Wired has a nice history of Samsung

In his 1996 New Year’s address, Lee proclaimed the Year of Design Revolution. He was referring to design in the broadest sense – not just styling but consumer research and marketing as well. Engineers had once defined new products and decided what features to give them; now specialists in everything from industrial design to cognitive science would take that role. When Lee issued his decree, ‘most of us didn’t understand what he was talking about, ‘ says Kook-hyun Chung, the senior vice president who heads the Corporate Design Center in Seoul. ‘Now we understand that we have a new, bigger, broader responsibility.

The Egg Cream Racket is a richly detailed history of the Egg Cream. Empahsis on detailed. It’s a long piece. Nice implication that the thing of nostalgia may be more for its nostalgia than it was as an original artifact…

Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes is a fantastic essay covering the innovation, technology, inspiration, invention, manufacturing, marketing and ultimately the cultural impact of the little, yellow, and different semi-sticky pages.

Post-it Notes, on the other hand, were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that’s what the glue was for. After all, the digital drudgery of Office Space and Dilbert didn’t tell the full story of office life in the eighties and nineties. It was also the era of Wired and Fast Company, the rebel businessman, thinking outside the box.

As part of the David H. Liu Memorial Lecture Series at Stanford, Paul Saffo from the Institute for the Future

spoke briefly last night, in a talk entitled The case of the blind venetians; reflections on innovation and what makes Silicon Valley tick

Saffo is a great speaker, lots of anecdotes and metaphors and implications and sidebars, so any attempt to summarize is going to be incredibly flat. Nevertheless, it was a simplistic story he told: in essence that Silicon Valley is a specialized version of the California myth, which is a distillation of the American Dream (that’s my synthesis, as you’ll see, he didn’t quite say that)

Loose notes:

In the history of Silicon Valley there have been so many innovations. We lurch from failure to failure, we know how to fail. The death of the Interactive TV industry had programmers and technologies just waiting, so the Web industry was able to move right into the same place.

Bad management is good for innovation (looking at all the famous Silicon Valley companies that are badly managed, i.e., Steve Jobs). Good management kills innovative ideas. Don’t read management books.

What does the culture of this area (Silicon Valley) offer up in terms of how we accept failure? We permit failure, unlike Seattle, France, or Sweden, where one failure can tar a reputation forever, going bankrupt can bring shame. There are consequences to failure here, but they aren’t lethal.

But why here? Why does it keep repeating?

California is a place that is fueled by dreams, against all odds. Consider the meme of California even going back to Spanish literature of 1500s – originally envisioned as an island, but despite multiple proofs that it was indeed part of the mainland, the idea that it is an island continued to appear on maps for many years – decades and more.

As trite as it sounds, California is still a place where dreams are believed to come true. From the Gold Rush, Hollywood, early aviation – many of which started elsewhere in the US but took strongest root in California, and despite the fact that success came to very few of those who tried, the story of the dream persists.

For innovators, you have to kid yourself, because if you looked at things realistically, you’d give up. Keep the dream alive.

story

Ticketmaster Canada confirmed Friday it is shutting its only unionized call centre in Toronto, along with centres in Vancouver, Calgary and Red Deer, Alta.

I worked at Ticketmaster’s Toronto office (not sure if it’s the same actual office – probably not) as a Night Run Operator back as an undergrad, I think it was 1987 or so.

I would go in on Friday nights and sit there with the computers in an empty office doing homework or listening to the radio. I would wait until all the box offices had closed – around midnight, and then run a bunch of “scripts” and get printouts and move these enormous cake-box sized disc packs from one VAX drive (about the size of a small dishwasher) to another. I had no idea how any of it worked so when something broke in the scripts I had to start paging the regular IT staff who were always drunk and wouldn’t call back forever.

I don’t know why I took this job; it seemed cool. I knew other people that worked there, both doing what I did, or even answering the phones. I got second-dibs on tickets, before they went on sale, and I think that’s how I got 4th row Rush and 12th row Yes or something like that – at Maple Leaf Gardens.

The drives looked something like this
DELETED
and the discs themselves were
DELETED

You had to rotate that handle a number of times and then pull it straight up. Sealed inside were many platters of magnetic media that gave the whole assembly it’s capacity. They had two systems running that recorded each purchase transaction, and I would run a backup from A->B and something else, every night.

One guy I worked with had figured out how to purchase General Admission tickets – for free – in between one of the backup stages and then would overwrite any record of it during the backup stages. Since there were no seat assignments, it wouldn’t be very detectable – yeah the overall ticket count sold versus number of arriving guests would be off, but it was GA, so who’d notice? I was horrified at the dishonesty, actually.

And I think we had, in the computer room, these DECwriter terminals.
DELETED
They weren’t for regular operations but if something went wrong, that was what you had to use to interact with them – but mostly they spat out many pages of transactions – you could see, on paper, every ticket purchased that day. If you worked on a day when a big show sold out (i.e., Floyd) then you would be there a long time while it generated output for each purchase. Name, address, credit card info, etc. And it could take a long time for the credit transaction to be verified – it didn’t happen in real time, so the transaction could go through but you wouldn’t get your tickets sent out in the mail because it would turn out that your credit was no good. I think they had someone who would call you up and talk to you in that case.

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FreshMeat #23 from Steve Portigal

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               (oo) Fresh
                \\/  Meat

FreshMeat is kicking it old school. Don’t you think?
=========================================================
We can remember it for you, wholesale
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It’s a common exercise in December to reflect back on the
about-to-expire year, but it can be particularly
challenging to identify the highlights in any category.
Sure, cultural critics produce a raft of best-of lists,
but how easy is it for the rest of us to look back?

We are all exposed to media (or information, or stories,
or whatever you’d like to call it) at an enormous quantity
and at a staggering rate, receiving content from TV,
magazines, newspapers, advertising, blogs, music (radio,
CDs, and MP3s), email and more. So, it shouldn’t be hard
for me to come up with some 2004 list of something, right?
After all, I read two daily papers, more than 125 blog
feeds, and about 10 magazines. I manage two mailing
lists (one about the Rolling Stones and one about user
research), participate in several others, as well as
online discussion forums. I contribute to three
different blogs. I’ve got a handle on the zeitgeist,
right?

Wrong. I can’t remember a damn thing.

What the heck happened in 2004? I can remember the front-
page stuff (crimes, war, politics) but little else. So I
decided to do an experiment: I went to several online
sources – BoingBoing, MetaFilter and Core77 –
and skimmed their archives of two random 2004 months,
February and April. I used these sites as triggers for
stories that seemed cool when they broke but eluded my
memory by the time December rolled around.

Just those two months amounted to over 150,000 words-and
many, many stories. Most I recognized with a hockey-card
collector’s nod – “seen it; seen it; seen it;” some I didn’t
notice at all at the time (or if I did notice, made so
little impact that I didn’t recognize them months later);
and a few still seemed new and cool. But a bunch of others
stood out as important, had personal resonance for me, and
seemed, somehow, to be representative of the year. So here
we go:

February, 2004:

The Grey Album – the highest-profile mashup, created by DJ
Danger Mouse from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’
White Album

Gay weddings at City Hall in San Francisco

Cingular buys AT+T Wireless

Scientists discover M&Ms randomly dumped into a bowl pack
together much more densely than spheres

Amazon writers caught reviewing their own books positively

Flickr launches

The Dynamap – bringing the power of layered online data to
a printed medium

Howard Stern dumped by Clear Channel

Brian Wilson performs his lost classic Smile, 37 years
later

Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ released – it does very
very well

Janet Jackson’s breast becomes the most searched-for image
in Lycos

A BBC poll named Apple designer Jonathan Ive as the most
influential person in British culture

Glare from Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall heats
up neighbor buildings

April, 2004:

Porn stars get HIV

BBC launches TV programs for pets

Roboticist develops swarming traffic-cones

Adbusters launches “Black Spot” sneakers

Legoland starts tracking kiddie visitors with WiFi and
RFID

Scary pics of an overweight guy designing his own Tron
costume

Retro 1850s and 1950s appliances

Google launches Gmail

Campbell’s sells Warhole-esque cans of soup as a tribute
to Andy

Burger King’s subservient chicken ad

IKEA founder, Ingvar Kamprad, has overtaken Bill Gates as
the world’s richest man

Academic conference about Wal-Mart

Sony launches a premium brand, Qualia

These are stories about design, technology, culture,
politics, media, and entertainment, all jammed together –
stories that are probably familiar, but that most of us
couldn’t have listed on our own without going back over
some kind of archive. Anyone who took Psychology 101 (not
me) will know that there are different types of memory. In
this case we’re contrasting the memory of recall with the
memory of recognition. We might not be able recall the
names of all our high school teachers, but we could
probably recognize most of them by name or photo. (Of
course, there are some teachers who we’ve blocked from
both recall and recognition due to excessive trauma – but I
digress.)

Perhaps some of the items listed above provided a frisson
of recognition, a surprise of a forgotten incident, the
pleasure of an interesting experience from the past or a
splash of perspective gained from just a few months’
distance. And you could do your own lists, using the
filter of what tripped your fancy or tickled your funny
bone, and that list might provide some fun for others
around you, but the parlor game would still hold; in this
time of information overload, we seem to need the stimulus
to have the response.

Why, if we’re consuming so many cultural stories, is it so
hard to recall them? Again, those Psych 101 students
will know about the Recency Effect – our inclination to add
weight to the more recent items. (Film studios plan
release dates for award-likely movies based on this
phenomenon; Sideways, released in the fall, seems to have
won a conspicuous number of film awards.)

And the Recency Effect is markedly intense when we try to
sum up the cultural experiences of a large period of time,
say a year. We’ve spent that time primarily consuming
information-not accumulating knowledge – the zeitgeist
database rapidly building, each fresh item reshaping the
slag heap, with the older pieces buried ever deeper below.
Try it yourself: you can probably recall last month’s
cover of ID Magazine (or a similarly relevant industry
journal), but not the one before it.

The notion of consuming media, in a period of history that
serves up so many choices, was recently addressed by Peter
Merholz in his thoughts about “media obesity”. (Indeed,
when does anyone have the time to listen to 40G of music?)
Of course, the tag-team of marketing and technology are
adding ever-more options, increasing the challenge of
ever-keeping up: If you enjoyed Seinfeld when it was
originally on television, and then again when it was in
reruns, you can now own it, so that you are able to watch
at least once more. Oh, and then one more time after that
with the commentary. So in addition to all the new media
experiences being generated from this moment forward,
there are re-released and enhanced versions of media
experiences from last year, from 5 years ago, or from 30
years ago. We’re at a single point in time with a stream
of media bearing steadily down upon us like a NASCAR final
lap, while if we’re not careful we’re going to get pounded
by the reverse commute of yesterday’s content.

And if we consider design, specifically, we have to ask
ourselves whether our contribution to this congestion is
unique in any way, or simply more of the same. Designers
are certainly in the consumption business, and while
design both creates and reflects the cultural stories
we’re considering here, the work is typically tangible.
Sure, “the iPod” sits in the zeitgeist somewhere near
“Janet Jackson’s breast,” but Lindsay Lohan’s iPod is a
concrete, physical, experience-able, designed artifact –
especially for Lindsay herself. And maybe “design
stories” – or “personal experiences with design” – are
a kind of story that is more memorable precisely because
it’s tied to an artifact. These kinds of stories may be
richer, individualized, or recall-able on other levels
(tactile, olfactory), making rapid and effective
connections with memories, emotions and experiences in
ways that that are palpable – indeed, literally physical
– and have an upper hand in providing effective tour guides to
both our collective and individual stories.

So here’s the corollary experiment: I was easily able to
generate (mostly from recall, with little need for
stimulus-recognition) a list of my own design-y
experiences from this past year – experiences that
affected me emotionally and intellectually (either
positively or negatively):

Touching the Bean at Millennium Park in Chicago

Rem Koolhaas student center (McCormick Tribune Campus Center) at IIT

Ontario College of Art and Design’s new Sharp Centre

Cornerstone Festival of Gardens

TomTom GO GPS

Bruce Sterling’s opening keynote at the IDSA Western
Region conference

It looks like design can impact an individual’s stories,
pushing past the Recency Effect, lodging in whatever
cranial fissures house the items available for recall. And
what a nice thought that is, looking back at all we’ve
been through and ahead at what’s still to come. Dylan
wrote, “She’s an artist, she don’t look back”, but he also
wrote, “Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.”

—

A similar version of this article appears on the Core77
Industrial Design Supersite. Check it out, with pictures
and everything, here.

You may have heard that google has unleashed the USENET archives back to 1981. Here’s one of the earliest posts from me that I found. Another is here and one more here.

Groups I was active in during the 1990 to 1993 period include:

alt.folklore.urban
rec.arts.movies
alt.sex
alt.rock-n-roll
alt.tv.muppets
talk.bizarre (though for some reason, those posts aren’t showing up in Google. Although I did win #25 most frequent poster of the week in the USENET stats post, including 76% of those posts to talk.bizarre – so I’ve got “proof” just no evidence)

I found some early (and tame) flame wars, some morally indignant posts by me, many smart-ass posts, quite a few questions about who sang this or acted in that (and my own share of answers), and some real newbi-ism. And, the .signatures from back then – oy! Star Trek references abound…

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FreshMeat #1 from Steve Portigal

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               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

Pass it on!

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What is the connection between quality and authenticity?
And is it really a small world after all?
========================================================
Do you ever watch other people when you go on vacation?
Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard, but I find myself
constantly curious about the people I see. Did they
choose this place for the same reasons I did? If not,
what brought them here?

This seems to be a fun exercise although it’s rare to
get any answers. It does provoke self-analysis, which if
you’re me, is a good thing to do on vacation.
I found myself in Waikiki a little while ago. It’s
totally a tourist area – a few blocks with hundreds of
hotels, surf lessons, beaches, palm trees, cafes, and
restaurants. Other parts of Hawaii are considered by
some as the “real” place to go – in fact I have to fight
the need to apologize for choosing Waikiki as my
destination.

While there, I thought a lot about previous trips to Las
Vegas, which is another area that exists solely for
tourists to come and consume manufactured tourist
experiences.

Vegas is typified by the Venice casino, a recreation of
its namesake (indoors), with clouds painted on the
ceiling and gondoliers who use professional audio
equipment for their singing. To me, it’s crap. Most of
the Strip is (increasingly) this sort of crap.

In Waikiki, two guys in an SUV pull up to the beach at
6:30, then leap out clad in a brand-new bright red and
gold nylon traditional toga-like outfit (obviously, it
looks nothing like a toga, but the point is, there are
no pants to it). One takes a conch shell and stoically
blows into it three times, turning 90 degrees each time.
The other scampers around carrying a burning stick and
lights all the built-in torches along the beach.

Now, this struck me as cool. Obviously, this was
completely manufactured for tourists who want to think
they’ve had some kind of authentic Hawaiian experience.
It was goofy, but I pointed out to myself that at least
it was derived from something real. To me, this form of
revisionism seemed less dangerous, less offensive, and
less crappy than mini-versions of Paris, New York, or
Venice.

Is it simply the fact that Vegas passes itself off as
opulent indulgence (successfully, it seems) that presses
so hard on the inauthentic button for me? Or is the
context of Hawaii so powerfully wonderful that no amount
of Disneyfication can eliminate it? And why is it that
the guys dressed up like Klingons at the Star Trek
Experience were the most genuine thing in all of Las
Vegas?

Clearly further study on these locations is required. My
current hypothesis is that it is the vacationer’s intent
(gamble, relax, indulge, party, nature-immersion, etc.)
that tints the sunglasses the appropriate shade of rose.

—

Postscript: If you’re interested in Hawaii from a
cultural and historical point of view, check out The
American Raj by John Gregory Dunne, in the May 7, 01 New
Yorker. He looks at the multiple ethnic groups and
cultures (the Navy being one of them) that make up
Hawaii, and does a nice comparison of Pearl Harbor (the
event), Pearl Harbor (the movie), and the sinking of the
Japanese fishing boat by the Greenville.

Postscript 2: A recent NYT travel feature “Honolulu
Proves Clichés Can Charm” provides more description of
Waikiki.

—