• The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics – Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.
  Not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance.
  Nike has discovered that there's a magic number for a Nike+ user: 5. If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit 5 runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At 5 runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them.
• To Sleep, Perchance to Analyze Data: David Pogue on the Zeo sleep monitoring system – Just watching the Zeo track your sleep cycles doesn’t do anything to help you sleep better. Plotting your statistics on the Web doesn’t help, either.

  But the funny thing is, you do wind up getting better sleep — because of what I call the Personal Trainer Phenomenon. People who hire a personal trainer at the gym wind up attending more workouts than people who are just members. Why? Because after spending that much money and effort, you take the whole thing much more seriously.

  In the same way, the Zeo winds up focusing you so much on sleep that you wind up making some of the lifestyle changes that you could have made on your own, but didn’t. (“Otherwise,” a little voice in your head keeps arguing, “you’ve thrown away $400.”)

  That’s the punch line: that in the end, the Zeo does make you a better sleeper. Not through sleep science — but through psychology.

• Baechtold's Best photo series – While they are framed as travel guides, they are really more visual anthropology. A range of topics and places captured and presented in a compelling and simple fashion, illustrating similarities and differences between people, artifacts, and the like.
• It's girls-only at Fresno State engineering camp – This is the first year for the girls-only engineering camp. Its goal is to increase the number of female engineering majors at Fresno State, which lags behind the national average in graduating female engineers. Nationwide, about 20% of engineering graduates are women. 20 years ago the national average was 25%. At Fresno State, only 13% of engineering graduates are women.

  Jenkins said he hopes the camp will convince girls "who might not have thought about it" that engineering is fun, and entice them to major in engineering.
  (via @KathySierra)

• Selling Tampax With Male Menstruation – This campaign, by Tampax, is in the form of a story featuring blog entries and short videos. The story is about a 16-year-old boy named Zack who suddenly wakes up with “girl parts.” He goes on to narrate what it’s like including, of course, his experience of menstruation and what a big help Tampax tampons were.

• Percival Everett's short story, “The Appropriation of Cultures” – This is the second story in this podcast and is an entertaining and powerful piece of fiction about the meaning of symbols and the power that we might seize to change that meaning. Culture jamming as narrative device, in other words.
• Ethnography is not an in-home interview – Grant McCracken considers the emerging finger-pointing as Tesco doesn't do as well in the US as they had hoped. Was research (or rather, poor research) to blame? I share his concern about people going through the motions and claiming they've done the research. A prospective client asked us the other day why they would hire us as opposed to simply borrowing a video camera from his brother and dropping into some of their target offices. It's an important question because it reveals a common mindset. My short answer was that they should definitely do that, but that the expertise we are bringing includes (but is not limited to) the ability to plan and execute those interviews so you really do get to something new, and the process for analyzing and synthesizing that data so that we can identify what it means to them and what the opportunities are. Perhaps, as McCracken suggests, Tesco failed to do just that.
• Standing/adjustable height work surfaces, long available in workplaces, are being tried out – with seeming success – in schools – Teachers in Minnesota and Wisconsin say they know from experience that the desks help give children the flexibility they need to expend energy and, at the same time, focus better on their work rather than focusing on how to keep still.
  …
  “We’re talking about furniture here,” she said, “plain old furniture. If it’s that simple, if it turns out to have the positive impacts everyone hopes for, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?”

In honor of the start of the school year, Core77 has put together the definitive set of tips, tricks, and lifehacks for design students: Hack2School. Divided into 5 groups–Classroom, Dorm Room, Represent, Crash Course, and Cheat Sheet–everything you need to survive a design education has been hunted down, written up, and offered to you on a blue foam platter. So to all the returning students, we say “welcome back.” And to all the new ones? Well, maybe you better read this first.

Super Bonus: Guest essays from: Ralph Caplan, Alissa Walker, Alice Twemlow, Steve Portigal, Jessica Helfand, Scott Klinker, Steven Heller, Sam Montague, and Jill Fehrenbacher.

My contribution is Practice noticing stuff and telling stories.

Recently I wrote about a Bad Survey, exhorting design instructors to pay more attention to why and how surveys are being used by their students. I was reacting to a pretty bad example I had encountered and I ripped on it and offered some suggestions for improvement.

The students involved in creating the survey contacted me, thanked me for the input and asked if we could set up some time to talk. We spoke yesterday, and I was so impressed. Standard reaction when someone criticizes someone else (online, I guess) is to lash out. Ideally in as inarticulate a fashion as possible. But these four folks were awesome – they got on the phone with me with specific questions, not about just the survey, but about research methods in general (something they are obviously not getting from their program!), about careers, and identities when our skill sets span traditional disciplines (hello, it’s The Overlap). They asked me about my background, and shared theirs with me. They respected my time and they all sent thank you notes afterwards.

Their were no embarrassment on their part or discomfort on my part for having criticized their work. And frankly, they set that tone in how they approached it. I didn’t feel weird about what I had written now that I had names and voices to go with the work, because they sincerely expressed appreciation for the help in making improvements.

I’ve met with a lot of students, career changers, young designers, future researchers and so on. Most handle it very well, but there was something exceptional here, given how it started, and that they turned the whole thing into a win-win through humility and curiosity. They invited me to visit their school next time I’m in their area.

We couldn’t cover all that and get really deep into research, the philosophy, the tools, the approaches, and so on (and of course, that’s more than a phone call) – but they are working hard to understand how the different tools (say, an open-ended interview, and a closed-ended survey) can address different design questions at different phases of a project. One gently amusing moment was a discussion of leading questions – one student had assumed this meant a question that led naturally to the next one (and of course, that’s a good thing) rather than, as I explained, a question that presumes a certain point of view and ultimately makes it harder for the person to give a true answer (i.e., Aren’t you disappointed that Jon Stewart didn’t host the Academy Awards?).

Learning is not just the information and experience you have or don’t have (and it’s clear that there’s some crucial info these folks don’t yet have)…it’s an approach to the people around you, indeed the world around you, and I’m so excited by the approach that this group of students is taking.

Relax, information architects and folksonomists, this story won’t stop your quest to crowdsourcingly identify attributes of every virtual and physical artifact. It’s the other kind of tag that’s a problem now.

Tag is now banned from the playground of Willett Elementary School in Attleboro. Touch football, dodgeball and all other unsupervised chasing games have also been taken out of play.
The ban is setting the stage for a schoolyard knock-down-drag-out between parents, some who believe the playground police have gone too far by calling a time out on the time-honored children’s play, and others who feel that it’s about time the whistle was blown on these competitive games.
The rule was championed by second-year principal Gaylene Heppe. She claims the rule is nothing new. It is part of a broader playground rule that has been in effect for five years banning hitting and inappropriate touching.
Willett Elementary School joins a growing list of schools across the country where kindergarten cops have taken aim at classic children’s games, citing the risk of injury and litigation. Cities like Charleston, S.C., tackled touch football, while Spokane, Wash., and Cheyenne, Wyo., ousted good old-fashioned tag from their schools.

I’m totally psyched to report that starting in September, I’ll be teaching Design Research Methods again at CCA in San Francisco, in partnership with Todd Wilkens.

For my class in Design Research Methods at CCA, I’ve asked the students to start either blogging or adding pictures to flickr. They are ideally doing this regularly, at least weekly, but I think it’s taking some time to ramp up.

I’ve asked them to think like design researchers and use this as a way to practice noticing stuff, and telling stories. They can blog whatever they want, but at least one piece per week should be something interesting they noticed – something funny or odd or curious or unusual – in their daily lives. An experience, a design, a need, a person doing something odd. Just to learn to pay attention to that alerting part of our judging selves. Ideally, this will help build the muscles they’ll need for making sense out of the fieldwork they start doing.

Anyway, I’m going to link to ’em all here and maybe some of the folks who read this blog will check out what the class has done. Maybe offer some comments or encouragement. Once they got their feet wet, the hope is that having an audience will actually provide some inspiration, motivation, momentum.

http://blurr1e.blogspot.com/
http://cupanoodle.blogspot.com/
http://dcarchitect.blogspot.com/
http://shambacca.blogspot.com/
http://thegumbyproject.blogspot.com
http://thenbalmer.blogspot.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/weberdesign/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dearjy NEW
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12187480@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14812574@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37212535@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/74386819@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91006549@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbassat
http://www.flickr.com/photos/justjump/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samdidnotknow/
http://www.myspace.com/homelesswombat
http://www.optionsf.com/blog/