Thanks to Alisa Weinstein for taking this great photo of me. I used this for the About the Author page in Interviewing Users. Also thanks to Kim Goodwin for (earnestly? teasingly? does it matter?) suggesting on Instagram that I use this as my author photo. Inspiring!

The SF Chron provides some context

The three Doggie Diner dog heads that once loomed over outlets of the long-defunct Bay Area fast food chain. The 7-foot fiberglass doggie heads, each weighing 600 pounds and sporting a chef’s hat and a bowtie, are camped out on a stretch of car-free JFK between Conservatory Drive West and 6th Avenue. The dachshund heads with their long snouts, sit atop square podiums with a couple of Adirondack chairs in front…

“If you rub one of their noses, you get one week’s good luck,” said John Law, a San Franciscan who considers himself the steward of three cartoonish canine heads. The disembodied heads have been painstakingly restored and repainted thanks to a Kickstarter campaign seven years ago that raised thousands to save the doggie heads, said Law. He frequently hauls the heads around San Francisco and the Bay Area to charity events, street fairs and art events.

I thought this advertising bear in Shinjuku was cool, and so stopped to take a picture. The bear saw me and posed with the typical Asian two-fingered V-gesture. After I took the photo, I did my best gaijin attempt at a bow. The bear returned the bow, and then saluted me.

Without a common language (indeed without a common species) we had an interesting opportunity to share our knowledge of each other’s culture in gestures. And although I rarely salute my friends and family, I understood its intent as a gesture-of-Western-origin.

Japan is quite impenetrable to the outsider, and it’s easy to subsist on a parallel layer, free from the possibility or opportunity for everyday interactions. In our two weeks that moat was crossed less than a dozen times (i.e., the couple in a cafe who smiled and waved at me when I peered in the window and inadvertently triggered the sliding door, letting in some very cold air; the couple who saw us eating Taiyaki (cooked sweet batter filled with bean paste in the sahpe of a fish) and explained what it was, what is was called, and compared camera models) and each time was rewarding in its own small way.

But making this connection with a bear, in the land of kawaii, was briefly and intensely magical.

This is how they display snakes in the “natural history” museum at Big Basin campground. And this is my 3000th picture posted to flickr. About as exciting, I guess, as seeing the numbers on your odometer roll over, but worth sharing here so we can stop for a moment and consider how the extent of the publishing we are able to do with blogs, flickr, podcasting, and so on. That’s a lot of content to share, 3000 pictures. I’m sure some amateur photographers (especially in the days of film) could never create that many images. But this isn’t even about creation – it’s the amount of photos I’ve been able to post in a public medium.
And flickr tells you how many times they’ve been seen. Some pictures end up being very popular. Perhaps a few have never been looked at (although I’d guess it’s very very few; most seem to have been viewed a few times; the older ones, even the less popular ones, have a surprising number of views). Being a publisher, who can create and present content for others to view is a whole other experience. Flickr has given me some structure, even motivation, for being involved in photography. I have some need to act on my pictures, even if that is to simply upload ’em and title ’em, and that structure has (for me) increased my enjoyment.

[Ironic, perhaps, that this photo wasn’t actually taken by me, but is still “my” photo.]

Update: 3,000th picture, not so much

Life-size cutouts of deployed service members

are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children and relatives back home.

The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta, Maine. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board.

Take that, designers of pillows-that-hug, USB-devices-that-emit-fragrance, robots-that-care-for-elders, simulated-dogs-that-soothe. A low-fi (functionally) but hi-fi (representationally) has dramatic (anecdotal) impact. Should we be chastened, saddened, or charmed?

I pulled a page out of Newsweek a year ago, intending to do something with the article, anyway a year later, I finally get around to blogging Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, mostly as Yet Another example of what I would call Inventory Porn (of which Taschen books might be a leading example) – if you go to some extreme length and document something (a big collection, all the stuff in your home, every manhole cover, gum wads, lost pet posters, bowling pins) at length, it becomes some publishable hipster NPR-reporting bloggable story.

It’s sort of the ultimate in DIY (or sorry, I mean User Created Content); anyone can seemingly visit every Starbucks in the US. Most won’t. But the person that does can get a book/movie/TV deal.

Some of these efforts are fun, some offer some insight, but others are just tedious. I might like to photograph the hotel doorknob of every room I stayed in over the last 3 years. Do you want to look at those pictures? What if I tell you engaging stories about each doorknob? Or each hotel? Or each trip? Well….maybe.

I admit it’s compelling to consume and create, but I’m also feeling a little burned out with this stuff. Perhaps it’s the lowbrow ethno vibe the whole thing gives off, that it’s an aesthetic and attitude of being into the details of consumption more than the implications or outcomes of the study (if it is even study; perhaps it’s just documentation).

In 2002 I travelled to Tokyo a couple of times with clients in order to do in-home ethnographic research, participatory design sessions, and general cultural immersion. Here’s some of my walking-around pictures. The entire set is here.

Community Safety Family

You must be 20 to buy us!

Delicious

Late night snack

Late night

Harajuku girls

Strolling Through Shibuya

Coming home from school>

Yesterday I received my copy of the new Swedish translation of Design: A Very Short Introduction (Design – en introduktion) by John Heskett. I can’t read Swedish, but this edition features two of my photographs from Hong Kong. Hooray!

I flipped through the book and found a photo captioned Amerikansk “strip mall” but is obviously taken in Canada, showing the Canadian McDonald’s logo, Tim Horton’s, Mark’s Work Wearhouse, and Canadian Tire. Hmm.

Making the best of bad times

(Click picture to see it larger)

I’ve been posting some pictures from my 2002 trips to Tokyo on flickr.

GTA must halt Michigan garbage shipments by 2010 is a news story that uses one of my flickr photos, with permission. They’ve got some nifty interface going; I received an email on flickr asking if they could use my picture; all I had to do was click on a URL and indicate yes or no on a web form. If yes, the photo gets published, and credit is given to me. It’d be nice if credit would linkback to either flickr or some other page, rather than NowPublic.Com (who runs the site), but whatever. I think it’s a neat way to do it – make it easy for people to say yes, make it easy for publishers to get photos for use in stories.

I have completed the mammoth task of editing and posting all my Asia pictures to flickr, with the completion today of the set from India (Mumbai and Bangalore). Previously: Bangkok and Hong Kong. All told, about 650 pictures.

Whew.

I’ve written two long pieces (and many smaller pieces on this blog) about our trip. An article for Core77 here and a more personal assessment here.

The process of taking time and reviewing the pictures with increasing distance from the event is pretty interesting, giving me a chance to reflect and revisit, to see things that I certainly didn’t see at the time I opened the shutter, and through the interactions on flickr, to gain insight and clarifications about things I observed but did not understand, especially with the pictures from India, where a pretty good dialogue has emerged (seen in the comments posted on the various pictures in that set Oops, not any more). The document of the experience is scattered, the interactions are scattered, but as the publisher of this content, I’m personally at the hub of all of it, so I’m taking full advantage. But clearly technology (even the ability to take several hundred pictures on a two week trip) is enabling some powerful behaviors; we know this, of course, but stepping back and noticing it is always pretty cool.