifies that “we may contact you in any manner we choose” and that such contacts can include calls, emails, texts, faxes or a “personal visit.”

Yep, that’s how you get willing research participants – add it to the Terms of Service! Sure, I’m kidding; that’s not really what this article is about (it’s about the credit-card company claiming rights to repossession for non-payment). Still, this ups the creepy ante for visiting customers and makes the trust aspect of recruiting participants just that much harder.

Full story

From this article

WIRED: What innovation do you think is changing the most lives in the developing world?
MELINDA GATES: Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.

So great to see this.

The image above, accompanying an article

about private jets, reveals a privation so unimaginable it may shake you to your very core. Yes, that’s the personal UI that the elite are forced to use during their painful time aboard. The ultra-elite no doubt have other people who are paid to look at (ugh!) and touch (aieee!) those buttons while puzzling through gnomic instructions. But the regular rich are just like us, I suppose.

Update: Nathan Shedroff says that’s just for the “wannabe” 1% and the state of the art is here. IMHO still “ugh” but at least current-generation-of-technology ugh.

I’m back to 90% of normal health today, after a long week of general confusion and extended napping. I was fortunate that we cancelled last week’s Boston trip in the face of a tremendous snowstorm.

• We did last week’s kickoff over WebEx. It was a disappointing not to be in the same room as everyone and put faces to names, but they closed their office due to the storm and most people called in from home anyway. I’ll finish up meeting with the final project stakeholder today. The next big step is to line up the hospitals we’ll be visiting and despite having weeks of lead time, the team is feeling pretty nervous about being able to pull it off. We’re supporting them with some best practices about how to ask for a site’s involvement.
• Networking this week includes offering some coaching on writing a book, and strengthening my own connections with folks I can pull in for projects.
• I’m involved in some early planning conversations for speaking at a really interesting internal corporate event.
• On the town this week, I’m looking forward to seeing a presentation on Design Thinking from Julie Baher this Thursday in San Francisco.
• Ten years gone: From February 2004 – Chagall at Costco, AOLiza, Found Typography.
• What we’re consuming: True Detective, Allman Brothers Band, ramen.

I’m recovering from flu which appeared in the last day of my trip, leading to an excruciatingly fevered/chilled day of overseas travel and a weekend of confusion and general self-pitying. Even without that, having some culture shock returning to the familiar.

• I’m off to Boston later this week to kick off a new project. Really looking forward to getting to know the organization as it seems we’re all excited to be working together. Eventually, we’ll be looking at IT and administrative processes in hospitals and doctor’s offices, but this week is all about the planning.
• Among the myriad messages that show up when you’re away from the office is one from our newish, supposedly user-friendly service-dedicated webhost, with some arcane request to make some technical adjustment I have no idea how to do that. So I’ll suppose I’ll be sorting that out!
• Ten years gone: From February 2004 – The remarkable photography of Brian Ulrich, Supersize your movie collection, Top 10 earworms.
• What we’re consuming: Monteith’s, Mac’s Beer, Bintang, Bircher muesli.