• Japanese cultural norms – asking about weight – Insightful little culture-clash story; an American working in Japan isn't sure how to deal with blunt (especially from the Japanese!) questions about his increasing weight
• Clive Thomson on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, renowned for his use of mathematical game theory models for prediction – Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. “His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”
• New York Times Magazine on the Beatles’ Rock Band videogame – This is a fantastic article that spans many big issues: gaming, music, performance, art, history, culture, product development, authenticity, creativity, entertainment, technology. It's a must-read.
• Brian Dettmer turns books into sculptural pieces – Contemporary visual artists see opportunity in what many bemoan as the twilight of the age of the book. John Latham (1921-2006), Hubertus Gojowczyk, Doug Beube and others have treated books as sculptural stuff. But no one whose work I have seen tops that of Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer at Toomey Tourell.

In 2000, prior to Portigal Consulting, we conducted an ethnographic study with Sony to “provide awareness of unarticulated consumer perceptions about digital imaging on which to base future product development decisions…generating a range of new product and service concepts.”

Over the years we’ve seen Sony launch products that are similar to ones we proposed (see example here). We identify opportunities for our clients; the path they take to develop (or not) can be complex and fraught, and many opportunities are not addressed in the marketplace (although we find our clients value how our work helps them make that decision).

Here’s the latest:

Sony today introduced the Party-shot personal photographer -an innovative camera dock that pans 360 degrees and tilts 24 degrees, automatically detects faces, adjusts composition and takes photos for you.

This device makes it easy to capture more natural expressions and fun, candid moments of you, your family and friends without having to hire a photographer.

“With the Party-shot personal photographer, you no longer have to worry about taking photos when you are with your family or friends,” said Shigehiko Nakayama, digital imaging accessories product manager at Sony Electronics. “Party-shot captures candid moments that tell natural life stories and also offers a new style of photography that enriches time with your family and friends.

From our 2000 presentation to Sony

Market Opportunity: Freedom to Participate
Today
Defined set of occasions where

• camera visibility/ interference is possible and accepted
• cameraman takes on an assumed role

Opportunity to Increase Usage

• Design cameras that are less bulky, obtrusive, “precious”
• Enable experiences to be preserved without requiring someone to operate a camera

Our concept (to illustrate the opportunity) emphasized video over still

Product Feature: Full Remote Control

• Gives capturer full control over video camera while away from device
• Includes viewfinder, volume, zoom/pan/tilt, battery/tape indicator
• Capturer is not “tethered” to camera and can participate

Sony isn’t the only one to launch products that we identified. As we identified needs and proposed solutions, it’s inevitable that as time goes by, competitors will identify those needs and develop products. For example, three years ago I blogged about Granny’s Inbox where HP launched something similar to one of our Sony concepts.

Elsewhere, we see other products that have been developed by competitors since our work for Sony in 2000:

Digital Blue’s Tony Hawk Helmetcam

and our X-treme Cam concept

• Rugged, mountable video camera that captures short clips from the user’s point of view
• Sharable, relivable document of exciting experiences
• Appeals to teens and/or sports participants
• Must be made inexpensive enough to justify its very specific (and thus limited) functionality

Hasbro’s VuGo Multimedia System

and our MPEG-Man concept

• Plays short clips of digital video
• Like a photo album, device can be passed around for sharing in a larger group
• Connect to TV, PC, or projector
• Better group interactions for sharing video
• Position as everyday, casual, social device rather than hi-tech or novelty

Casio EXILIM (and other models of still and video cameras from other manufacturers) feature Pre-Record Mode where

photos are not only taken at the moment the shutter release is pressed – they’re also taken before that! With continuous recording of up to 30 photos per second, a maximum of 25 photos can be saved in the camera’s buffer memory – even before the shutter release is pressed. The 25th image then corresponds to the photo that was taken when the shutter release button was pressed. This means that, in addition to the photo that you took at the moment the shutter release button was pressed, you can choose from a further 24 images that occurred just before that moment.

and our Capture Buffer concept (video but could be used for still as well)

• Video camera is always capturing and discarding footage
• When user initiates recording, option of saving the contents of the buffer
• People will no longer miss the beginning of what they want to film
• Slightly more skill required by users – where was the camera pointing before the button is pressed?

Buffalo TeraStation Home Server

and our Digital Memory Vault concept

• Permanent digital storage for stills and video
• Indexing, organizing, online publishing
• Random access retrieval
• Simplifies organization and retrieval of images (and video)
• Leverages familiar (to PC users) activity of searching (i.e., web search)
• Appeals to customers who are already invested in digital imaging, or in legacy imaging (i.e., family albums)
• Challenge to deliver expected bullet-proof reliability at an acceptable price point

Samsung TL225 with front LCD to prompt subject to smile, etc.

and our Teleprompter Cam concept (video but could be applied to still)

• Image on screen prompts subject to pose for video
• Helps people feel comfortable in front of a video camera
• Positioning challenge: though most images are posed and theatrical, our culture privileges the capture of candid and “natural”

• The Product Is You, No. 12 – Rob Walker does a series of advertisements that reveal a customer segmentation and the associated characteristics. Similar vein to my postings about personas leaking outside the enterprise
• Please vote for our SXSW panel "Culture Kicks Our Ass: How To Kick Back" – The conference lineup is chosen partially based on input (i.e., voting) from the community. Even if you don't attend, you still have a voice about what the discourse should be in our various fields, so please vote for this panel from Steve Portigal and D. P. Haine, of Obvious Design.

  We’ll explore the different cultural challenges that breakthrough products must overcome: emergent usage behaviors that are impossible to predict, a global customer base and cultural barriers inside the corporation that suffocate innovation. We’ll also share best practices for addressing each challenge.

• Please vote for our SXSW panel "FAIL: When User Research Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong" – The conference lineup is chosen partially based on input (i.e., voting) from the community. Even if you don't attend, you still have a voice about what the discourse should be in our various fields, so please vote for this panel from
  Steve Portigal, Portigal Consulting
  Nate Bolt, Bolt|Peters
  Dan Saffer, Kicker Studio
  Aviva Rosenstein, Ask.com
  Mark Trammell, Digg

  Best practices for user research are not hard to come by, but experience is the ideal way to develop mastery. And with experience inevitably comes failure. Embarrassing, awkward, hilarious failure that gives the gift of self-improvement. We’ll share our own unvarnished examples and what they taught us.

• Do programmers still buy printed books? | Zen and the Art of Programming – Likewise, when I’m holding a book or have it open on my desk, I’m in “book reading mode”, which makes it far easier to immerse myself in it. This means that I’m focused on the task and can proceed quickly. The only context switch that happens is between the book and the editor/shell, if it’s the kind of book that warrants typing along. If you are reading a book in a browser tab, it’s very easy to think, “I’ll just check my email for a second”, or introduce similar distractions. I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect.

  When I buy a physical copy of a book, I feel psychologically more obliged to at least try to get through it. Online I experience a paradox of choice of sort. With hundreds of interesting books available there in front of me, I’m more inclined to excessively multitask, and end up checking out different books while I should still be reading the current one.

  (Thanks @onwardparam and @chirag_mehta)

• New study suggests people from different cultures read facial expressions differently – East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.
  They were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

  The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

  (via Design-Emotion.com)

As of this writing there are only 3 1 spots remaining for my EPIC 2009 workshop Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities, September 1 in Chicago.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of ethnography in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. How can designers and researchers work with ethnographic data to create new things for business to do?

Participants in this workshop will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.

You can check out slides and audio from an abbreviated version at BayCHI or come to the abbreviated version at Web 2.0 New York, November 17.

• Steve Portigal presenting "We've Done All This Research: Now What?" at Web 2.0 Expo New York on 11/17 – As designers increasingly are themselves conducting contextual research to inform their design work, they may find they are holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design. How can designers and researchers work with this type of data to have the most impact on design and business?

  Participants in this workshop, collaborating in teams, will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data (to be gathered before and/or during the workshop) into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights.

People always ask us, “how do you find the people for your projects?”

Figuring out how to identify appropriate people to interview for a project is all-important. For Reading Ahead, we know we need people who are active readers. What constitutes an “active reader?” We’re defining it as people who read books at least three times a week, in multiple locations. We want people who are engaged in the behavior at a level where they will have lots of experiences from which to draw. We also know that we want to look at how people’s behavior changes/doesn’t change/is supported by/is influenced when reading books in print vs. reading eBooks using a device.

When we have established the criteria for participating in the research, we typically use a specialized recruiting company to find people. We write a screener, which has a series of specific questions to identify people who meet our criteria.

Screener excerpt, Reading Ahead project, 2009

Finding the right people can be quite complex, and for some projects, we’ve written screeners that are more than 10 pages long. If we’re looking for people who do activities X and Y, in locations 1, 2, and 3, but have never done activity Z-well, you get the idea!

In this project, the criteria are simpler, and we’ll be doing our own recruiting. In fact, if you’re in the Bay Area and an avid reader or Kindle user, let us know and maybe we can talk with you!

Update: We put together a representative screener that is formal enough to be given to a recruiting firm, even though we aren’t doing that for Reading Ahead. You can download it here.

• You Can't Innovate Like Apple (the best summary of Apple's approach to innovation/domination and why it's tough to replicate) – The point is not to go ask your customers what they want. If you ask that question in the formative stages, then you’re doing it wrong. The point is to go immerse yourself in their environment and ask lots of “why” questions until you have thoroughly explored the ins and outs of their decision making, needs, wants, and problems. At that point, you should be able to break their needs and the opportunities down into a few simple statements of truth.

  (via Joshua Porter)

• UK teen sex education pamphlet emphasizes sex sex as healthy and pleasurable rather than warning about disease – "Health officials are trying to change the tone of sex education. The new pamphlet, called "Pleasure," has sparked some opposition from those who believe it encourages promiscuity among teens in a country that already has high rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases."

  Regardless of what you think of this morally, politically, etc., it's a powerful example of reframing a discussion and challenging closely-held beliefs in order to innovate.

• Slides and audio posted for “Well, we did all this research … now what?” at BayCHI – BayCHI has relaunched podcasts and my recent BayCHI talk is among the first to be posted. You can listen to the audio, or you can watch the slides with embedded audio."Steve Portigal introduces a framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of a customer's unmet needs."

My EPIC 2009 workshop Moving from Data to Insights to Opportunities is now open for registration. It takes place September 1 in Chicago.

One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of ethnography in business is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. How can designers and researchers work with ethnographic data to create new things for business to do?

Participants in this workshop will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.

This workshop is a lot of fun to lead and, as we’ve heard, fun and informative to participate in. Earlier this year it sold out at Interaction 09, and was enthusiastically received in its abbreviated format at San Francisco’s Interaction09 Redux and BayCHI.

Hope to see you there!

• David Lynch's Interview Project – Reminds me a bit of Robert Frank's "The Americans" where Lynch is interviewing to Frank's photography; Lynch goes around the US and finds people and interviews them. My modest dream is to make time to watch these regularly.
  (via Waxy.org)

• Lovenest: Help Keep Your Baby’s Head Round – The parent-of-baby market seems unique in its (often peer-reinforced) drive to identify new needs and corresponding solutions. This leads to a lot of stuff being produced, some as expensive replacements for existing satisfactory (if generic) solutions, but much of it seemingly innovative. I suppose the work of a parent now includes the emotionally fraught process of trying to sort out the difference.
• Icon-o-Cast by Lunar : Best products & experiences for new moms & their babies – This is a really great discussion about how parents-to-be seek out product information, what products are offering and not offering, the challenges around integration with other products and with the existing home environment. Good insight and tons of opportunity for designers, brands, and retailers.

• Mark Menjivar's You Are What You Eat – Set of naturalistic images of inside of refrigerators, with brief profile of the owner. Beautifully done.
• Rollasole – after-dancing semisposable shoe vending – Fact 1: The best nightclubs are notoriously located at either the top or the bottom of a massive flight of stairs.
  Fact 2: The best nightclub shoes are painful, precarious and perilously pointy.
  But fear not, for we at Rollasole have appeared like Prince Charmings (sic) to gently escort you down the stairs, across the kerb and into the back of your carriage – all without falling on your face.
  When you're all danced out, just slip one of our vending machines a fiver and it'll sort you out with a pair of roly poly pumps and a shiny new bag to shove your slingbacks in.

  (via Springwise)

• Legendary McDonald's failure in the UK – McPloughman – Although vegetarian burgers have failed in the U.S. McDonald's, one of McDonald's most spectacular production failures happened in Britain. This failure can be seen not only as a failure to understand the desires of its primary market, largely for burgers and fries, but also as a lack of understanding of a food product that is tied to British identity. In 1994 McDonald's test marketed the "McPloughman" in Britain. A "ploughman's lunch" is a very traditional British lunch that consists of bread, cheese (British, of course, usually cheddar) and a pickle (also cured in the British style). An attempt to tie the America-based company to such a traditional British product was a "McFlop." The company admitted that the British counter crew were embarrassed both by the concept and by the name itself.

  [Thanks to Stokes Jones for the tip to this one]

• FitFlops – the FlipFlop with the Gym Built In – What we girls really need is something like a flip flop that tones and trims our legs while we run errands. We have no free time…We Want a Workout While We Walk!” FitFlop midsoles incorporate patent-pending microwobbleboard ™ technology, to give you a workout while you walk. One woman reported feeling like she’d had a ‘bum-blasting’ workout after a half an hour of FitFlop-shod walking.

  (Thanks to CPT!)

• Love Land, first sex theme park in China closed before construction completed – Photographs showed workers pulling down a pair of white plastic legs and hips that appear to be the bottom half of a giant female mannequin towering over the park entrance. The mannequin is wearing a red G-string. The park manager, Lu Xiaoqing, had planned to have on hand naked human sculptures, giant models of genitals, sex technique “workshops” and a photography exhibition about the history of sex. The displays would have included lessons on safe sex and the proper use of condoms. Mr. Lu told China Daily that the park was being built “for the good of the public.” Love Land would be useful for sex education, he said, and help adults “enjoy a harmonious sex life.”
• Air Traveler Satisfaction Goes Up? Look Beyond The Data – The airline business scored 64 out of 100 in the first quarter of this year, a 3.2% increase over the same period a year ago. Airlines were still among the lowest-scoring businesses in the index, which measured customer satisfaction with the products or services of hotels, restaurants and 14 other sectors. Full-service restaurants scored highest at 84. Airlines scored far below their own index high of 72, achieved in 1994. "It certainly looks like most of these increases, if not all, are due to lower passenger load," says Claes Fornell, professor of business at the University of Michigan and index founder, noting that the recession has kept many Americans from traveling. The lower number of passengers "means more seat availability, shorter lines, more on-time arrival, fewer lost bags, and all that probably adds up to a slightly higher level of satisfaction." He noted that a reduction in the number of flights offered could erase the slight gains achieved in passenger satisfaction.

• Mass Customization of the Fiat 500 – A number of folks we recently met in Europe mentioned this new (although an updated classic) car as being perfect for their needs. The variation and customizing, while perhaps not unique in today's marketplace (I'm imaging the Mini's variability is similar if not beyond) was still striking: "The 500 is available with four different trim levels: Naked, Pop, Lounge, and Sport. Customers can choose also between 15 interior trims, 9 wheel options, 19 decals, and 12 body colours. There are over 500,000 different personalized combinations of the 500 that can be made by adding all kinds of accessories, decals, interior and exterior colours, and trims."
• Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas – Allison Arieff writes about "inventor/author/cartoonist/former urban planner Steven M. Johnson" whose "work tends toward the nodes where social issues intersect with design and urban planning issues." I'm reminded of my formative experiences with Al Jaffee features from MAD magazine where he's describe future products or technologies, or explain (fancifully) the workings of some current product (i.e. bars of soap that are made with quick disappearing stuff on the outside and then a small interior core that takes a long long time to dissolve).
• Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt – Suggested to me by René Vendrig at the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, after my talk on looking at cultural differences based on everyday observations. He tells me "It is about traffic, but the real subject is human psychology and how we deal with that kind of situations."
• It's Not TV, It's HBO – HBO's standard-creating slogan, giving words to the premium experience of their programming.
• It's not just coffee, it's Starbucks. – New ad campaign for Starbucks attempts to differentiate on quality, but sounds just a bit familiar.
• All This ChittahChattah | Flying the sneaky skies – (see link for screen grab)

  While checking in online for a United Airlines flight, you may be offered the opportunity to upgrade to Economy Plus. It’s likely that most people decline upsells in many situations, though. The default would be to click “no thanks” and move on to completing the transaction. But United has done some tricky and manipulative interface design. The bright yellow arrow with bold text placed on the right is almost irresistible. E-commerce sites have trained us to envision a transaction moving from left to right (granted that they’ve landed on that model since it corresponds to how we read and other cultural factors); it’s very easy to click on the arrow and make a purchase you didn’t want. It takes cognitive work to search for the preferred option which is a lowly blue-underlined unbolded text link off to the left.

• Evil-interface design in airline website design spanked by European Commission – "Another common problem is the use of prechecked boxes offering services like travel insurance; consumers must uncheck the boxes to remove the unwanted charge." I've written before about United's website being slightly more subtle in their evilness, by offering an upgrade during check-in where the highly visible (colored graphic arrow) button in the default location will cost you tons of money; it's more effort to realize, locate, and decline the offer. Why do we live in a world where major brands want to sell us things that we don't want by tricking us? It's unconscionable that any company can claim to respect consumers and then pull crap like this.
• Cyd Harrell of Bolt | Peters reacts to the ludicrous Dell campaign trying to sell computers to women, in 2009 – "…a woman, with the last Dell I will ever own. It’s my current laptop, and I chose it because I needed a computer powerful enough to run screensharing tools and high-res video; I needed mobile broadband to stay in touch with my clients and employees, and not just my kid (heresy!); I needed my screen to look great when I go to meetings with clients. That is to say, I needed it for work. Dell, let’s make it official: you can bite me and the millions of other women who take themselves and their technology seriously."

  I love the articulate passion here, as well as the insight into what may have happened organizationally/culturally at Dell (ahem, really crappy research) that leads to such a horrendously offensive sales pitch to HALF of their buying population

Six months ago my chapter in Age of Conversation 2 was published. Although I’m reprinting my chapter here, it’s for a good cause (Variety) so you might want to buy a copy from Lulu, although I heard Amazon sales may be coming soon, too.

Listen, Do You Want To Know A Secret?

We’re in the business of digging for insights and that frequently takes us into the territory where secrets reside. Recently my colleague and I sat in the bedroom of a young rapper and watched as he demonstrated his creative process. While playing a simple backing track on iTunes, he improvised into a hand held recorder for a few minutes. Afterwards, he sat down with a notebook and reviewed his recording, scribbling furiously as he refined the lyrics. Finally, he took the new text and performed it against the same backing track.

Had anyone ever witnessed this particular music-making process before? We didn’t think so. But was it a secret? Probably not. Although it may have been hidden from view, the details of his process were undiscovered, rather than secret.

To reveal the undiscovered, the first thing to do is look. Go where something is happening, and watch. Sometimes we have to do more than look, we have to ask. Find someone who is involved in something that is happening, and ask them.

To get to the “secrets”, we have to do more than ask, we have to listen. Listening is much more complex than asking. It means adjusting our mindset and ensuring that we’re truly giving permission for secrets to be revealed.

It’s easy to fall into the familiar mode where we consider secrets as that which is deliberately hidden because it’s inherently bad or wrong. And although only the Shadow knows for sure what evil lurks in the hearts of men, consider that much of what is kept secret is out of our fear of violating social norms (the unspoken rules of a culture that determine what is and isn’t acceptable) and being embarrassed rather than being sent to jail. As producers of goods and services and experiences, it’s powerful and useful to understand these fears.

Those secrets are not unattainable, but they require a significant listening effort. The engine that drives the Age of Conversation isn’t talking, but listening.