In 2009 we supported three organizations:

Locally, we once again gave to Coastside Hope

the “primary provider of safety net services,” providing a “monthly food harvest, emergency shelter and rental assistance services, crisis intervention and referral services, clothing vouchers, Christmas Adopt-a-Family program, [and] citizenship services.”)

In tribute to the winners of our Reading Ahead design contest (conducted in partnership with Core77), we donated to 826 Valencia, a San Francisco nonprofit that helps kids with expository and creative writing




Finally, we were excited by the opportunity to support StoryCorps who we regard as fellow travelers in the story business: telling stories, gathering stories, and listening to stories.

Previously:

• Portigal Consulting Philanthropy, 2007
• Portigal Consulting Philanthropy, 2008

• Zach Gage’s Antagonistic Books – A set of two books and instructions for how to build them. ANTAGONISTIC BOOKS turns the emotions and actions surrounding the banning of books into physical objects that undermine the user.

  Danger reenacts what has historically been done to dangerous literature, self-immolating when opened.

  Curiosity represents the notion that many book-banners feel, that the true danger of literature is that once you've opened a book you have been forever changed and can never go back. Emulating this notion, Curiosity can never be closed. Once opened, it is locked in an open position forever.

  (via Waxy)

• Netflix agrees to delay in renting out Warner movies [latimes.com] – "This deal uniquely works for Netflix because our subscribers are desensitized to street dates and more interested in being matched to the perfect movie," said Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer, who handles studio relationships. "Some subscribers will so passionately want to see it in the first 28 days they may go out and buy it, just as some people want to see 'Avatar' so badly they pay to watch it in 3-D." [Snort! Guffaw!]
• Book Industry Study Group – BISG is the leading U.S. book trade association for supply chain standards, research, and best practices. For over 30 years, BISG has been working on behalf of its diverse membership of publishers, retailers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, librarians and others involved in both print and digital publishing to create a more informed, empowered and efficient book industry supply chain for both physical and digital products.

  In seeking support from and representing every sector of the book industry, BISG affirms its belief in the interdependence of all industry segments. BISG understands that success in business is often easier to achieve through joint effort and that common problems are best solved together.

• How to create new reading experiences profitably [booksahead.com] – Books have served well as containers for moving textual and visual information between places and across generations. [digita] books need to be conceived with an eye on the interactions that text/content will inspire. Those interactions happen between the author and work, the reader and the work, the author and reader, among readers and between the work and various services, none of which exist today in e-books, that connect works to one another and readers in the community of one book with those in other book-worlds….Publishing is only one of many industries battling the complex strategic challenge of just-in-time composition of information or products for delivery to an empowered individual customer. This isn’t to say that it is any harder, nor any easier, to be a publisher today compared to say, a consumer electronics manufacturer or auto maker, only that the discipline to recognize what creates wonderful engaging experience is growing more important by the day.
• New York, 2009 [Flickr] – My photos from my recent trip to New York City. Art, street art, strange signs, people watching, and other observations. Check it out!

• The Book Cover Archive – An archive of book cover designs and designers, for the purpose of appreciation and categorization
• Avatar Makeup Tutorial [YouTube] – Line extensions and spin-off products come from the people that use your product. Here, a "customer" of Avatar makes a new "product" – an instructional video telling other "customers" of Avatar how they can (literally or vicariously) extend their consumption experience beyond the film itself. It's a lot more relevant than a Burger King (say) value meal, it hews to a compelling aspect of the film itself.

• The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2009 – A stupendous year-end review. Lots and lots and lots here.

• Devising the stove that could save the world [The New Yorker] – The effort to develop a better stove (safer, healthier, uses less fuel) for developing nations, and the challenges in getting that solution adopted once it's development is funded and the engineering problems are solved.
• What means to find out what your customers want – The idea behind the centers is to foster innovation by combining a richer understanding of customer needs with creative links among 3M technologies. “Being customer-driven doesn’t mean asking customers what they want and then giving it to them,” says Ranjay Gulati, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It’s about building a deep awareness of how the customer uses your product.”

• Don Norman on Ethnography and Innovation – Some great commentary on Norman's piece (discussed here as well) including the very exciting revelation that Edison did something very much like ethnography!
• General Motors – The Lab – It’s a pilot program for GM, an interactive design research community in the making. Here you can get to know the designers, check out some of their projects, and help them get to know you. Like a consumer feedback event without the one-way glass.

  We work on ideas that will influence our future vehicles. We want to share our ideas, inventions and pre-production vehicle designs. We want to build the right cars and trucks for your future. We want your opinion.

• Iceberg Digital Book Reader for the iPhone – Digital books as content, as hardware, as a platform, as an OS, as an app? Interesting to see a range of approaches appearing. Iceberg use the iTunes store to sell the books, which seems like a brilliant strategy, leveraging a storefront/distribution platform that already exists.
• Steal These Books – From Wikipedia page about book theft, a set of articles that describe what books get stolen from bookstores (independent, chain, and campus) and libraries.
• Archaeology’s Hoaxes, Fakes, and Strange Sites – A large set of links to articles about fake archeological-type stuff (discoveries, artifacts, and the like). How and why.

It’s been a busy year and as we head into the home stretch, looking forward to 2010 (supposedly the year we make contact), we wanted to take a look back at the past 12 months and call out some of the highlights.

• Our blog, All This ChittahChattah, turned 8
• We conducted our own study (Reading Ahead) about the future of the book and digital reading, blogged at length about our process, posted an in-depth narrated presentation of findings and opportunities, tracked the cultural progression of the digital books issue, presented at the UC Berkeley Digital Futures speaker series (and subsequently at Blurb), conducted a design contest with Core77, and selected a handful of exciting winners
• We helped to launch REACH, a global network of small “design research” consultancies that can better serve clients across multiple markets
• We found good (or at least interesting) design exemplars in/at/from/by information-rich street signs, David Lee Roth and Runnin’ With the Devil, sour cream, NPR, the Forestry Service, real-life interfaces (and again), a farmer’s market, and a drink menu
• We were disappointed by user experiences that fell short, from AT&T, Yahoo!, car dashboards, and Land’s End
• We noticed workarounds for hotel rooms, parking lots, shopping carts, input devices, and loud guns
• We found some curious branding, storytelling, and other customer-facing strategies by Starbucks, M&Ms, Papa Murphy’s, parking garages, The Griddle Cafe, a range of business names (and again), the Santa Barbara Zoo, Verizon’s Hub, YouTube, municipal garbage, Old Navy, Columbus Foods after a devastating fire, KISS (and again), and Jewish delis
• We revisited themes, findings, or product launches from previous projects about IT professionals, safety gear, digital cameras, mobile telephones and saw our client MediaMaster shut down their service
• We bemoaned bad approaches to product development with personas (and again), surveys, and a shallow view of user-centeredness
• We continued to explore where, when, why, and how to use customer information in product development, including a provocative article by Don Norman, and a thoughtful piece by Robert Fabricant
• We found surprise and amusement in gendered home territories, grocery stores, pillows that preserve the shape of a baby’s head, retailing dead formats, license plates, and grassroots product development
• In the face of tremendous growth for Twitter, we considered some of the barriers to adoption as well as the opportunities still to be addressed
• Steve was invited backstage to designer-vibrator-purveyor JimmyJane and found their brand not fulfilling its cultural change (and world domination) business opportunity, a perspective later taken up by the New York Times
• We posited how the electric car industry can create a better story around their optimal use cases
• Steve led his workshop “Well, We’ve Done All This Research…Now What?” for sold-out groups at Interaction|09 and EPIC, as well as abbreviated versions at IxDA-SF, BayCHI (slides and audio here), Web 2.0, and Nokia
• Steve spoke to students from Pratt, SVA, Istanbul Technical University, and CCA’s Design MBA Innovation Studio
• Steve spoke about user research, design and innovation to the MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative, the Istanbul Industrial Design Summit; about culture to the Chicago IxDA, the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, and HFI; and about improv and creativity at the IDSA and the IxDA-NYC (see slides here and video here)
• Steve gave a webinar about Creating Authentic Product Experiences to the University of Oregon’s Contemporary Design class; we’re looking for future opportunities to give this webinar and even put together a trailer
• World travels lead to a comparison of election posters as well an an examination of toilet paper sizes
• Steve took pictures in Vancouver, LA, Santa Barbara, Amsterdam (some highlights here, here, here, here, and here), Belgium (some highlights here), Miami, London (highlights here), Istanbul (highlights here), and New York
• All This ChittahChattah is now on Twitter and portigal.com is available in a mobile version
• Steve’s chapter, Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret? was published in here) for Photo Reporter Magazine, Let’s Embrace Open-Mindedness for Johnny Holland, The Cultures of Design for DMI Connect, Organizational Empathy, from Top to Bottom for Appliance Magazine, and on video, offered some quick advice to aspiring designers
• Steve was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, in an article about the adoption of e-book readers (thoughts, from the cutting-room floor, here)
• Steve contributed to William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa’s book Deconstructing Product Design
• Steve published a second year of True Tales columns for interactions: Poets, Priests, and Politicians, Interacting With Advertising, Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?, Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?, We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World, and On Authenticity

Previously: Our 2008 review

Deconstructing Product Design: Exploring the Form, Function, Usability, Sustainability, and Commercial Success of 100 Amazing Products is a recently published book by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa. The book is essentially a crowdsourced-and-curated critique of some notable products. I was thrilled to be included among an esteemed set of contributors including friends and peers like Jon Kolko, Dan Saffer, Rob Tannen, and Trevor van Gorp.

The book steps through the 100 products (including such items as Bratz Doll, Kryptonite-4 Bicycle Lock, and Vicks Forehead Thermometer) and describes the product, while including commentary from a number of contributors.

For example, here is the iPhone page, with callouts (each of which are described on a facing page), and commentary along the bottom by me and Rob Tannen.

Here’s a mostly readable version of my commentary

I also comment on other products, including Moneymaker Pump and Pot-in-Pot Cooler.

Check out reviews at Core77 and Designing for humans and buy the book at Amazon.

I posted a few months ago on on design studio Blu Dot’s New York leave-behind/Big Brother-is-watching-you (and wants to know what you did with that chair) marketing campaign.

For anyone interested in the aftermath, Rob Walker’s latest Consumed column in the New York Times includes a few anecdotes about what happened to the Blu Dot chairs that were the campaign’s focus, and some interesting backstory from Mono, the marketing agency that put the whole performance piece/stunt/campaign together.

• Designing the future of publishing – Or the screen might be smaller, on the assumption that even the most serious readers don’t just sit on a couch for hours and read Tolstoy. They also read shorter works, in all sorts of places, and at least some of them would likely value a highly portable device over one with a big screen. And if our designer’s boss insists that most people don’t want to carry multiple portable devices, she’ll also build in a phone and camera, and make sure her processor can run not only an e-reading application, but plenty of other software too…What does this mean for the future of the e-reader space? Will we see a bifurcated market, with our first group buying gussied-up descendants of the Kindle, and the second preferring tablet-style computers? It’s hard to imagine that this won’t happen.
  (Thanks @nquizon for the pointer to @litnow)
• Skiff E-Reading Service to Launch in 2010 – Skiff (incubated by Hearst) oday announced plans to launch a new consumer e-reading service platform in 2010 that will deliver enhanced content experiences to dedicated e-readers, as well as to multipurpose devices such as smartphones and netbooks. The Skiff™ service and digital store will feature a comprehensive selection of newspapers, magazines, books and other content from multiple publishers, uniquely optimized for wireless delivery to devices and delivery via the Web.
• Empire of the Word – …a compelling look inside the act of reading and traces its impact on more than five thousand years of human history. The series traces reading's origins; examines how we learn to read; exposes censors' attempts to prevent our reading; and finally, proposes what the future might hold for this most human of creative acts.

  (Thanks, Mom!)