The New Yorker takes a wry look at the cultural perspectives embedded in information design

When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other.

The Overlap Blog has launched, hoping to start a bit of dialog in advance of the event.

I found inspiration in this quote from the introduction to Story-Wallah: Short Fiction from South Asian Writers by Shyam Selvadurai

“What kind of writer do you consider yourself to be? Are you a Canadian writer or a Sri Lankan writer?”

It is perplexing, this matter of cultural identity, and I am tempted, like some other writers of multiple identities, to reply grumpily, “I’m just a bloody writer. Period.”

Yet this response would be disingenuous. I suppose I could answer, “Sri Lankan-Canadian writer,” or “Canadian-Sri-Lankan writer.” But this also does not get to the heart of what i consider my identity to be as a writer (and we are talking of my writing identity here). For in terms of being a writer, my creativity comes not from “Sri Lankan” or “Canadian” but precisely from the space between, that marvelous open space represented by the hyphen, in which the two parts of my identity jostle and rub up against each other like tectonic plates, pushing upwards the eruption that is my work. It is from this space between that the novels come.

Spotted on BoingBoing is this special toilet paper just for kids. It’s printed with a puppy paw path that spans five sheets (and then begins again). It’s portion control for toilet paper, presumably there is a need to have kids learn how much to use? I’m a bit confused as to the actual need, and how this solves it. Wouldn’t the amount needed depend on what is being wiped? And who is being wiped?

I’d guess you’d want to teach kids to wipe until they are done – to pay attention to the bodily and other cues (visual?) to ensure that the hygiene need has been handled. Making it such an inflexible system doesn’t teach anyone anything!

And if you use a different amount than five sheets, ever, then the system breaks until you sync up back to sheet zero with the happy puppy. A training system that is intolerant of (highly likely) user error is not a good training system.

You must always use five and only five sheets. Regardless of what’s going on with your po-po! Cottonelle has forgotten that they work for us, not the other way around.

And their site includes this lovely FAQ (which is such as misnomer, since these are not likely to be frequently-asked-questions, but rather info they wish to convey) that suggests some product problems besides the obvious usability failures.

Why is my toilet paper printed on the inside? How do I fix this?
The good news is that this is an easy fix. The toilet paper isn’t actually printed on the inside. What’s happened is that the two plies have become separated, and the inside ply is wrapped around the outside of your roll (you’ll probably also notice that the perforations on the two plies don’t line up). To fix, first make sure your toilet paper is positioned so that it unrolls from the spindle with the sheets coming over the top. Next, steady the roll so it does not move in the spindle. Take the top ply (make sure you are only handling one ply) and unwrap it behind the roll. The print should now appear on the outside, as intended, and the bottom ply should now be longer that the top ply. Tear off the excess bottom plies (approximately 3) and you are ready to go.

and When I tear the toilet paper, the perforations on the two plies do not line up? How do I fix this? which offers the identical answer.

Now we’re taking on toilet paper maintenance tasks? Who the hell wants to fix their toilet paper? This is way too much work and this company hasn’t a clue about addressing real people’s needs.

From House & Garden comes this awesomely negative review of Karim Rashid’s new book

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Considering the chutzpah of the basic conceit, I expected Rashid to pepper the volume with absurd pronouncements. To my great disappointment, the most shocking thing about the book is the banality of the designer’s advice: “If you’re short, don’t worry about it.” “Clip and trim your nose hairs.” “Make friends online.” “Know yourself.” Try to imagine Dr. Phil grooving on some pharmaceuticals at the Milan Furniture Fair and you start to get the picture. Predictably, the book is rife with evidence of Rashid’s narcissism, but even those passages don’t relieve the painful tedium.

DCamp, an unconference focused on design and user experience, is open to everyone interested in the topics: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and others.

Unlike traditional conferences, there is no program created by conference organizers. What happens at DCamp depends on you. Come share your work and ideas. Tell us about some interesting UX method, explain how design fits into agile development and open source, share your design dilemma, or tell us about your new and interesting design.

I’ve signed up for this, in Palo Alto in mid-May. I fear it being too technical, too software-focused. I’m signed up to give a loose talk I’ve given before, The Overlap: Cultures, Disciplines, and Design – some questions about whether or not some things are better as unambiguously one thing or the other, or if there’s more richness to be mined in the spaces between. Indeed, will it become essential to live, work, and play in that space?

I’ve been involved with some other folks in the planning of a neat little professional meeting – Overlap (subtitled Exploring new methods for business and innovation)

Overlap offers a unique opportunity to join other curious, deep thinking professionals in a spirited discourse on the relationship between business and design and the implications both that may have on our companies and careers.

It’ll be in Asilomar (near Monterey) in May. It should be an interesting event.

37 Signals jumps the shark (if they hadn’t already)

While we appreciate customers who take the time to write in and tell us what they want, the way people phrase things often leads to raised eyebrows. Every feature that’s missing is essential, a must-have, and the fact that it’s missing is killing someone. Yet the #1 thing that people like about our software is how simple it is. To give you an idea of what it’s like to be on the receiving end, here are some excerpts from recent 37signals support emails and forum posts

The excerpts are meant to ridicule the customers/users/people who contact them. For being too intense or too clueless or in whatever way just not as cool as the folks at 37 Signals.

This is a company that makes software but also wants to teach the world about making great products. I’m not sure that their products are really that great, but their credibility for teaching anyone how to do anything is nil once they start using the bully pulpit of their own blog to mock people – customers! And of course, there’s an ensuing pile-in on the comments “hyuk-hyuk, people are morons.” It’s too easy to get your pals to agree with that sort of thing, and ultimately it reveals contempt for the wrong people. That’s a critical failure at the root of what they are setting out to do.

Update: several other bloggers agree with me.

We opened a bottle of wine the other night, and the interesting wording on the cork prompted some conversation. The cork (above; click to enlarge) was covered with WHOOH WHOOH WHOOH and with one odd COUGH.

What is that about?

Check out the brand of the wine:

Smoking Loon. WHOOH WHOOH COUGH.

It was a nice little detail to carry the brand of the wine (which we were obviously not paying much attention to – I think the decision was basically white) into a fun surprise. Great packaging design.

(click on picture to see it full-size)

Here’s an ad for LG mobile phones that I pulled out of a recent issue of SPIN magazine. It’s sort of odd/interesting to see the rhetoric of design and marketing used to create content for advertising. I’m referring to the need to create personas that represent some aspect of the user category that can be designed for, or marketed to. And sometimes the distinction between designing for and marketing to is blurred through the use of personas. And sometimes the personas represent an aspirational statement of the manufacturer -who they’d like their customers to be, or what they would like their products to be used for. Whether or not the products actually achieve that doesn’t seem to matter, as long as there’s a catchy phrase to represent in the simplest terms possible some key attributes.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on this approach and on LG-specifically. I have no idea if an ad creative repurposed actual content or just picked up on the approach because it reads well and maybe moves product. It’s always interesting to see one form of internal company behavior make its way into advertising, though.

AutoWeek takes a look at corporate culture, management structures, and the resulting impact on getting good stuff made and into customer’s hands. They focus on Honda’s flat organization and support for product development initiatives that come from staffers.

No big committees. No bureaucracies. No layers of decision makers reviewing the decisions of the previous layer of decision makers, who in turn, reviewed the decisions handed up from the previous layer.

“We empower people to make good decisions,” says Flint, who was chief engineer on the Ridgeline pickup. “If you can build the business case for something, you can pretty much run with it here.”