• OneMillionGiraffes.com – fascinating to look at how a simple exercise can be tackled in so many different ways – My friend, Jørgen, doesn't believe I can collect one million giraffes by 2011. I'm gonna prove him wrong, but I need your help. So far I've got 76.870 giraffes, so I need 923.130 more! And I have 503 days left to get them.
• See my giraffe – Will it be one in a million?

• An Anthropology of Everyday Life by Edward T. Hall, A Review by Bobby Matherne – In his childhood in New Mexico he studied impressionist painting and soon learned that "every part of a painting affects every other part." The adding of a dab of color to a painting can change the color of the dab and all the other colors already on the painting. It was a metaphor for what happened when he was later assigned to build earthen dams with the Hopi and Navajo tribes. This dab of white skin on a field of red skins were both changed by his presence. On a trip to Europe to visit his mother he noted how the German trains ran tightly and smoothly on the track and were always right on time. The French trains, however, swayed from side to side and ran late. He was far more observant about the hidden cultures of the continent than the French who confiscated German trains after World War II only to find them useless on the French tracks.
• Edward Hall, Expert on Nonverbal Communication, Is Dead at 95 – Mr. Hall first became interested in space and time as forms of cultural expression while working on Navajo and Hopi reservations in the 1930s. He later developed a cultural model that emphasized the importance of nonverbal signals and modes of awareness over explicit messages.

• A thoughtful consideration (that could have so easily gone curmudgeonly) on the changes in how (and how much) we consume art – Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.
• Michael Pollan on the cultural shifts revealed by themes in food-related TV entertainment – The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit…Buying, not making, is what cooking shows are mostly now about — that and, increasingly, cooking shows themselves: the whole self-perpetuating spectacle of competition, success and celebrity that, with “The Next Food Network Star,” appears to have entered its baroque phase. The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking.
• Nine Reasons RadioShack Shouldn’t Change Its Name – Best one is " RadioShack has problems beyond any issues with its name." Also they did already change name from Radio Shack to RadioShack.
• Radio Shack: Our friends call us The Shack – Do they really now? More proof that you can't simply declare yourself cool. Promo or overall rebranding, it reeks of inauthenticity.
• Understand My Needs – a multicultural perspective – A Japanese usability professional compares the norms of service that retailers provide in Japan with those elsewhere (say, his experience living in Canada), and then contrasts that to the common usability problems found in Japanese websites. Culture is a powerful lens to see what causes these differences, and how usability people can help improve the experience.

• Exercises in Style – 99 visual retellings of the same story – Matt Madden's visual version, where the same one-page story is told in graphic novel form 99 different ways.
• Exercises in Style – 99 retellings of the same story – Exercises in Style, written by Raymond Queneau is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat.
• Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work – "Wood created this piece not for others, but as a reminder to himself to not become bogged down in unproductive eddies" – like Oblique Strategies or McLuhan's Distant Early Warning Cards, this is another go-to set of tools for a creative problem (in this case, how for comic illustrators to present information in different ways)
  (via waxy)

• BusinessWeek looks at how Steelcase went from user research data to insights to opportunities – "But most innovations depend on nontraditional research methods—ethnographic studies, customer-created collages, and so on—that can't easily be sliced and diced in Excel. That means synthesis can be one of the most challenging steps in the innovation process." This is an issue I'll be addressing in my upcoming workshop at EPIC 2009 "Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities"
• The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies – Not technically a museum (or even an Internet museum) as they've really just aggregated images that represent tools and ways of working that have or are in the process of obsoleting.

• AD BOY: Vintage Advertising with Character by Warren Dotz and Masud Husain – Their newest book; I haven't seen it yet!
• Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertising Character by Warren Dotz and Masud Husain – Link to Google Books where you can browse most of the content. I've got a copy at home that I always wish I had time to dive into.

• The Comic Strip Museum in Brussels (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessiné. Belgisch Centrum voor het Stripverhaal) – A really interesting museum; I had no idea of the rich and important history of comics in Belgium, beyond Smurfs and Tintin they've produces an insane number of titles over the decades.
• Comics is the ninth art? – Although this post attributes the source to someone besides Morris, it does offer a bit more explanation about the set of arts
• Maurice De Bevere aka Morris – Belgian comic strip author who (according to the Comic Strip Museum in Brussels) coined the term The Ninth Art to describe comics

• Pathways: Mondo Blendo computer art movement (from 1991 Compute! magazine) – You may not have heard of it, but it's all around you – on TV, in advertisements, in the movies. It's blendo, a.k.a. "genre-bending," "digital postmodernism," or "synergistic art," and it may well be the first important – or foolish – aesthetic idea to come out of computer graphics.

  What is blendo? Michael Gosney, publisher/editor of Verbum, the Journal of Personal Computer Aesthetics, calls it "the parallel convergence of art forms" combining "anything and everything – type, bitmap paintings, vector graphics, scanned images, animation, 3-D…." School of Visual Arts academic Timothy Binkley describes computer art as the creation of "a prodigious menagerie of things" brought into being "merely by waving a magic wand." It's a fair characterization of the blendo approach. You take whatever elements are relevant (or irrelevant) to your purpose and put them into your picture.

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

Rack o’ seats, Tate Modern, London, July 2008

This is a nice touch: self-serve portable seating for your journey through an art museum.