I will be leading a discussion on Participation and Authenticity: The new Prosumer and User-Generated Content (perhaps an update to an older FreshMeat at MarCamp

in South San Francisco on September 26.

I’m feeling eagerness and trepidation over the upcoming Applied Improv Conference. Eagerness because I find improv has enormous potential for creativity and collaboration (and even connections to ethnography) and discussions of improv can be provocative and intellectually invigorating.

And trepidation over whether this event will be filled with earnest, clowny, extroverted, unprofessional flakes where I’ve just got no common ground.

We have an exciting Plenary Session planned for Wednesday evening with Nika Quirk of InterPlay.
InterPlay means “interaction” and what could be better to kick off a conference? InterPlay is easy, fun, and life changing. It is based in a series of incremental “forms” that lead participants to movement and stories, silence and song, ease and amusement. In the process, we unlock the innate wisdom of our bodies and in our relationships.

Nika Quirk is a lifelong mover and student of dance, starting with her interest in wiggling to TV jingles at age 3. She founded and directed a Dance Choir using authentic movement and a collaborative choreography process she developed. Completing the yearlong InterPlay Leadership Program in 1997, she earned certification in the methodology and has focused her application of InterPlay in small groups, individual coaching, and “labs” exploring business partnership. Nika’s career spans law, business management, non-profit program development, academic teaching and professional coaching. In August, she began a doctoral program at California Institute of Integral Studies and is following her curiosity about the connections between improvisational ability and social creativity.

I guess it’s up to me to bring some open-mindedness back and cover up my cynicism (which I oh-so enjoy). The conference is local, so no travel costs, and is relatively inexpensive, and is an experiment for me. I’m passing on some of the typical conferences my peers are attending this year (and that I have been regulars at in the past) in order to branch out, but I can feel the tension inside me over that decision.

MarCamp – Marketing, Advertising, Recommendations is an unconference sponsored by France Telecom – Orange.

How will marketing and advertising evolve in the next 5 years? How best to leverage the power of the community and 2.0 technologies to the benefit of marketing and advertising? How to improve the relationship with your customers? How important will interactivity with your customer be in your product design strategies?

Having been at one “camp”, I’d like to try and lead a discussion at MarCamp; but I’m not clear yet what the topic should be…

Core77 has put up podcasts ofJune’s Design 2.0 event, including my presentation (21M mp3 link here) below

Notes from my UXWeek session are online (not sure how helpful they are without hearing me talk through the issues, (Update: you can hear me talk through the issues here) but if you want to, check out Dan Saffer’s notes or the notes from the wiki.

Hawai’i makai/mauka signs
different orientation toward navigation: toward mountain, toward ocean
difference in how we move through space

so what?
mundane observations reveal differences in cultural needs or drivers

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.

CanUX 2006

is announced. You can see a cheesy picture of me on that site if you click on the 13 in the banner. Geez, last year (when I was a speaker) they didn’t have a website!

Great event last year, wonderful location, good vibe. It was ridiculously cheap last year; this year it’s extremely reasonable.

User Experience Week 2006 is coming up in just 2 weeks. I’m looking forward to the event; I’ve never been to D.C. before, looking forward to seeing Michael Bierut and some of the other presenters. My talk and Jared Spool’s take place simultaneously, so I can expect an (ahem) intimate audience, I guess.

I know some of the folks who will be there (especially other presenters), but I’d love to hear from other folks who will be at UX Week?

I’m attending an interesting event next week. It’s a two-day summit on the topic of (as far as I can tell) what we want from our cities in the future. There’s an implied (to me) technological bias, but not any assumption that technology is good.

This is not a topic I feel very expert in, not even very well informed, or strongly opinionated about. Given the discussion-based slant the organizers are taking, this could be a risk, but I’m hoping that diving into the issues will unearth some perspectives on, well, living life in the spaces we live in, that I haven’t previously written or talked about.

Tipping the scales for me, therefore, to attend, are the facts that the event is free and local and especially that organizers/presenters include Eric Paulos and Matt Jones, two big-thinking design/culture/technology folks whom I admire.

This summit is part of a larger event going on in San Jose (electronic art, and presumably some other themes; I can’t really parse the details or remember the name of the conference without regular use of the web) – I won’t be part of that.

If you are attending the interactive city summit, let me know!

This past weekend at Asilomar we put together a small (50-person) “unconference” referred to as Overlap, nominally set up to address the (perhaps emerging) confluence of design and business. The emphasis was not on the typical conference top-down presentations by “experts”, but on the creation of discussion moments.

But in planning the event, we took a open-ended approach. We didn’t define or even seek to define what the Overlap really meant or what the outcome of this conference should be. We conceived of an approach where presenters were asked to keep their remarks extremely brief, and work with another person to really facilitate a targeted discussion. Unfortunately, that didn’t play out in execution. Presenters ended talking for much longer than I had expected, and then it was thrown open, often without a mechanism for facilitating either the speakers or the topic. And 50 people piling on was often unmanageable – it takes a fair amount of force to jump into a discussion with that many inhabitants (not participants; that’s my point, you couldn’t easily participate unless you were loud and fast, at least).

It wasn’t chaos, it was engaging and it had an energy, but it was not fully inclusive, and it was rather tiring. We had highly spirited discussion, and even some persistent disagreement that I think was extremely healthy (in contrast to the hushed horror seen at DUX and other events when an idea was challenged) without being excessively personal or inappropriate in tone.

Tom Mulhern opened the event by asking everyone to go around the circle and talk about what they thought the Overlap was between. What were the endpoints? The answers were fascinating and grew in depth as the circle proceeded. This was truly a group looking to bust some paradigms, with exciting, diverse backgrounds and an intensity towards moving towards…something. Indeed, this discussion (and our effective warmup intros via email, in the days leading up to the event) made me feel better about various insecurities. Feeling like I don’t fit, or don’t have a clear identity, or the identity that I want were all themes that other participants echoed flavors of, while offering up fantastic credentials and passions…hmm, if these people are so awesome, why do they have the same troubling feelings I do? Maybe there’s some lesson to be learned here. Indeed, I returned to the blogosphere to find rather similar thoughts from PeterMe

.

Some of Tom’s presentation [Note – I took a few notes about a few different parts of the event. I’m not summarizing every aspect of every presenter and I won’t mention some presenters. That doesn’t imply that there was nothing of value. I’m lazy, and some presentations don’t easily translate to a blog posting. I imagine more exhaustive notes will emerge over the next while] about the things that design can bring to business, or the “products” of design, were built on his structure of Grease, Grit, and Glue.

Grease – the power of design to align people, i.e., make people work in a team – if you are going to have the pleasure of becoming unconfused, you have to allow yourself to be confused

Grit – we encounter people taking on Newspeak terms about the future, about their products or business, but bringing a real person into the process (a real “user”) brings the 15,000 foot view down to a real level (and prototyping is a way to do this even further)

Grout – taking things and holding them together – i.e., a wall doesn’t work without grout, but the grout is not really what it’s about, this is helping people connect stuff, such as communication design, i.e., creating a brand “bible” that everyone would believe in

After Tom’s piece, something changed when Richard Farson led the first session the next morning.

Richard said a lot of great stuff in a direct and articulate voice of authority. For example
– design is one of the few industries that is dominated by its clients and this is not healthy
– we are a business not a profession
– we have a vendor mentality when we approach clients, not as peers (he referenced the period in history when architects were at the highest level of a society and mixed with presidents)
– we must move from a market orientation to a goal orientation; from meeting wants to meeting needs
– (designed )situations are more powerful creators of behavior than [a long list that included genetics etc.] – i.e., “no one smokes in church”

But this shifted into a discussion of social responsibility or rather Social Responsibility that seemed off-topic. But had tremendous gravity for the group. It became this underlying theme for the event (why, I am not sure).

Immediately the discussion turned to ways we can start to address the list of social ills that Richard presented, and whether his public/private sector perspective was the way to handle it. And the “we” became “designers.” I started hearing that dreadful “As designers, we….” preface to statements from every corner of the room. I can’t stand when people start doing that. Suddenly people were acting as if we were a bunch of designers on a retreat somewhere to talk about design which therefore means saving the world. We weren’t people with multiple professions and identities, we were one thing: designers. I tried to flag this for the group, but the language didn’t change; the traditional behaviors are hard to break, perhaps.

There were lots of other presentations, some with breakout exercises where we might try and design a solution to a complex problem. Brad Nemer gave us a task where we looked at a range of media sources or artifacts (Reese’s Pieces in E.T., Fox News, blogs, “4 out of 5 dentists”, NYT, Oscars, and 25 more) and asked us to deconstruct the issues of trust within those sources, and then to design solutions. I was struck by the framing of the exercise, where “the problem with society and media” was baked in, rather than being more open-ended.

Unpacking the issues of trust was fascinating our breakout group. But our design was an unsexy Google-News-on-steroids that would automagically do a lot of shit better. One other group came up with the same thing. And three other groups couldn’t finish. It was a bummer – I saw none of the “sweeeeet” moments in the entire event – where someone comes up with something that maybe isn’t fully realized, but is elegant in a way that grabs you in the gut and brain simultaenously, making you utter in a low voice “sweeeet!” without even thinking about it. I don’t know if the exercise was at fault, or the framing, or the save-the-world tone that pervaded the groupthink by that point.

A fascinating, if troubling, exercise was led by Erin Liman and Marc Levine. 1/3 of the group was brought up to be Influencers. The rest of us sat in our chairs and were Influencees. The exercise was for the Influencers to get the Influencees to try drinking some buttermilk.

But first a bit more context – this was an enormously social experience. We dined together at special tables for Overlap in the dining hall. We stayed together in one or two buildings that were exclusively Overlap folks. We talked extensively during the many breaks, during meals, with beer (which people independently purchased and shared), during walks. There were many familiar faces, other faces put to names, and other new people met. It was really a great connection where everyone was pretty much really nice to each other, convivial, welcoming and collaborative.

And that informed the exercise and my feelings about it.

Structurally, the Influencers would have some time to go plan their approach, then some time with the Influencees (which I was one of), then more time to revise their approach, and then a final session with us.

What happened was fascinating as a story if unnerving as an experience: the Influencers did what seemed very natural in the setting of a workshop exercise. They play-acted. They did improv, taking on characters that were enormously familiar. They parroted the language of telemarketers and informercials.

Watching them do it was amusing and kind of meta-ironic. But then they wanted us to actually do something. To take an action. To drink something. It wasn’t about the drinking of the buttermilk, it was about the feeling of being treated that way. Insincerely. Manipulated. And these were new friends acting this way.

Funny to see this hugh macleod image today.

That really sums it up. I had people standing in front of me and channeling every awful camp counselor/peer pressure/telemarketer/religious zealot/scammer – people with whom I had developed these great relationships. It was horrifying, and in a couple of cases I was not even really able to repair the post-exercise relationship.

And of course it didn’t work. What worked was people who approached each other sincerely, even acknowledging the frame of the exercise. The fact we had to learn that insight so viscerally through failure is really a drag.

I’m not entirely sure how this was an Overlap-relevant experience, but again that was one of the risks with such a (deliberately) ill-defined brief.

The nearest thing to a “sweeet” moment happened in this session, however. The Influencers realized that buttermilk was good in other foods, say, pancakes. They went to the Asilomar kitchen and in the space of a few minutes managed to get them to make some buttermilk pancakes. Sadly, they arrived as the session was concluding and so it didn’t serve to persuade us (too late), but it would have been pretty cool. The fact that they pulled that off is a tribute to the power of creative thinking and extroversion.

The event ended with a discussion of what comes next, and I think that’s still being sorted out. There’s some real passion for an outcome, I’m not sure if there’s too much around a specific outcome (we’ve talked about future events, regional events, taking on projects, creating a publishable archive of what we’ve done, or what we will go and do, etc.), or even the individual leadership to take on any of those outcomes (because we’ve all been in groups where there’s clear energy towards doing something, but have seen the success or failure when a single person does or doesn’t step up and move things forward).

I’m not fascinated by fixing the world and those big-picture initiatives – at least where they are now. When they get “real” I can definitely get on board, but I was so burned out from the hard work of the experience (and lack of sleep) that I couldn’t see how that will happen. I am fascinated by more personal connections and more insights into who we are and how we do what we all do, and I think that will be an outcome in one form or another.

I had a good time and I approached Overlap with few in-depth expectations, and so I’m not upset or disappointed by what happened. I’m a bit surprised, sure, but we did frame this in the organizing as a planning meeting, keeping it relatively unconstrained, so the results do seem appropriate for that. There’s a desire among most of us to further define this thing we’ve unleashed, and I may find more comfort or my own personal niche as that definition gets refined.

I think people brought a lot of passion, insight, hard work, commitment and other good-tasting-ingredients to Overlap and I’m so appreciative of that. I’m okay with things not working, or not working the way I want; that’s part of letting go and riding the experience. I wouldn’t have changed the approach too much, even with what I know now (I’d do it differently next time, but I wouldn’t have done it differently this time). I look forward to ongoing connections with the new friends I’ve made.

See my Overlap pics at flickr.