From What I’ve Learned: Vint Cerf (“creator of the Internet”) in the latest Esquire magazine (italics mine)

There was a first “Oh, no!” moment. That was the first time I saw spam pop up. It could have been as early as ’79. A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening, and we all blew up, saying, This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

(Update: link to article here)

It’s not A digital-equipment corporation (and really, who speaks like that?) It’s Digital Equipment Corporation, aka DEC, aka Digital.

One letter changes the details of the story somewhat (I suppose it’s not crucial to know who sent this first spam), enough to make it clear that the copy editor had no context about the era in technology and business that Cerf was talking about.

I’m reminded of the challenges with interviews transcribed using an overseas service:

Male: It keeps searching and then it is–

Female: So what did it come up with?

Male: Well, I did come up with tickets.

Female: Get out, you are kidding me. I should go, where is this at? In Denver?

Male: Denver, yeah. In the Betsey Center.

Female: Okay, well try and find me some tickets in Tampa.

I’m pretty sure the Betsey Center is actually The Pepsi Center.

Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here

Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.

Transit Chief Plans to Ask Riders to Grade Subway and Bus Lines

Riders on each line will be asked to grade different aspects of service, including the cleanliness of cars and stations, safety and the responsiveness of employees.

He said he would also ask riders to list the three things that they thought most need to be improved.

“I want to know what passengers want,” Mr. Roberts said yesterday during a wide-ranging interview that touched on topics as diverse as dirty subway cars and his affinity for the poetry of Robert Frost.

“I think too often people sit around in offices like this and say, ‘O.K., I know better than the customer what it is they want and so this is what we’re going to do.’ I want the customer to drive the priorities.”

…He envisions cards that would be handed out to riders as they exit stations, and which they could fill out and mail in at no cost.

The impulse is good, but broken. Roberts realizes that the truth about riders/customers is not in his office but is “out there.” In the subway. With the riders. The real people.

So what does he do? He sits in his office and creates a piece of paper that will be given to those riders. The paper will be sent back into the office where people in the office will look at the paper and make decisions about what to do.

Why not go out of the office and talk to the riders while they are riding? Take that impulse, Roberts, and follow it to the next level!

Last weekend I went to an audition for a newly forming troupe from Blue Blanket Improv. I had done a full two hours of improv games for a really long time, and I was definitely rusty, but it was a lot of fun. I was hesitant to attend because there’s a pretty strong focus to the group – non-profit community events, and performances. I’m not sure I care that much about either. With that emphasis on performances comes a need to be funny for an audience. When I interviewed Chris Miller about improv and creativity, he noted the difference between improv and improv comedy, and this is definitely about improv comedy. But Chris also encouraged me to go to the audition, simply for a chance to play. I’m glad I did, because it was absolutely a chance to play, but it also clarified something for me: that I am fascinated by the problem-solving aspect of improv games…the need to follow the constraints of the game (i.e., a one-minute scene that is improvised, then repeated in 30-second, 15-second, 7.5-second and 3 second versions), be collaborative, and be creative. I love the laughter that comes from the participants in the activity (and even if you aren’t in the scene, you are going to get up and do it yourself next, so you share in that creative act) but I’m not so turned on by improv as a form of entertainment for those on the other side of the proscenium.

I got the call last night telling me that I passed the audition and was invited to join the troupe. I had to decline; I love the process and the way they’ve set up a structure for trust and creativity and collaboration, but I can’t go down the road of committing to performing for others right now.

It was sort of a stunning decision to make; I can imagine at various points in my life I would have given anything to be part of something like this, especially at this nascent stage (essentially they are building a new troupe from scratch in our community).

The day before that call I had seen a posting up at CCA for writing classes at
Killing My Lobster

This class is a six-week boot camp where the main requirement is for you to write funny and keep writing funny. If you’ve always had a curiousity [sic] for comedy writing, had funny ideas and have wondered “what would happen if I actually took this to the next level,” and enjoy learning and creating in a fun environment this may be the class for you. The class will culminate in a live reading of your favorite material.

I really enjoy sketch comedy as an audience and this class (sadly already in progress) sounds really cool. It’s another set of creative problem solving tools with some very different constraints and philosophies than improv, but perhaps a valuable exploration in expanding storytelling skills.

And finally, a piece about laughter and social context in the NYT today.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group. But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss, as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.

This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate good.

“Laughter seems to be an automatic response to your situation rather than a conscious strategy,” says Tyler F. Stillman, who did the experiments along with Roy Baumeister and Nathan DeWall. “When I tell the muffin joke to my undergraduate classes, they laugh out loud.”

Mr. Stillman says he got so used to the laughs that he wasn’t quite prepared for the response at a conference in January, although he realizes he should have expected it.

“It was a small conference attended by some of the most senior researchers in the field,” he recalls. “When they heard me, a lowly graduate student, tell the muffin joke, there was a really uncomfortable silence. You could hear crickets.”

Designing Sustainable Mobility is an event recently held at Art Center in Southern California. In Northern California (i.e., Silicon Valley) an design-y event about mobility (sustainable or otherwise), is going to be about wireless communications (i.e. cell phone stuff). In Southern California, it’s about cars.

Although, now that I think of it, a conference about sustainability and wireless mobility would be interesting, since I don’t ever hear of the two things put together.

Yet another article that mocks the introduction of an automated technology. In this case, it’s a self-serve postal kiosk in San Francisco. Several silly examples in the story where people struggle to figure out how to use it, taking longer than the line for a real person, where the machine asks for lots and lots of extra info (since it has no a priori context like a human might), and so on.

Some themes that we now know

1. Lots and lots of stuff is badly designed
2. Many people can’t easily become quick at interacting with a new computer system
3. Some tasks are more appropriate for a kiosk than others.
4. Lack of context in an automated system and the resultant work the system (and thus the user) must do in order to establish that context reads as silly, funny, frustrating, and unacceptable

It’s impossible from these stories to tell, of course, what’s really going on. Me, I love self-check even if I have to fight it, even if I have to bend my natural tendencies to work the way it wants me to work. Maybe it’s being an introvert, or a bit of a technology geek, or curious, or just the idea that there’s a scam to be had by being savvy and checking out automatically rather than the usual way.

Michael sent along the above screengrab, showing an all-too-familiar sight. A news story with a hee-lariously inappropriate ad placed automatically alongside. Computers are as dumb as we make them. Software looks for matches and places ads “in context” – i.e., if there’s a conversation about Olive Garden, let’s advertise to those people. There’s not enough smarts in place, currently, to find out, say, if this is bad news about Olive Garden. This ad is 180-degrees from the content. Olive Garden sickens people, well, have this coupon ON US, and come on in for some delicious food!

We’ve been laughing at these for years and years and we can stop there, or we can marvel at the fact that this is tolerable to organizations who advertise. Is this a direct-mail mentality? We’ll serve up 3 Million Impressions of the banner ad, and if 10% of them are an inappropriate, so be it, because the click-through rate is so low, it hardly matters? I don’t know what the numbers are on so-called junk mail (as you can imagine, they don’t like call us to call it that), but let’s assume they are very very low. When most of what you send out is seen as garbage, is it okay if some percentage of it actually is garbage? Could this be doing more harm for these brands than good?

The fact that this has become the norm is just a little bit sad. Those of us who design things of any type – to be experienced, seen, heard, read…we want them to be experienced in some relevant context, but we’ve accepted this as a normal error for computers blindly filling in blanks and matching X to B. I’d suggest our culture loses a little when this happens; that we have been bludgeoned just enough to tolerate quack-speak through the medium of the Internet.

We’ll see if firms like Aggregate Knowledge (with some presumably new perspectives on where the most relevant – and profitable – connections can be made) can evolve the status quo.

I have been running some in-home discussion groups for a design project recently. The ebb and flow of context is just so interesting to me and highlights the challenges of getting “all” the information.

[none of this is verbatim]

Q: If you and your wife own one iPod, how do you determine who is going to use it?
A: Well, for commuting, it’s either the iPod, or the New Yorker.

Two scenarios are likely:
1. She takes the iPod on the train and he drives their lovely car, a New Yorker.
2. Whoever takes the iPod gets music, and the spouse gets to read the most recent issue of the New Yorker magazine.

There’s always the clarification question: “When you say ‘New Yorker’ are you referring to the car or the magazine?” but in this case, we didn’t get to ask that, and I was confused at the time. It’s clearer looking at the video that they are talking about the magazine.

Later on, the same guy (still talking about iPods) tells us “Well, when you do that, it looks more Zen. It actually looks like the competition.” and moments later another participant adds “Yes, it’s like he says, very Zen, very Japanese, very spiritual.”

But that’s not at all what he meant. He meant another type of MP3 player, the Creative Zen.

I understood what he meant, at the moment, but the other person, didn’t. And it wasn’t possible in the flow of things to clarify (and maybe not even necessary).

I have powerful memories of being in Mr. Collison’s grade 6 class, and seeing him do this sort of thing all the time – missing a word or a piece of context of what someone said and riffing on it, in entirely the wrong direction. It really made me squirm in my seat to see all this miscommunication around me and have to keep quiet, or at best, wait to offer my insight. I wonder if other people notice this stuff and are as stimulated/aggravated/curious as I am?

Over at Functioning Form I’m in conversation with LukeW.

To help me work through some recent thoughts I’ve had about Design Research, I asked Steve Portigal -founder of Portigal Consulting and all around bright guy- to talk about context within digital products and the connection between ethnographic research and design. Part one.

Part two will be here (although where “here” is remains in slight flux as this blog is soon to move to portigal.com but is not yet ready. We’ll announce the move when it happens and we’ll make sure you find part two of the conversation!

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!