Posts tagged “magic”

Out and About: Steve in Baltimore

During last week’s trip to Baltimore, I had just a little bit of time to explore. Here’s what I saw:

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I had a really delicious meal at The Food Market in the hip neighborhood of Hampden, but I did snort with laughter when they brought over what I thought was going to be a beet salad.

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Have we hit Peak Experience (and not in the Maslovian sense) when donuts are reframed as experiences? Closing the loop on my last visit to the area, this was a total disappointment. Disappointing donuts and a weird experience. Fractured Prune was located in an Italian restaurant but I could not figure out where the donut counter was. It turned out to be shared with the restaurant. I had to ask two people once I was actually in this little restaurant where the donuts were. There’s no familiar visual cue of shelves of donuts, since all are made-to-order. I did have nice chat with a fellow patron who told me they were great donuts. I didn’t let him see me leave the half-eaten ones sitting in the bag on the picnic table outside. Not good.

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Street art in Hampden.

This Week @ Portigal

Monday, Monday…

We here at Portigal are off to a bustling start of the week (contrary to the wispy, relaxing vibe that tune implies).

  • We spent the morning ideating approaches and tools for upcoming ethnographic interviews. Imagine three dedicated research geeks in a room surrounded by whiteboards, post-it notes, laptops, and lots of markers. In addition to sharing our own ways of thinking about interviewing tactics, we had the chance to explore ways others are are practicing this magic.
  • We are excited to dive back in to the Omni project this week as we welcome back Kristine Ng to review her primary research efforts and craft a plan for more collaboration this year.
  • In lieu of tempting our latent gambling and tech addictions, we will be watching the flurry of CES excitement from the sidelines (er, our desks) this week.
  • Julie is vying for Crock Pot Champion this week but it’s going to take a transformational eating experience to top Tamara’s Beefy Barley Vegetable Stew from last week…
  • Steve has a To-Do list longer than anyone wants to acknowledge as he prepares for Interaction 12 in Dublin. Have you checked out the videos from the four winners of the Student Design Challenge yet? Wow.
  • In the aftermath of last week’s 2012 off-site planning meeting for Portigal, we are building a list of events, conferences, and workshops that look shiny in the new year. Please don’t be shy! Let us know if you can think of something we should attend. Better yet, is there an upcoming event where you’d like to see us present a talk or workshop? As much as we enjoy hanging out in the office together, we are ethnographers and compulsively curious so we love even more excuses to get out of the office and into the wild.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Steven Levy on How Gadgets Lose Their Magic [Wired] – "Any sufficiently advanced technology," Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1962, "is indistinguishable from magic."…This applies to all the similar fruits of Moore's law. In the past 40 or 50 years, such mind-stretching advancements have become the norm…We all, I think, have become inured to Moore's law. The astonishing advances that once would have brought us to our knees are now reduced to a thumbs-up on Gizmodo. They're removed from the realm of magic­ – they're just cool gear…As technological magic becomes routine, I wonder whether a visit to a preindustrial society might teach me more than it teaches them. The only thing more fascinating than our technology is the idea of getting along without it. Maybe the way to recapture the magic is to turn all that stuff off.
  • How Tony Gilroy surprises jaded moviegoers [The New Yorker] – Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals. Perhaps the most famous reversal in film was written by William Goldman in "Marathon Man,.” Laurence Olivier, a sadistic Nazi dentist, is drilling into Dustin Hoffman’s mouth, trying to force him to disclose the location of a stash of diamonds. “Is it safe?” he keeps asking. Suddenly, William Devane sweeps in to rescue Hoffman. In the subsequent car ride, Devane wants to know where the diamonds are. After a few minutes, Hoffman’s eyes grow wide: Devane and Olivier are in league! “Thirty years ago, when Bill Goldman wrote it, the reversal in ‘Marathon Man’ was fresh,” Gilroy says. “But it must have been used now 4000 times.” This is the problem that new movies must solve. “How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.”
  • Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability [Wired] – [Echoing some of what I wrote about in a recent piece for interactions "We Are Living In A Sci-Fi World"]
    It's a satisfying development for Varian, a guy whose career as an economist was inspired by a sci-fi novel he read in junior high. "In Isaac Asimov's first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics."
  • What is the Status Quo Bias? [Wisegeek] – A cognitive bias that leads people to prefer that things remain the same, or change as little as possible. People will make the choice which is least likely to cause a change. This can also play a role in daily routines; many people eat the same thing for breakfast day after day, or walk to work in exactly the same pattern, without variation. The inability to be flexible can cause people to become stressed when a situation forces a choice.

    It explains why many people make very conservative financial choices, such as keeping their deposits at one bank even when they are offered a better rate of interest by a bank which is essentially identical in all other respects.

    While this provides self-protection by encouraging people to make safer choices, it can also become crippling, by preventing someone from making more adventurous choices. Like other cognitive biases, this bias can be so subtle that people aren't aware of it, making it hard to break out of set patterns.

  • Sports, sex, and the runner Caster Semenya [The New Yorker] – There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married?…We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • 'Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed' inventor dies at 92 – The inventor of the "Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed," which brought weary travelers 15 minutes of "tingling relaxation and ease" for a quarter in hotel rooms across America during its heyday as a pop culture icon in the 1960s and '70s, has died.
  • Vending machines for Gold? – While it's just a plan at this point, it seems that the idea is more about disruption and promotion than simply "vending."
  • Let’s Embrace Open-Mindedness – My article published at Johnny Holland, considering the challenges in living up to the standard we set for ourselves. And there's a story about cheese, too!
  • Why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others – To investigate how cultural tastes change over time, Berger and Le Mens analyzed thousands of baby names from the past 100 years in France and the US. (Because there is less of an influence of technology or advertising on name choice, baby names provide a way to study how adoption depends on primarily internal factors.) The researchers found a consistent symmetry in the rise and fall of individual names; in other words, the longer it took for a name to become popular, the longer it took for the name to fade out of popularity, and thus the more staying power it had compared to names that quickly rose and fell. The effect was robust, occurring in both countries and across various time windows.

    According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.

    (via Lone Gunman)

Mythological optimizations as satisfying as real ones?

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When Netflix movies arrive, the barcode on the DVD envelope peeks through a window on the back of the outer envelope. When I put the DVD back in and seal it up before returning it, should I make sure the barcode is still lined up? There’s no indication this is necessary, nor is it very easy to do since there are eight different ways (four edges and front/back) to orient the DVD).

At this point in Netflix’s history there has been a lot written about their sorting process and envelope design; the whole Netflix experience smacks of optimization (plenty of feedback by email or RSS, consistently rapid shipping in either direction, and of course, the throttling scandal). So it makes some sort of sense that they are scanning incoming packages and those that are scannable will be returned (and the next movie sent out) fastest.

According to general consensus and the official word, this is false. It makes no difference; it’s only scanned when it’s sent out, not when it comes back in.

This gap between perception and reality can create real challenges for companies that deliver technology solutions, hoping that the user’s mental model matches to the engineers or designer’s mental model. We worked with a software vendor who had a loyal customer base using a time-intensive transactional system. We heard many stories from these customers about how the system “really” worked. Some had conducted experiments to document their beliefs. Even as our client brought in increasingly senior technologists to explain the way their product worked, people found ways to justify their own model. The technology decisions in the product were arbitrary (some thresholds for the number of milliseconds, or the number of transactions, etc. were refined to some point over time, from 25 to 15 to 10). The fact that the system was being tweaked created mistrust and lent credence to the customer’s theories about what was really going on behind the scenes. Transparency isn’t sufficient; there were other business decisions our client was making that were not seen as being in the best interest of their customers and so that really colored how they viewed the partial information about the technological workings.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Put another way, we often develop complex and irrational mental models about technology. The joke that “a clean car goes faster” demonstrates how we attach emotional attributes to some product or system, despite an intellectual awareness that it isn’t true.

I just sealed up my Netflix envelope; it took some will power to not fiddle with the barcode. Sure, there’s the written word that says it won’t make a difference. But, it just might, maybe, right?

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