Frankenstein Parking, Universal Studios Hollywood, February 2009

Jurassic Parking, Universal Studios Hollywood, February 2009

Parking Legend, Universal Studios Hollywood, February 2009

Universal leverages their brand properties in and around their theme park. “Jurassic Parking” is clever, but does Frankenstein really convey the right attributes for valet? I think there’s a real sense of fun here, but I wonder about devaluing the emotional resonance that these characters have.

A curb creates an impromptu parking system for shopping carts at this mall in Daly City, CA.

Related posts:
Affordance Control
More on shopping carts

I’ve uploaded nearly 1300 of my Japan pictures to Flickr. For reasons I’m sure you’ll understand, I haven’t added titles or tags or descriptions proactively, but please add comments or questions on flickr and I’ll gladly offer a story or explanation.

Meanwhile, I’m including some of my faves here, as well as part 2 and part 3.

For long-term parking, SFO recently switched from a big lot to a 7-story parking structure. At one end of each floor is a bank of elevators and on the ground floor is the bus stop to get to the terminals.

Each floor is (somewhat subtly) color-coded and right next to the button for the elevator is this little widget: a card with the floor printed on it, and a space for each of the sections that can be marked or torn to indicate where you left your car. Simple, elegant.

Our CCA class just finished a “user experience audit” of BART and found dozens of aspects of the whole experience that are sub-optimal. I’ll add this one (although maybe one of them saw this as well).

Step 1 – remember your stall number.

Too bad this sign is posted in the ticket-buying area of the station, far far away from your car off in the parking lot. It should read Go back to your car, dumbass, and write down the four digit number and then come back here and look at step 2. Their guidance is not presented at a useful point in the process, at all.

Last week I dialed my cell phone with my 4-digit parking code so that I could “remember” it. There’s one machine for buying tickets, and then through the turnstiles is the next machine for paying for parking (“the paid area”). So even if you walk from your car muttering 3214 over and over again, you still have to use a number-heavy interface to select the value of your ticket, enter your ATM password and so on, and that’s likely to wipe out your short-term memory.

But I only learned this from failure. All of which makes this sign so unhelpful.

I attended the interactive city summit earlier this week (held in SF as part of ISEA2006: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.)

It was an unusual event for me to attend, since the bulk of the people seemed to be strongly into the issues around new urbanism, planning, technology of the future civic life, if-you-can-dream-it interactivity, etc. I admit I hadn’t thought about this stuff in great depth and so it was a lot of new thinking; although many of the examples shown were things that go through the design and technology sections of the blogosphere I frequent.

I think like so many events, this one struggled a bit with the identity. They repeated the notion of a summit several times, and one possible output was a document that could be sent to a city planner or a design planner or any number of agencies. But an event with a goal like that – a goal of producing a collective output – needs to really structure and facilitate the discussion and creation of output. The emphasis here was on invited presentations (and some good freewheeling discussion), and on quickie presentations from attendees. I don’t see how that sort of content can accomplish the stated goal. And that’s okay, I think the format wasn’t bad. We had the usual problems with acoustics and presenters with tiny type, presentations that ramble without a clear thesis to support, heavily accented presenters, etc. but I think for the most part it was a pretty good event.

Matt Jones gave a stimulating hyperlinked talk (while the laptop-enabled in the audience checked out links and videos concurrently). He showed us this amazing video of the Sultan’s Elephant – an artistic spectacle that you must check out.

There was a great presentation from Rebar, who did the widely blogged PARK(ing) project, where they created small parks in parking spaces; putting down sod, a bench and a plant in a parking space and feeding the meter for a couple of hours.

Troika spent a lot of their time defending themselves (needlessly?) from their work in the commercial domain, under the rhetoric of art vs. design. I didn’t fully understand their stance. They showed the widely blogged SMS Guerilla Projector; a handheld device that takes a text message from a phone and projects it at great distances. In some experiments they shone messages into people’s apartments, and they bemusedly described people calling the police. Ha ha? Their next slide was about empathy, which they seemed to have none of; creating technology experiences that surprise and sometimes frighten people, so they can study their reactions? They need to take a look at an ethics committee guidelines for human subjects! (NB: I was reminded of the disturbing potential for this stuff when I saw Rob Walker’s post about a popular (among cynical edgy youth, no doubt) text message in Iraq: “Your call cannot be completed because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

In an excellent lunchtime discussion we brainstormed on the key issues where technology impacts urban life, and it seemed to me that most of the issues fell into three piles: preserving old stuff, ensuring we don’t fuck up the old stuff (those are different), and enabling new stuff. Of course, today I see this post about the closing of an historic neighborhood store. The post is not significantly high-tech (it uses pictures, and it has a broader reach since it’s on the Internet), and is not significantly unique, but I enjoyed mmediately stumbling across an example of a model that we were just refining.

I took public transit in from Montara both days, trying BART on the first day and MUNI the second day. Thinking I was pretty smart, I drove up to Stonestown Galleria on 19th, parked my car, and took the MUNI right to the front of the place. When I came back after lunch, my brand new car was gone. Towed. The conference was free (including food) but this stupid mistake cost me nearly $300 in fees and taxi! Not to mention stress and wasted time. And somewhat ironic, given the conversations we had been engaging in around surveillance, technology, privacy, and the like. How did they know that I wasn’t a customer at the mall and I wasn’t shopping while my car was there? I parked around 9:35, and the towing receipt read 10:30. What time did they call the towing company in order for them to be writing the thing up at 10:30? Couldn’t have been much after I parked. Did a security guard simply observe me walking away from my car and onto the transit platform? If I had gone into McDonald’s and then come out again, would they have figured it out? Were they monitoring me, or the car in the lot?

I’m not defending my choice, or their response, but it certainly raises some questions about how the heck they knew. Liz Goodman had just mentioned the highway signs that tell you your speed and if you are over, and she commented on the different emotional impact and social perception of a technology that monitors you for your information and a technology that monitors you for someone else’s usage. The highway sign, in her example, doesn’t write you a ticket, or tell the cops, it simply tells you about your behavior, presumably to warn or shame you into driving normally (or to reinforce your choice of compliance). I certainly wondered about whatever technology was used to identify my misdeed.

Some bad government usability on a notice we received from the county

The aplication requests an Off-Street Parking Exception to allow for 1 uncovered tandem parking space within the existing driveway, where 1 free-and-clear arking space is required for a second dwelling unit. The application has requested this exception to allow the required parking space to be located in tandem to existing covered parking spaces.

I read this several times, looked at the diagram on the back of the page, walked over the house in question, read this again, and I’m still really confused. Really confused.

These feedback forms in the SFO Long Term Parking bus shelter are always empty. Someone has written Ha Ha Ha as a sarcastic bit of feedback, presumably about the implied hypocrisy of an unmaintained feedback mechanism.

There’s a phone number (that would ideally be covered by feedback forms) that you can call from a telephone (if you’re carrying one) or a courtesy phone (once you get into the airport itself, a 10 minute drive away), for parking information. Parking information? You’ve already parked, if you’re seeing this. The sticker is out of sync with the feedback form holding function.