ChittahChattah Quickies
September 11th, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] What’s up with ewwww? [Lunapads Blog] – [Thoughtful response by the Lunapad folks triggered – in part – by my Core77] What we call the “ewww” factor is a fact of life here at Lunapads (although most of the feedback we receive is overwhelmingly supportive, when it does come up it can kind of wreck your day.) Recently however there have been some interesting examples that have given me pause for thought about how we respond to it. Are washable cloth menstrual pads gross?And yet I certainly didn’t start my journey of consciousness around menstruation where I am today. In fact, I’m sure that once upon a time, had you asked me what I thought of the idea of washable menstrual pads I might well have been totally icked. Apparently, what is and is not gross/disgusting etc to us today is not necessarily true for tomorrow.
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 10th, 2010
- [from julienorvaisas] William Gibson On the Future of Book Publishing [Speakeasy – WSJ] – [Sci-fi author William Gibson lays out a vision for an alternative bookstore/publishing model, a response to the rise of eBooks… and it involves actual books.] "My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.]
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 9th, 2010
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 7th, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] A Morose and Downbeat Woman is My Co-Pilot [Boing Boing] – [Nass and Yen on Boing Boing talking about their body of research, of which we've long been fans, around the social behaviors that emerge in our interactions with technology. Back in the day, their research was under the branding Computers are Social Actors, but this latest offering seems to be positioned a bit more broadly in focus and in appeal] In my new book, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us about Human Relationships, I describe almost one hundred rules for social behavior that can be derived from experimental studies of how people use technology and that can make people more likeable, effective, and persuasive. The current study gives us two principles to guide interactions with people (as well as technology): telling upset people to "look at the bright side of life" can be off-putting, and "misery loves miserable company."
- [from steve_portigal] There is a Horse in the Apple Store [Frank Chimero] – [A lovely story that delivers on so many levels, from pure observational humor to an insightful treatise on how we engage – or not – with the world] THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing. I wondered: if there were kids in the Apple Store, would they notice? “Yes,” I say. “Yes, they would.” Kids have a magnetic connection to animals. But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny. And if you have a child, you probably can not afford Apple products. But, if a child were here, they would see the pony, because when you’re a kid, you notice everything, because everything is new.
- [from steve_portigal] Does Your Language Shape How You Think? [NYTimes.com] – [Some of the latest thinking on this evolving exploration] French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
Tags:
animal, apple, cognition, culture, horse, interactions, interface, language, livestock, nass, noticing, pony, quickies, retail, social, society, technology, thought
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 6th, 2010
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 3rd, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] Driving a message home with an optical illusion [The Globe and Mail] – [I'm curious how persuasive the illusion is; does it really cause driver alarm, or is it just something different that jars drivers from a state of complacency] Motorists travelling on 22nd Street in West Vancouver will be confronted with a 3D image of a little girl chasing a ball in the street starting next Tuesday…The 3D image will look like an indistinguishable mark from far away, but by the time the driver is within 30 metres, the image of the girl and ball will become clear…“You’ll see this image start to rise off the pavement and it will look like a little child is crossing the street. As you get closer to the image, the image recedes into the pavement,” Mr. Dunne said….Mr. Dozzi said the drivers will be able to tell something is on the road at a far distance and will have enough time to stop safely when they realize it is an image of a little girl – if they are travelling at the posted speed limit of 30 km/h.
ChittahChattah Quickies
September 2nd, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] Laptops Look like Race Cars — And Not in a Good Way [NYTimes.com] – [Pogue on the ridiculous sticker-on-laptops package] As A.M.D. points out, it’s like buying a new, luxury car and discovering that it comes with non-removable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using….A.M.D.’s research shows that consumers hate the stickers (duh). But they’re not going away, for one simple reason: There’s big money involved. I(Apple famously refuses to put Intel stickers on its computers, even though there’s Intel inside. In doing so, it leaves millions of dollars a year on the table.)…In 2011, A.M.D. will switch to new stickers that peel off easily, leaving no residue; after that, it’s considering eliminating the sticker program altogether. In the meanwhile, it’s going to make affixing its stickers optional. If a computer company chooses not to use the A.M.D. stickers, A.M.D. will still pay it the same marketing dollars to use in other ways.
- [from steve_portigal] DROID DOES – [Of course this advertising copy is at least partly tongue-in-cheek but I really have to wonder why – even as a joke – this is the sort of thing that we supposedly want out of our devices. The radio ad goes even further, giving voice to the implicit message here by promising to turn you into a machine. Verizon's raison d'etre is to sell phones, I know, but ulp, people, ulp. As we grapple with where we're at with this digi-firehose, Droid is putting a mecha-stake in the ground for us] Turns your eyes into captivated apertures of ecstasy. Its web-busting speed turns your arms into blistering, churning pistons. It’s power, intelligence and intuition. It’s not a better phone. It’s a better you….Its power, ability, brains and skill turn you into a web-rocketing, message-crafting super-you…with web-browsing speed that shoots you from zero to sixty in nanoseconds. It has an intuitive QWERTY keyboard that turns your thumbs into twin, text turbines and steaming diesel email engines.
- [from steve_portigal] Robert Krulwich on Wondering [Frank Chimero] – Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented. We’ve more tools than ever to do so…Maybe if the noticing started to arrange into larger patterns or there got to be a lot of documentation, I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed. And wouldn’t that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering — 2010. As a person constantly in a position to produce words or designs or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn’t seeking, it’s highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.
Tags:
advertising, android, brand, copy, design, droid, laptop, messaging, noticing, os, phone, pogue, positioning, quickies, smartphone, stickers, technology
ChittahChattah Quickies
August 30th, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] On The Media: "Debunk This!" (August 27, 2010) – [Pervasive myths affect product adoption as well as political or cultural stories. This is an area we are sometimes asked to explore] BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, this study is building off previous research that you've done on correcting misperceptions, research. But can you give us just a quick rundown of what those earlier experiments showed?
BRENDAN NYHAN: My coauthor, Jason Reifler, and I looked at can the media effectively correct misperceptions, which seems like a simple question, but no one had really tested that scientifically.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you found actually that when people had their misperceptions challenged certain people, at least, were more likely to become more firmly entrenched in that belief.
BRENDAN NYHAN: People were so successful at bringing to mind reasons that the correction was wrong that they actually ended up being more convinced in the misperception than the people who didn't receive the correction. So the correction was making things worse.
ChittahChattah Quickies
August 24th, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] Star Wars Uncut — Emmy Winner [Digits – WSJ] – [More collapse between consumer and producer. The resulting film is compelling as iconic storyline transcends lack of visual continuity, trumped by radical creativity. Definitely worth checking out.] When a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences called 26-year-old Web developer Casey Pugh five months ago and told him he should apply for an Emmy award, Pugh wasn’t sure what to make of it. But despite his initial disbelief, Pugh now has a golden statuette, won this weekend at the creative arts portion of the Primetime Emmy Awards. Pugh and his team — including Annelise Pruitt, Jamie Wilkinson and Chad Pugh — launched Star Wars Uncut last year, dividing “Star Wars” into 15-second clips and allowing people to choose scenes to remake. Several different groups could claim the same scene, and people could choose as many as three scenes to make. The submissions were then put up for a vote by the fans, and the team edited them together to make a full movie.
ChittahChattah Quickies
August 23rd, 2010
- [from steve_portigal] At The Movies, A String Of Futures Passed [All Things Considered – NPR] – No matter how accurate they may be, all fictional futures — especially alarmist ones — lose urgency as the concerns that fueled them fade. The Cold War paranoia of 1984 and 2001 now feel distant, even if the tech-boom fears in Blade Runner may be a bit more current. This decade, we're uptight about the environment and our increasing decrepitude, so we get Wall-E. In the flower-power era, we were skeptical about social conformity, so we got A Clockwork Orange.
- [from steve_portigal] Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words [Steve McCurry’s Blog[ – [Photjournalist assembles series of images of people reading, across the planet]
- [from steve_portigal] Coca Cola Village Like Facebook [The Inspiration Room] – [The ability to "post things" to Facebook or similar from far away (online or offline) is provocative but perhaps limiting, when the feedback loop – I post and I see what I post appear- is broken as badly as here] Coca Cola Village in Israel is a summer holiday resort designed for teenagers finishing their school years. For its third year experiential marketing agency Promarket provided residents with RFID bracelets (Radio Frequency Identification) to help them share their experiences on Facebook. Teens were able to put a digital ‘like’ on their choice of forty facilities in the camp, from the pool, the spa, to the extreme activities and sport section. If photographed by one of the official photographers, the RFID technology would automatically tag everyone in the photo and upload it to the relevant Facebook profiles…Real world Liking resulted in up to 35,000 posts per cycle…On average each visitor was posting 54 pieces of Coke branded content to their Facebook profile.
Tags:
brand, coke, culture, facebook, film, future, global, history, irl, israel, like, photography, prediction, quickies, reading, reading ahead, scifi, stories