March 2007 Archives
Details That
Mar 31, 2007
There's something tooth fairy about leaving a brown bag on a hook at night, and waking up to find a lite breakfast hanging there in the morning. From the Hoxton Hotel.
Lions Den
Mar 30, 2007
After seven years of living in Tokyo its the first time in the UK that I'm only seeing my home land through the eyes of a stranger - perhaps a side effect of hotel living and mentally not having the opportunity to unpack.
Yesterday evening's office is the Dunhill Den, a post-nostalgic best of British if there is such as thing. An hour to kip on an expansive leather sofa before the arrival of guests a welcome opportunity to delay the onset of the side-effects of permalag. But lions den? Ah, an evening spent in the company of the fouth estate - though in truth more inquisitive cats than lions. Design research communicated, challenged, surviving both jetlag and a mauling. Close to midlnight the assembled disassemble and when everyone is ready to doze off my body tells me its time to wake up.
Breakfast is a 5am walk through the City of London, introducing a Korean colleague the delights of a bacon butty.
You Are. Are You?
Mar 30, 2007
Anti-Social By-Products of Use
Mar 28, 2007
The anti social cost of free-papers? - they are more likely to end up littering the streets. Another example of cost, perceived cost affecting usage behaviour.
Positioning and Support for Asychronous Communication
Mar 28, 2007
Office entrance, Mayfair.
Not the liveliest of neighbourhoods if you're jetlagged at 4am .
Phone Box Advertising Norms
Mar 28, 2007
The visual richness of escort service advertising in this London Mayfair phone booth above, and the more text based equivilent in Sao Paolo below. And the complete absence of escort ads in Bangkok - bottom photo.
Why interesting? The richness and cost to produce the advertising; the degree to which it can be (re)moved by potential customers and/or cleaners; the position of the advertising within the phone booth itself; the social acceptability (or otherwise) of using soft-core pornography in a public space; the legal status of prostitution in the society and the fact that illicit advertising is deemed necessary in the first place.
The keen eyed amongst you will no-doubt be chuckling to the appropriate nature of text in the Mastercard advertising in the top photo. Click to, enlarge.
Routes, Landmarks
Mar 27, 2007
The dominant landmark, in this instance Mt. Fuji, that defines a route of a train. That then makes it onto the train signage.
My Icon. Your Icon?
Mar 27, 2007
Consider the impact of this grafiti on the walls of Geneva (where it was spotted) versus on the walls of Tokyo. Iconic images for whom? And why? And what reaction from the local population?
What are the technologies that increase the immediacy at which this kind of information flows around the world? And the accuracy of those flows. Blogs? Don't be silly. Think Microsoft's Photosynth. Though as a TEDster pointed out this moves from Wow to genuinely interesting when it is able to recognize the Post Falls Seven Eleven from every other Seven Eleven out there.
This morning's commute is a little longer that usual: hello London, followed by hei Helsinki next week.
Phone, PDA Customisation Norms
Mar 26, 2007
Nail shop in Bankgok that has extended its services at the bequest of customers to include customising mobile phones. Somewhat surprisingly PDAs also go for the bling treatment. And their design inspiration? Harajuku.
Thai Nail Shop Norms
Mar 25, 2007
The Elevation of Objects
Mar 25, 2007
Media Skin by Tokujin Yoshioka, in the KDDI concept store, Harajuku. At first sight the design comes across as minimal, but when the flip is opened the user is confronted with additional rows densely packed buttons. Features have go somewhere right?
A pleasant enough way to display a product if you happen to have a couple of robotic arms lying around.
Stretching in 2 Dimensions
Mar 25, 2007
Play On,
Mar 25, 2007
Uma is Japanese for horse.
If They Can They Will
Mar 23, 2007
What makes this pipe a (more) socially acceptable place to place trash than, say the ground or gutter?
From last winter's soujourn in Chengdu. The hard hat eventually moved - the chap was peeing against the other side of the wall.
Confidence and Consequences
Mar 23, 2007
Is this door locked? Can the person in the room test whether it is locked (without the act of checking itself unlocking the door - very Schrödinger's cat)? And what is the consequence if the door is not locked?
From a bathroom/toilet located in a design company.
Oo
Mar 22, 2007
Localised
Mar 22, 2007
Graf includes a Japanised version of the Ronald McDonald face.
Colour Coordination
Mar 21, 2007
Colour coordination to the point that it feels like a theme park. Thai Air.
Rules, Exceptions
Mar 21, 2007
Height rules for travelling on Bangkok's Sky Train: 140cm or less - free only on children's day, 90cm or less - free everyday.
And the exceptions to the exceptions?
Tips Over Time
Mar 21, 2007
Beads of a sap-like substance forming on the tips of wheat grass.
The crop is harvested once per week, and blended into a variety of drinks for the Glow cafe at the Bangkok Metropolitan. And if you happen to be in that part of town they also do a decent steamed fish soup with wild rice.
Natural Glow
Mar 21, 2007
Smoking Makes Your Teeth Go Bad
Mar 21, 2007
Mentally quite affective - the package design is simply not something you want to have lying around on a cafe table. But why stop there? Packaging with abrasive surfaces, increasingly unpleasant odors...
Thanks to our local guides, Nad & Yu for making our stay that much easier.
Experiences Reconnected
Mar 19, 2007
The smell of Playdoh triggered strong childhood memories.
We're already heading down the trail of cradle-to-grave-rich-meta-data. How will information about your past experiences - be called upon to enhance elements of your next experience?
Whilst experience-data mining has the potential to be highly accurate, my guess is someone out there will find a way to apply that data in crude and, from the consumer's perspective ulimately unnecessary ways. Part of the 'value' derived from recalling this childhood Playdoh experience is that it's a rare occurance. What consideration will marketing company X have for the subtleties of your past memories?
Get ready for the truly invasive sensory equivalent of spam.
Status Brace
Mar 19, 2007
Fake or non-functional bejeweled braces bought by teenage girls from a street market in one of the poorer districts of Bangkok.
Whilst we didn't get an opportunity to ask any gem-grinning consumers about this product my assumption is that purchase motivation is driven by a mixture of decoration, experimentation, and status - showing off that one's parents can afford to pay for this kind of dental care. 39 Baht (0.9 Euro)
buys you a brace for upper or lower rows.
From a humidly sweaty night trying to understand the flow of a Bangkok street market.
Texture, Colour Norms
Mar 19, 2007
Tokyo's subway above, Bangkok's Sky Train and the London Underground, below.
Information Positioning
Mar 19, 2007
Taxi license plate posted on the left and right passenger doors supporting information recall. Related to the risk of forgetting and then having to retrieve belongings from the taxi, and perceptions of passenger safety?
Humour Disconnected
Mar 18, 2007
Humour that requires translation is not humour.
Whether global connectivity enables a shared base understanding that makes humour, well, more universally humourous. Or whether it helps define the boundaries of whether you are in or out of [this] culture?
Brutal Walks
Mar 18, 2007
Event sponsorship and the sensorial touchpoints - in this instance funky tasting snacks in the hands of punters that become integrated into the experience, of Bangkok International Fashion Week.
Of note beyond the catwalk? Bouncing around in the media scrum and watching people watching people watch people. We slink in and my colleagues at least quietly, elegantly slink out.
Shoe(less) Norms
Mar 17, 2007
As with Japan its common to take off your shoes entering a Thai apartment. A foowear behaviour extending into this workplace - a library worker pads around the stripped floor of the Thai Creative and Design Center building prior to opening.
Given that this is a space trodden by members of the shoes-wearing public to what extent does this behaviour assume that there hasn't been much shoes wearing traffic since it was last cleaned? (How) will her behaviour change as the building infrastructure and worn materials are incresingly able to gather information on the things they interact with? For example? - exactly who has walked where in this building, the type of footwear they were wearning, and the (bacterially tranmissive) stuff they have come in contact with prior to being here.
Who is motivated by what reasons to 'raise awareness' of the issue germ transmission in public spaces? (and then of course provide a 'solution' to meet the 'need'). And how might architects and urban planners redesign human flows through buildings to contain or affect the flow of the stuff we carry on the soles of our feet?
A full day of workshops with local designers, followed by a night conducting street research. For once I'm happy to not be out there during the midday heat (35 degrees yesterday) and happily bouncing off the creative energy of the team.
Respect For, Sponsored By
Mar 17, 2007
Thai Sticker Graph
Mar 17, 2007
Street Freshness Norms
Mar 17, 2007
Juices are all freshly squeezed, whereas condensed milk for a street cappuccino (using however freshly ground beans).
Bike Brands We Know & Love
Mar 17, 2007
Stinkin' Links
Mar 16, 2007
Touch down Bangkok. Today's driver is straight out of, well, Taxi - gloved hands wrapped around a steering wheel with enough ribbed rubber grip to be subliminal advertising for a major brand of condoms, and a spoiler to that never gets a chance to, well, spoil. A fast set of wheels is largely cosmetic in a city with one to many traffic cops and legendary traffic jams.
Ah yes, stinkin' links? The TED presentations are now correctly linked (thanks Tom) as PowerPoint or PDF [4MB]
Adrenaline does strange things to people, apparently.
Cost, Perceived Cost Affecting Usage Behaviour
Mar 15, 2007
The humble Biro is one of those ubiquitous products that is by and large ok to forget to return, or to put it another way - steal. Which helps explain why this Salt Lake City café has adapted the default design to extend their claim of ownership. But why is this product socially acceptable to steal? Even in a city where faith and responsibllity is pushed to the fore?
For those wanting background research my colleague Jan Blom has written extensively on what motivates people to personalise objects e.g. here he's also got good material in the pipeline which I'll link to in due course.
For a start the pen is mass produced, ubiquitous, changes hands as part of a task process (signing a credit card slip), and typically can be replaced for very low cost. Last week I chatted with guys from our LA design studio (cheers RN, AG & DB) and have since been mulling over the extent to which the in-store sticker cost is associated with the perceived value of the product.
Lets take a real world example from the advertising in the photo below- is it really possible for a Wal-Mart to make a profit or at least break even on a Motorola c139 mobile phone at less than $15? This isn't just about loss-leading. Despite its tangible presence the product in this advertisement isn’t the phone - the product is connectivity, and that’s where for Tracfone and by association for Wal-Mart where the promise of future profits lie. Of course this is nothing new - operators the world over take a hit on the device and make it back over the course of the contract with devices that best support services offering up the largest sticker subsidy.
But the gulf between sticker cost and actual cost hides something deeper than a lighter wallet. Like the humble biro it changes our perception of what it means to 'own' a product and may well have significant impact on the speed at which the product ends up reaching the end of its life as a functional object, of being discarded. With an estimated 1.2 billion mobile phones being sold next year this is a non-trivial matter. Transparency plays an important role in helping individuals understand their environmental impact (which is why I like the Kill a Watt that came in the TED gift bag). To what extent could or should the price of objects be transparent?
Function & Projected Function
Mar 15, 2007
Advertising in 3 Dimensions
Mar 14, 2007
Physical advertising for Kenzo in a Daikanyama cafe includes supplying and stocking bamboo furniture, product samples, framed aren't-we-in Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia/Thailand photos for the walls, and a rather weak movie projected on the walls.
Stanford Slides
Mar 14, 2007
Links for last week’s Stanford University presentations on Repair Cultures [PowerPoint, 4MB] and Exploratory Field Research [PowerPoint, 2MB] - material first published last year. Cheers to Bill Cockayne for hosting.
For attendees following the discussion on the informal practice of sending money as airtime - Sente, may wish to read this essay on shared phone use and download this accompanying presentation [PowerPoint, PDF, 7MB].
And the photo? Just another Shibuya pop-street interview. Spent time observing, but in this instance nothing new to learn.
Early start tomorrow - the 35 degree heat of Bangkok and the energies of the design team awaits.
Textures of an Urban Interface
Mar 14, 2007
From a pedestrian crossing in Naka Meguro. The blind/dis-abled crossing box includes brail on its top surface.
Vehicle Colour/Color Norms
Mar 14, 2007
Commuter car park in northern Tehran above, and ski-resort car park close to Salt Lake City below.
Appropriate Use of Punctuation
Mar 13, 2007
Unusual use of exclamation marks in street signage, or more accurately park signage - Tokyo's Komazawa Koen.
(Un)Conducive Spaces
Mar 12, 2007
During last week’s presentation at Ideo I touched on conducive spaces places that you expect to be, well, conducive to ad-hoc social interaction and engage in whatever research questions you're interested in exploring without unduly pressuring the people or changing the vibe of the space itself.
A good example? A bowling alley in Tupelo that served as a social hub for both young and old members of the community. Less productive spaces? For starters the techno-playing bowling alley in Tehran turned out to be a dud. And during the same 10 day cross-country road trip of the US as the Tupelo bowling alley we also stopped off at Doug's Sport and Shoot gun range for what we assumed would be a photogenic round of meet the locals. Turns out that interviews, guns, ear-muffs and ammo don’t mix.
And the photos? Last week-end's Utah style après-ski.
You Know What This Is
Mar 12, 2007
The tangible representation of a place where busses stop, designed to accomodate potential passengers the bus driver plus the drivers of other vehicles who might otherwise park in this spot. How will the design evolve when more of the what-this-space-can-be-used-for-decision-process is decided automatically? For example local parking/stopping rule negociation pre-programmed into the vehicle software.
Authoritative Reference Points
Mar 12, 2007
Time is everywhere, and its confusing.
It's strapped to my wrist, displayed in my rental car (though thankfully I don't have to deal with this) broadcast on the radio, there were two bedside alarms in the hotel, on my sat-nav, mobile phone, digital camera and laptop. Which is not inherently a problem except that many of these sources synchronise automatically, and to do this successfully it needs to know both where I am and what the local time is. And that today the US government has switched to day light saving hours, bless them so one of these is in doubt. And I don't know which time source I can trust.
In a world where current time information is ubitquitous the wrist watch has largely lost its relevance as a time keeping device (though don't expect it to disappear - it still has value). And no device has yet stepped up and completely filled its role as a time source you can always trust on. Yeah I know, you can get your mobile phone to automatically synchronise the current time with the network. When's the last time you really trusted the network? The network operator?
Right now I've either missed my flight, or got another hour to kill.
Disembodied Voices
Mar 11, 2007
I seem to have missed a beat. At what point in the evolution of hte service industry did it become OK to look someone in the eye, say 'hi, how can I help you' and ignore the answer? Obviously I don't travel thru, um, drive-thru USA enough - where this past weekend a number of restaurant serving staff were expected to multi-task by enaging in-store customers whilst simultainiously coping with incoming drive-thru and telephone orders. The net result is a disembodied experience where all the social cues say 'you presense in this store is valued' but the words that are spoken 'you're irrelevant'.
I'd assume that most stores would train their frontline staff to adopt body language that makes it obvious where their current attention lies - with the customer in-store or a remote somebody. But how to unlearn a life time of social behaviour and cope with the multi-tasking demands of service industry managers?
BTW - the server above is an example local/remote multi-tasking done right - when micro-phone is down she's somewhere else, when in the up position she gave her full attention. The worst offender? Below.
Signing on the Dotted
Mar 11, 2007
Attendance of the conference implies consent.
We used to rely on verbal consent during street research under the assumption that obtaining a signature from a stranger would be too invasive. Turns out we were wrong - in our most recent ad-hoc street survey we started collecting signatures with a 100% success rate. BTW - if you're running street research collecting verbal, video or photographic data, acceptance of any form of gift by the participant implies data consent.
Moving Atoms
Mar 11, 2007
Two TED gift bags - red rollers for attendees and the additional yellow hold-all for speakers far outweigh my hand luggage on this trip. Includes an offer to FEDEX these to wherever on the planet you live.
In pretty stark contrast to Doors Juice held in Delhi last week where my Nokia Design colleague Hannu Nieminen gave a presentation on the extent to which we move atoms around the planet and what we can do reduce, well, pushing atoms around the planet. Business Week has a light write up.
Shipping back home in an hours or so, to catch up on loved ones, laundry, Tokyo. In a few days Bangkok beckons - the research team keeps rolling on (and on).
The New Sociality
Mar 10, 2007
Playing around with Jeff Han's multiple input display. First thoughts? Just how social/anti-social you can be working in the same space as someone else. Yes, totally obvious but not immediately so from the demo.
When you Delegate Positive Experiences
Mar 10, 2007 | 1 Comment
During yesterday's TED talk I proposed that from a design perspective a potential solution to pretty much every design problem is delegation - getting other people or technology to complete those parts of a task or activity that the user is unable to complete themselves. With the exception for things like bodily functions e.g. going to the toilet or entertainment - you wouldn't pay someone to go to the cinema and enjoy a film on your behalf. (Yes, just because its a potential solution doesn't make it a worthwhile goal to aim for).
Except that at some point - when we are better able to understand and map sensorial experiences and have a better understanding of how the brain processes these you may well be able to delegate entertainment experiences to other people, to be enjoyed at your leisure at a later time and date. In essense - time, location and body-shifting experiences. Movie buffs amongst you will already be tutting about Strange Days, and so you should.
Experience shifting raises all sorts of interesting questions about empathic design, where from an physiological-emotional perspective experience designers will literally be able put themselves in someone elses shoes. What are the characteristics of the people whose experiences will define, well, the essense of the experience we wish to design for, to communicate? It can be anything from designing an out of the box experience to learning, knowing what it feels like to walk in a Sao Paulo subway station (above), the touch a razor from a Chinese back street barber (below) and yes, will encompass sexual encounters. In this world DRM boils down to removing experiences from human memory and the inevitable badly written DRM leaves its host as a vegetable.
A new profession will arise - people whose job it is to experience stuff, and who will be judged on their ability to capture the subtlties of any difference process, task or context. With a distinction between raw experiences and those enhanced though stimulants, or post production. And yes, Gonzo?
Anyone feel like writing a job spec for this job from the future? Thoughts in the comments please.
TED Downloads
Mar 10, 2007
The slides from yesterday's TED Talk are now available for download as either PowerPoint or PDF [4MB] (the .ppt includes notes, and I'll post transcripts at some point). It pulls together threads from research on what people carry and why; designing for illiterate users; how the streets are able to take univerally appreciated functionality/services and innovate in ways that are both efficient and in tune with the local conditions - in other words pulling together material from the other talks from the past year.
A summary? Research to understand the consequences of living in a planet that is truly connected - where for the first time most people on the planet have in their hands a tool to allow them to transcend space and time; the immediacy of ideas and information and that the metric for what we consider to be a big idea will in part be judged on our ability to engage the next 3 billion; the immediacy of portable objects and the functionality/services they represent will travel faster and further than anything we've seen - largely we've underestimated the speed of technology adoption (which broadly correlates to the singularity); that if you're smart you'll be observing street innovation and applying this to inform and infuse what and how you design; and lastly that with billions more people connected the conversation got that much larger and that if you wish to remain (or be) relevant you need to learn to listen.
The direction of the conversation will have the most profound impact on you and me because everyday we take for granted that our perspective on the world is relevant to the broader context. The cultural center of gravity is shifting and its shfiting to include languages you have yet to learn.
Related research, as always here.
Update: And TED have posted the TED Talk video here
Ideo Presentation Download
Mar 06, 2007
Yesterday's presentation at Ideo Palo Alto entitled Always On - An Introduction to the Design Research for Everyware can now be downloaded from here [Powerpoint, PDF 2MB]. It highlights the challenge of designing for everyware and that, if we are serious about minimising negative externalities, our ultimate need to understand the relationship between everyone and everything. In essense our challenge is to understand the sum of all human experiences - which is clearly impossible. The PowerPoint includes slide notes, which I'll expand on at some point.
Thanks to Jane Fulton Suri for the invite, and the lunch-time audience for, well, engaging between mouthfulls.
And the snowglobed city? The San Francisco view from my capsule hotel.
If You Can See This, It's Already Too Late
Mar 04, 2007
Looking the wrong way down a gun range. Reminds me of the sign targetted at train driver's in Old Delhi Station that says 'You've gone too far'. It's positioned right in front of a terminus point.
Perception, Reality, Privacy
Mar 04, 2007
Close Circuit TV camera becoming a lightening rod for the debate on privacy. To what extent do people perceive their privacy to be violated by CCTV cameras? To what extent is their privacy actually violated i.e. the information that is collected is acted on in some way? And how big is the gulf between the perception and the reality? And is the difference irrelevant?
What design changes can be made to mitigate/extenuate the feeling of being watched?
Given the granuality of information they are able to collect, why doesn't this sticker include the name of a search engine? What does it say about our awareness of what search engines (and other services) versus physical presence? Or about the willingness to give up privacy for convenience?
Local Newpaper Section Norms
Mar 04, 2007
Local sensitivities reflected in newspaper information architecture - The Salt Lake Tribune includes a section with the title Faith, Spirituality and Ethics (whether it matches your or my understanding of faith, spirituality or ethics is a different matter). Ditto the Religion and Ethics joining Sport, the main section and local news in the Deseret Morning News.
Trust Jesus
Mar 03, 2007
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