Seen on the junction between two buildings on Bryant St. in San Francisco.

Who uses this information? And what does it tell them?

I’m officiating (? for lack of a better term) at The Bay Area’s Best

Please come out to celebrate the impact the Bay Area industrial design community had in the 2006 IDSA & Business Week Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA). Out of 1,494 entries submitted from 29 countries, Bay Area firms, corporations and individuals won 16 of the 108 awards given. That is 15% of all of the awards given out internationally.

7:00 – 8:00
Tunes/ DJs Ric-Tic Soul 66 and Super Mod 67, spinning genuine 1960’s and early 70’s Soul, Motown, R&B, and Funk.
Moves/ Authentic 60’s style Go-Go dancers
Drinks/ Cocktails
Eats/ Tapas

8:00 – 9:00
Door prizes and award presentation by Steve Portigal

9:00 – 11:00
Music dance drink

…this may not be what you think of.

On Friday I became a first-time uncle as Talia Elyse Todd arrived. We’ll be headed up to Vancouver in a few weeks to check her out!

I’ve been running around evenings and weekends the last few days doing fieldwork. We did find a fun place for a debrief (listed as “Java on Judah” in my GPS) with a gregarious San Francisco-type proprietor.

Sunday was 3 hours of driving, to Bolinas and back, for an all-day faculty retreat for the CCA ID department. Really great session and I feel excited about this and upcoming semesters, but still.

MarCamp – Marketing, Advertising, Recommendations is an unconference sponsored by France Telecom – Orange.

How will marketing and advertising evolve in the next 5 years? How best to leverage the power of the community and 2.0 technologies to the benefit of marketing and advertising? How to improve the relationship with your customers? How important will interactivity with your customer be in your product design strategies?

Having been at one “camp”, I’d like to try and lead a discussion at MarCamp; but I’m not clear yet what the topic should be…

Ergonomically suitable for human and canine (and other, as the case may be). At Fort Point, in San Francisco, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’m attending an interesting event next week. It’s a two-day summit on the topic of (as far as I can tell) what we want from our cities in the future. There’s an implied (to me) technological bias, but not any assumption that technology is good.

This is not a topic I feel very expert in, not even very well informed, or strongly opinionated about. Given the discussion-based slant the organizers are taking, this could be a risk, but I’m hoping that diving into the issues will unearth some perspectives on, well, living life in the spaces we live in, that I haven’t previously written or talked about.

Tipping the scales for me, therefore, to attend, are the facts that the event is free and local and especially that organizers/presenters include Eric Paulos and Matt Jones, two big-thinking design/culture/technology folks whom I admire.

This summit is part of a larger event going on in San Jose (electronic art, and presumably some other themes; I can’t really parse the details or remember the name of the conference without regular use of the web) – I won’t be part of that.

If you are attending the interactive city summit, let me know!

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.

From the New York Times, Indian workers in San Francisco and Redmond, WA can order Indian food delivered for lunch from some small businesses that echo, in some fashion, the tiffin delivery seen in cities like Mumbai.

More hubris for Sony as they sell the Metreon

Lisa Carparelli, a spokeswoman for Sony, said the company pulled out as Metreon’s original owner upon reviewing its corporate strategy and deciding to focus it on electronics, entertainment and games.

‘We had success in Metreon,’ Carparelli said. ‘We attracted an average of 6 million people a year, but the decision is based on corporate resources.’

Sony will continue to operate the Sony Style Store and the PlayStation store inside the Metreon. ‘We’ll be in essence a tenant,’ Carparelli said.

Visitors panned an exhibit based on the book ‘The Way Things Work’ as boring, and it closed in summer 2001. An anchor Microsoft store closed later that year. An exhibit based on Maurice Sendak’s book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ was scaled back to four days a week and later closed. The Discovery Channel store closed in 2003.

The movie theaters flourished. But Sony didn’t receive any revenue from the theaters and in 2002 rebuffed a quiet proposal by the theaters to expand into the by-then-vacant fourth floor.

One industry observer said the complex ended up with a mostly teenage clientele that alienated the upscale families whom Sony had intended to attract.

‘Sony envisioned a much higher-end customer than ultimately wanted to be there,’ Taylor said.

‘The tenants they put in originally were very unique and esoteric. The Discovery Channel had unique things, but they were for affluent people with lots of disposable income for cute knick-knacks. The most successful tenants were ones who catered to the teenage moviegoing crowd, like the pinball arcades. They intimidated the more affluent crowds looking for a more museumlike experience.’

I guess hindsight is 20-20 in situations like these. Sony in Japan offers pretty much every sort of service you can think of; in the US their attempt at a mall mostly failed (despite their positive spin). It never really had any meaning – there was little Sony about it, and the Metreon brand never seemed to grow into anything. And the place itself always lacked coherence as an experience. Let’s see if it’ll become anything I care about now, though.

Also from this story:

I was shown around the building by a Metreon staffer as workers scurried to finish the project in time. Everyone I’d spoken with had gushed about how Metreon was going to reinvent retailing and serve as a model for similar ventures worldwide.

I said to my guide: “So the mall … ”

“It’s not a mall,” she interrupted. “It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s an urban entertainment destination.”

I dutifully described the place as such in the article I’d been hired to write. But I had no clue what Sony meant. Metreon was a mix of stores, eating places and a movie theater.

It was a mall.

Sony never understood this. Nor did it grasp Bryant’s notion of a seamless entertainment-retail experience. Instead, it attempted to package Metreon as a mini-Disneyland, with a handful of attractions and a bunch of ways to spend money.