It’s been a busy-yet-fun few days on the road, from giving a plenary presentation and workshop at ASU’s Design Research Symposium (more to come, whenever I get my pictures – Hi, Greg!), to meetings, dinner with colleagues, and helping a client synthesize fieldwork data from China and Russia into product concepts. Here are some images I captured along the way:

Font problems @ Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

No carry-on tires, Sky Harbor Airport, April, 2008

Well, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Pay Here, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Fear God, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Disengaged Citrus, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Life imitates The Simpsons, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Busy license plate, Tempe, AZ, April, 2008

Crepes To Go, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Font Era #1, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Font Era #2, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Dog Paintings, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Sign upon sign, Portland, OR, April, 2008

Lift party, Portland, OR, April, 2008

AirTran poster, Savannah airport, March 2008

Minipops (an ongoing project, but a big Internet meme in 2005/2006)

Fast Company describes how Alaska Airlines has been redesigning their check-in environment. Some nice bits of process to note

White assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. “Disneyland is great at this,” says Jeff Anderson, a member of White’s skunk works. “They have their people in all the right places.”

The team began brainstorming lobby ideas. At a Seattle warehouse, it built mock-ups, using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts. It tested a curved design, one resembling a fishbone, and one with counters placed at 90-degree angles to each other. It built a small prototype in Anchorage to test systems with real passengers and Alaska employees.

It appears that Alaska had some obvious (and shared) design goals: increase throughput and reduce confusion. There’s a whole class of environmental redesign projects where the goals aren’t as clear. In those cases, there’s some generative research needed to understand what aspects of the overall experience could and should be different.

The progress bar is a familiar interface widget in software. But sometimes it appears away from the PC.

Crosswalk in Tokyo (full disclosure: I took the picture when the progress bar had run out; so I added them back in Photoshop).

NEX train from Narita Airport to downtown Tokyo

Airport Express into Hong Kong

Sign from Intellectual Property Office, Ministry of Economic Affairs, in the Taipei airport
The sign reads:
Post only authorized images, music, videos, or writings on your blog, or you could be blogging your way into court! Today’s user is tomorrow’s right owner. Respect others’ intellectual properly rights.

Even before clearing immigration in Taipei, there’s an intellectual property warning for bloggers. Is this really such a big problem? I’d expect them to worry more about CD and DVD piracy first.

Recent political scandals have much to teach us.

…Officers wrote that they knew from their training and work experience that the foot-tapping was a signal used by people looking for sex.
…
After a man in the adjacent stall left, Craig entered it and put his luggage against the front of the stall door, “which Sgt. Karsnia’s experience has indicated is used to attempt to conceal sexual conduct by blocking the view from the front of the stall,” said the complaint.

The complaint said Craig then tapped his right foot several times and moved it closer to Karsnia’s stall and then moved it to where it touched Karsnia’s foot. Karsnia recognized that “as a signal often used by persons communicating a desire to engage in sexual conduct,” the complaint said.

Assuming this is true (and recalling humorous-in-retrospect documents that we’ve all seen about law enforcement deconstructing hippies, punks, heavy metal, gangs, etc., it very way may not be), it’s cool to consider a signal that can only be interpreted by those that know what it means. To everyone else, it may not even penetrate your awareness. Until the communication is decoded, it’s almost perfect, especially for messages that may be risky.

I’m fascinated to consider that (maybe, just maybe) someone may have at some point tapped at me, and I wouldn’t have necessarily noticed and certainly not interpreted it as it’s presumably intended.

I’m here in Richmond, VA for another few days of fieldwork. I haven’t quite processed the time in Seattle (and let alone the photos from KC) and here I am on the road again, turn the page. Our hotel is in a combination of industrial and motel strip, directly across from the economy lot for the airport. The main floor of the hotel smells like humid flatulence.

And here’s a closed 7-11, as I pulled in, the local cops were there flashing lights and getting out to talk to someone in another car. There are two Waffle Houses within sight of each other. Interesting area.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a free day tomorrow, so I’ll be off to explore the city. I am entirely unprepared for that, of course, since I planned to be busy minute by minute. We’ll see how it goes.

For long-term parking, SFO recently switched from a big lot to a 7-story parking structure. At one end of each floor is a bank of elevators and on the ground floor is the bus stop to get to the terminals.

Each floor is (somewhat subtly) color-coded and right next to the button for the elevator is this little widget: a card with the floor printed on it, and a space for each of the sections that can be marked or torn to indicate where you left your car. Simple, elegant.

We met some great folks during our two-day odyssey from San Francisco to Kansas City.

Right after I took the picture, a group of guys who work at the airport were talking to me about how I probably made the guy’s day by paying attention to him. They didn’t understand that I truly thought his look was awesome. I love that some people pay such close attention to their personal branding.

At the end of a long day of canceled flights and insanely long lines, I was reminded by this display at the Denver airport of the things that really matter.

It’s hard to believe I’ve lived so long in California without ever making a pilgrimage to the Tower of Pallets.

The Chateau Avalon in Kansas City: in the words of the fellow who built the place, the 64 suites are not rooms; they’re “experiences.”

It was hard to fully capture the grandeur of the Serengeti Room, where I stayed, but I will say that the rhino head made an excellent place to hang my clothes.

This restroom-last-cleaned-at status box is a digital device that replaces a familiar paper version. I’m not totally clear what the function of this has been: enforce compliance by employees who are responsible for doing the cleaning, remind the public that (appearance notwithstanding) the institution does indeed care about restroom cleanliness?

How does making it digital improve the performance? Is it the meaning of digital (to the public, or the monitored staff?) or the usability of the technology (one button press replaces writing by hand?) or the affordances of the technology (networked data tracking to look for patterns over time/location?)…