Interview with Patricia Ryan Madson on How Improv Can Change the World [Priya Parker] – As often happens, the principles of improv give us a lens towards larger truths about how life – just being in the world – can or should work.

Trying produces tension and misdirects our focus away from what we are doing onto an obsession with the result. We are doomed to fail when we try to be smart or witty or amazing. It you think about it the people who actually are smart, etc. are focusing on what they are doing rather than how they are doing. I can make an average painting, story, etc. And if I put my attention on just doing what comes naturally, just making it the most obvious to me then the result is commonly pretty good. Trying is misplaced attention. The idea of excellence robs us of our common sense intelligence.

Snooping in the Age of E-book [NYT] – There are many reasons we advocate for studying people in their own environment. One of them is the richness of the cues you get from that environment. This short piece articulates those cues nicely.

A bit of gumshoe in someone’s cupboard or closet can reveal far more about them than an entire evening’s worth of chitchat. “Places reflect long series of behavior,” he told me during a recent visit to my home. “If I have a conversation with you, I just get snippets of behavior. Your books, your chairs, your wall hangings represent an accumulation over many years. A space distills repeated acts. That’s why it’s hard to fake.” Of the five major personality traits, three – openness, conscientiousness and extroversion – are clearly revealed in people’s spaces…Snooping, in other words, instead of being an antisocial activity, is actually prosocial. Our spaces are telling others what we’re like even when we’re not. These days, we need such boosts to communication, because as the demise of the bookshelf shows, our true selves are increasingly retreating from public display and disappearing inside our devices. We are becoming, as Ms. Fadiman lamented, more invisible. “Our obsession with privacy is somehow reflected in the fact that our taste is now locked up invisibly inside all of these little boxes.”

Can the Cult of Bang & Olufsen Last? [Wired] – Rob Walker catches up with the 2011 edition of this long-standing audio company, known for out of this world design and out of reach prices, as he says, “audiophiles lost out to audio audio files.” The closing paragraph is telling and compelling.

Mantoni sounds intent on prodding B&O toward a less aloof attitude about the marketplace. “We need to go out and talk to customers,” he says. He recently told 30 of his top executives that they would be working in B&O stores for a while to meet customers face-to-face. There’s a message here about design: Of course the company has to keep producing distinctive wares-but these also have to fit shoppers’ actual lives.

• So, You Want to Do User Research: Characteristics of Great Researchers [UXmatters] – One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the other hand, it takes real commitment and a lot of personal development to do user research well. People commonly assume that research is research—and doing any kind of research is better than doing none at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Not all user research is created equal. Flawed research can be a significant liability to the success of a product, as well as the company developing it, so it really is important to get it right.

  To be effective, there are certain personal characteristics a user researcher should have. Whether you are a dedicated user researcher, a student who is considering a career path in user research, a UX designer or software engineer who sometimes gets called upon to do user research, or a stakeholder looking for research support, this column will help you to understand the personal characteristics that really make a difference to a user researcher’s success.

Ms. Dewey (no longer online) is a new search engine making the blogosphere rounds today. You can search, and this character offers you comments, some based on what you search for and others perhaps random. It doesn’t make me think about neat new visions of software interactivity, it seems more like a gimmick. It meminded me of Subservient Chicken, I immediately wanted to start talking to her about her, not about my search task. And of course she’s loaded with responses. Folks on digg are documenting what they are finding (just like what happened with aforementioned poultry) that they can get her to do.

Haw haw, or yawwwwn?

According to a study of national personalities

which found that this time-honoured perception of our oh-so-unique Canadian psyche — and other cultures’ stereotypes of themselves — are in fact just so much hooey.

‘These stereotypes are as Canadians see themselves and Americans as they see themselves,’ said Robert McCrae of the U.S. National Institute on Aging, a principal investigator of the study on national personalities around the world.

‘Canadians think they’re extremely agreeable; the Americans think they’re very disagreeable,’ he said. ‘Canadians believe that they’re very calm and not irritable, very even-tempered, whereas Americans think they’re more anxious and hostile.

‘The fact is Canadians and Americans have almost identical average personality traits.’

In a measure of five main areas of personality, covering a total of 30 traits, Canadians and their U.S. cousins fell roughly in the middle. Not only that, but they weren’t all that different from other cultures around the globe, researchers found.

The study, published in the latest issue of Science, collected data through personality questionnaires given to thousands of people living in 49 countries.