• Lou Rosenfeld revisits an old engagement where the client sought to dissuade usage – What they told me was that they didn't really want to make it easy for veterans—those people risking their lives for their country—to learn about the health benefits that they were entitled to. And that taxpayers had committed to funding. All to save money—and for what??

  IT issue? Not. It was an issue of business model design, and this particular business model was shrouded in a sick morality emanating from the top levels of the VA's management structure. Absolutely immorally, shamefully, and horribly sick.

  [With the theme of persuasion, manipulation, and user-centeredness floating around lately, good to consider an example where the organization goals are 180 degrees from the user's supposed goals]

• Citations for California drivers not using hands-free are on the rise – Seems like there was good compliance when the law was first passed but the numbers are climbing back up. One might think the best way to drive adoption of a product/service/behavior is to make it legally mandated but people are citing the poor user experience with Bluetooth headsets as a reason/rationalization for ignoring the law. "Sometimes, it can be more dangerous to figure out your Bluetooth than just to pick up the phone."

Forcing function…

Animal Hospital with separate dog and cat entrances, Berkeley, CA

WYSIWYG…

Wallaby Yogurt container: Clear container lets the color and texture of the contents “create” the label



Related Posts:
Fair warning
Progress bar
Fruit 2.0

• Some big-thinking on how the professional organization is changing: structure, environment, process – There will be a set of rituals, a cadence of events, that comes to define what differentiates the organization and supports how things get done. The places where these take place now are found by labels on doors—“conference room”—in otherwise undifferentiated space. The activities of the evolving place are about actions—collaborating, integrating, innovating—and not about hierarchy or formal processes.
• In Detroit, Artists Look For Renewal In Foreclosures – In the late '90s, we used to generate fake "trends" mostly for fun, but also as a fatigued reaction to all the hype we were facing about, well, everything. One of my best – because it was just so ludicrous and therefore worthy of endless repeating in any ideation session – was that people were choosing to live in hovels [because hovel is definitely a good comedy word].

  Once again, I was 10 years ahead of my time.

  "Jon Brumit is an artist in Chicago…He and his wife just bought a house in Cope's neighborhood for $100. That's right: an entire house for the price of dinner at a nice restaurant for a family of four. Sure, the place needs a ton of work and it['s not that safe, but Brumit says it's worth it just to help bring back the neighborhood."

In Fast Company’s Green Guru Gone Wrong there’s a sobering examination of sustainability architect William McDonough and the work that he’s doing. I am sure this type of investigation is highly contentious, especially when icons like McDonough are revealed to be less-than-perfect.

But it’s interesting to note that some the project failures are tied to a dramatic lack of understanding of the current behaviors and future needs of target customers.

Shannon May smelled the rot firsthand. An anthropology PhD student from UC Berkeley who lived in Huangbaiyu for nearly two years, May first met McDonough in 2005, the year the project broke ground. But within several months, it became apparent to May that everything from the village’s overall design to its construction was deeply flawed. The homes were suburban-tract style with garages, despite the fact that only four of the expected 1,400 villagers had cars. The backyards were too small for growing feed corn or raising animals, which the villagers needed to make their living. But most absurd to her eye was the plan to use agricultural waste to fuel the biogas plant to power the village: leftover corncobs and stalks were the winter food supply for the cashmere goats, the area’s leading source of cash. Using them meant the goats would starve.

“I started calling Bill and telling him these things, and he would be very responsive and concerned on the phone,” says May, the blonde seen standing behind McDonough in Friedman’s documentary. “What troubled me was that it was as if he knew nothing about the way these people lived. And he seemed concerned, but then nothing would happen after these phone calls.” May says McDonough visited the village only twice while she lived there “for one or two hours at a time, and only when there was a video camera following him.” The supposedly $3,500 homes were costing nearly $12,000 to build, more than 10 times the villagers’ median income. By 2006, only two families had moved in, and they did so because their previous homes had burned down. Even then, they had to use antiquated heating rigs because the renewable energy systems didn’t work.

And even more interesting is that the failure isn’t about a lack of information about these customers, it’s a failure of process to integrate that information into the project decisions.

I was in Chicago last weekend for IIT Institute of Design’s excellent Design Research Conference, and spent a day walking around the city. (I’m happy to say I can now use the term ‘Miesian’ with authority.)

I ended the day in Millennium Park eating a hot dog and looking at Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture.

Actually, to say I was looking at the sculpture sells the experience short. I’d seen the giant silver bean from a distance earlier that day, but once I was next to it, the combination of scale, surface treatment, and form made it such an unusual and compelling object that I couldn’t help but start interacting with it. Chicago writer Lynn Becker’s article on Millennium Park sculpture-as-architecture delves further into the interactivity of Cloud Gate.

After a few trips around and under the sculpture, I decided to sit back and watch how other people were responding to it.

I saw people

• photograph it
  
• photograph themselves with it
  
• photograph others with it
  
• have strangers photograph them with it
  
• use it as a mirror and check their makeup, hair
  
• clean it and (while being photographed) lick it
  
• fit their bodies into the smallest possible space created by the sculpture’s curves
  
• smear their fingerprints along the mirrored surface (this seemed like a form of graffiti, a recording of presence)
  
• pretend to be holding the sculpture up
  
• use it to hold them up
  
• pose suggestively on all fours next to it
  
• talk about having come there other times
  
• lie on the ground in poses to create specific tableaux in the funhouse mirror-like underside
  

It was fascinating to see how people reacted to having this functionless object placed in their midst. It struck me as a form of spatial/environmental prototyping, and I’m sure that noticing and examining what people do and what their patterns of motion around this object are and synthesizing that data could produce insights to inform many types of design.

In our research work, we periodically use objects to elicit responses from people to new concepts. Sometimes these artifacts take the form of storyboards, sometimes models, and sometimes we’ll just put something in a person’s hands to give them a starting point, something to react to. One time, I handed a person we were interviewing a CD box set that was on his coffee table, and he proceeded to talk us through a whole design for the product idea we were discussing. “It’d be smaller than this, I think the corners should be rounded, maybe this part could come off . . .”

We’ve been collaborating lately with a couple of our clients on the creation of storyboards and models for this purpose. It’s been interesting figuring out in each case the right balance of detail and abstraction; how to give people enough cues to get the basic concepts, while leaving them enough space to think about how they would like to see those concepts refined.

Of course, what gets created depends on where our client is in the development process and what we want to learn from the people we’re talking to, but I think that what I saw at Cloud Gate is a good model for what one hopes an artifact will spark in a research participant: the urge to experiment, to hypothesize, to test, to interact, to play, to see what’s possible.

Related posts:
On using objects for generative research
On noticing
On prototyping and fidelity

During a recent trip to Florida I took some time to check out the Disney-founded community of Celebration.

The experience was much more subtle that I had expected; perhaps the true nature emerges more through residency than driving through. Overall, it felt a lot like The Truman Show – a set that made everything a bit too perfect and while one can appreciate just how nice everything is, it lacks a certain organic naturalness.

The town theater is achingly new, yet completely retro. There’s no funk here.

The downtown area is beautiful, branding is kept to a minimum.

Starbucks, the Americanized faux-Italian experience (so faux and so Americanized that you can enjoy it without knowing where it comes from) seems to fit right in (but then Starbucks is the ultimate brand for fitting in everywhere and anywhere).

These electric vehicles were ubiquitous, some turned into rolling advertising vehicles (as has happened with the PT Cruiser, the New Beetle, the Mini, and the Smart Car). I imagine the retirement communities in Florida have a wider general adoption of those vehicles and that’s part of the reason they are seen in Celebration.

Chick-Fil-A branding at a church event.

And about 2 miles down the road, familiar sprawl returns, highlighting the contrast. I think that’s the tallest Starbucks sign I’ve ever seen.

Previously: Florida Faux, part 1

Also: Orlando pictures; Miami pictures.

Miami Beach construction, June 2008

Visitors to Miami Beach encounter hotels (and other architecture) that is old and new Art Deco, as well as various modernist and post-modernist successors (see examples here). This construction site with its orange and stainless look fit nicely with the finished aesthetic seen in the area (note the similarly colored building in the left corner).

Previously:

• Body Image Norms: Miami
• Rum Culture

More Miami photos here.

While in Florida last week I had the chance to learn a bit of history and realized that the manufactured experiences intended to evoke another time/place go back to the earliest days of Florida land booms.

In Orlando, I stayed at the Lowes Portofino Bay, meant to evoke a resort on the Italian Riviera.

Some faux touches included the scooters parked – well, installed, actually – around the grounds…

…and the made-to-look Old Country stair details.

But getting around the place was a nightmare.

In order to convey some sense of authenticity, the architects echoed bits of a townscape, with limited ability to see what was ahead. Although what you could see was devoid of any actual real details – no people, no commerce, no mess, nothing that would help you located yourself or make a decision about what direction you might want to go into. It felt like a rendered videogame background before the branding, characters, and gameplay was added. I just found it frustrating trying to get around, with a very small amount of triumph when I succeeded or found an alternative; but I wasn’t there to work on getting un-lost and I wanted the hotel’s precious Portofino-ness to get out of my way so I could perform basic wayfinding tasks.

Previously:

• FreshMeat #1: Blue Hawaii, or Viva Las Vegas
• Artsy Hotel Raises the Barre
• Meet The New Authenticity
• We’re not in Kansas anymore

Also: Orlando pictures; Miami pictures.

I attended the interactive city summit earlier this week (held in SF as part of ISEA2006: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.)

It was an unusual event for me to attend, since the bulk of the people seemed to be strongly into the issues around new urbanism, planning, technology of the future civic life, if-you-can-dream-it interactivity, etc. I admit I hadn’t thought about this stuff in great depth and so it was a lot of new thinking; although many of the examples shown were things that go through the design and technology sections of the blogosphere I frequent.

I think like so many events, this one struggled a bit with the identity. They repeated the notion of a summit several times, and one possible output was a document that could be sent to a city planner or a design planner or any number of agencies. But an event with a goal like that – a goal of producing a collective output – needs to really structure and facilitate the discussion and creation of output. The emphasis here was on invited presentations (and some good freewheeling discussion), and on quickie presentations from attendees. I don’t see how that sort of content can accomplish the stated goal. And that’s okay, I think the format wasn’t bad. We had the usual problems with acoustics and presenters with tiny type, presentations that ramble without a clear thesis to support, heavily accented presenters, etc. but I think for the most part it was a pretty good event.

Matt Jones gave a stimulating hyperlinked talk (while the laptop-enabled in the audience checked out links and videos concurrently). He showed us this amazing video of the Sultan’s Elephant – an artistic spectacle that you must check out.

There was a great presentation from Rebar, who did the widely blogged PARK(ing) project, where they created small parks in parking spaces; putting down sod, a bench and a plant in a parking space and feeding the meter for a couple of hours.

Troika spent a lot of their time defending themselves (needlessly?) from their work in the commercial domain, under the rhetoric of art vs. design. I didn’t fully understand their stance. They showed the widely blogged SMS Guerilla Projector; a handheld device that takes a text message from a phone and projects it at great distances. In some experiments they shone messages into people’s apartments, and they bemusedly described people calling the police. Ha ha? Their next slide was about empathy, which they seemed to have none of; creating technology experiences that surprise and sometimes frighten people, so they can study their reactions? They need to take a look at an ethics committee guidelines for human subjects! (NB: I was reminded of the disturbing potential for this stuff when I saw Rob Walker’s post about a popular (among cynical edgy youth, no doubt) text message in Iraq: “Your call cannot be completed because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

In an excellent lunchtime discussion we brainstormed on the key issues where technology impacts urban life, and it seemed to me that most of the issues fell into three piles: preserving old stuff, ensuring we don’t fuck up the old stuff (those are different), and enabling new stuff. Of course, today I see this post about the closing of an historic neighborhood store. The post is not significantly high-tech (it uses pictures, and it has a broader reach since it’s on the Internet), and is not significantly unique, but I enjoyed mmediately stumbling across an example of a model that we were just refining.

I took public transit in from Montara both days, trying BART on the first day and MUNI the second day. Thinking I was pretty smart, I drove up to Stonestown Galleria on 19th, parked my car, and took the MUNI right to the front of the place. When I came back after lunch, my brand new car was gone. Towed. The conference was free (including food) but this stupid mistake cost me nearly $300 in fees and taxi! Not to mention stress and wasted time. And somewhat ironic, given the conversations we had been engaging in around surveillance, technology, privacy, and the like. How did they know that I wasn’t a customer at the mall and I wasn’t shopping while my car was there? I parked around 9:35, and the towing receipt read 10:30. What time did they call the towing company in order for them to be writing the thing up at 10:30? Couldn’t have been much after I parked. Did a security guard simply observe me walking away from my car and onto the transit platform? If I had gone into McDonald’s and then come out again, would they have figured it out? Were they monitoring me, or the car in the lot?

I’m not defending my choice, or their response, but it certainly raises some questions about how the heck they knew. Liz Goodman had just mentioned the highway signs that tell you your speed and if you are over, and she commented on the different emotional impact and social perception of a technology that monitors you for your information and a technology that monitors you for someone else’s usage. The highway sign, in her example, doesn’t write you a ticket, or tell the cops, it simply tells you about your behavior, presumably to warn or shame you into driving normally (or to reinforce your choice of compliance). I certainly wondered about whatever technology was used to identify my misdeed.

The landscape is forever changing in little ways, writes SF Chron architecture critic John King, and he identifies several defining artifacts of 2006

• Security barriers
• Solar panels
• Traffic calmers
• Anti-skateboard clips
• Wireless cafes

Of course, it’s not the list itself that is noteworthy, but his articulate and provocative analysis that underlies the reasons for these newly emergent artifacts. What do these things tell us about what’s going on around us? Context is king, isn’t it? I highly encourage you to check out the article!