Short article in the latest Metropolis about Chronicle Books hiring a corporate anthropologist to help design new offices. It’s a quick read:

“[Her] thesis is that organizations have their own kind of invisible structure. In other words, what you see on the flowchart of a company isn’t necessarily how the work gets done,” Carabetta explains. Stephenson uses surveys, data analysis, and elaborate charts to map out networks of relations that are often hidden.

There’re the usual sorts of findings:

“Evolutionary anthropologists always talk about a line of sight. You stand up on the savannas and you’ve got to be able to see great distances,” she says. “It’s the same thing here in the work space. You’ve got to be able to see out to others and see where it is you work, why you’re working there, and who it is you can interconnect and collaborate with.”

Plus some a little bit different:

The result is a layout based on relationships rather than hierarchies, with a design meant to foster interaction at all levels

That’s interesting. Which goes stale faster: a relationship or hierarchy? Depends on the job, the business, etc. etc. I suppose. Also, could this be the start of social network inspired architecture? Sign of the times but when I read “relationship” I immediately thought social networks. How awful.

Pretty exciting! Topspin goes live:

Topspin is founded on the principle that while costs of production and distribution in the music industry are dropping, unlimited choice for consumers only increases the importance of efficient marketing. Marketing means both connecting and cultivating relationships with your existing fans (much of what Seth Godin describes as “Permission Marketing” applies) as well as discovering new fans. Topspin is building software tools to help artists market efficiently.

Topspin’s an answer to a question I’ve been thinking about off and on. The music biz isn’t about records, Sam Goody and Top 40 radio anymore. (And if it is for you still, be ready—things are changing fast!) To succeed as a musician you need to embrace the web, digital distribution, blogs, twitter, social networks, satellite radio and seamlessly transition from hyperlocal to global. How do you measure success? Is your marketing paying off? What counts? Radio plays? Downloads? Do you have the tools to even begin measuring success? How do you cultivate relationships with your fans? Touring sure. But where are you fans? Kevin Kelly had a great intro to this new world with his 1,000 True Fans scenario.

Madonna’s been making her own rules from early on and so it continues–she ditched the traditional music industry in 2007 and signed up with a concert promotion company:

“The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and a business woman, I have to move with that shift,” Madonna said. “For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited. I’ve never wanted to think in a limited way and with this new partnership, the possibilities are endless.”

Topspin is going in a similar direction:

One point I want to make clear: we are not just another digital distribution company. Our belief is there are some very good digital distribution solutions out there already, and digital distribution is quickly becoming a commodity. What’s not anywhere near commodity status is marketing, and we are a marketing tools software company. We are about demand creation, not demand fulfillment.

Not to overstate things but the unstoppable shift from Old World music industry to New World could very well start here with Topspin. One to watch for sure.

Once again success! Panning for gold in my archives brings this nugget from June 2003:

Amble Time / “A shortcoming of standard maps is their inability to convey a sense of temporal scale. Can I stroll to the park for lunch, or would it take me all day? Amble Time adds an element of time to a PDA-based tourist map. By using a GPS system and your average walking speed, it creates a bubble that indicates everywhere you could walk in an hour.” This could be a lot of fun.

Don’t bother clicking, the url is kaput. One quick Google finds Amble Time alive and well:

A steadily shrinking area of a city map shows where you can walk as time ticks by. The bubble shows everywhere you could go within timing constraints that you provide. Researchers used this “travel-sensitive alarm clock” to explore ways that location-based information and ad-hoc networking could support participation in interactive stories.

There’s even a nice PDF available, Time, Voice, and Joyce, that discusses the project Amble Time was built to support:

We present a design for recapitulating walks through Dublin’s City Centre by characters in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Our computationally supported walkers will avail themselves of a “map with a sense of time” and a system that translates their hand lettering gestures as attributes of colourful typographic forms.

Now I definitely have to see it working again. Amble Time has iPhone written all over it.

I was reading KT Meaney’s piece from Design Observer, Greening the Grocery Store, when I realized how similar the problems facing the CF light world. Meaney’s post describes the confusion & misinformation people face when they try shopping “green”. What help does a consumer get?

Did it surprise me that the “recycling symbol” at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability? Yes. (As it turns out, my city doesn’t take #5s.) So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class. […] Our class is not about recycling per se. It is about understanding the systems we live in, finding the flaws and evaluating them. Our three Rs are research, rethink, redesign.

That last sentence lists the elements missing from the CF light adoption story. Treating them as “different” light bulbs isn’t working. The industry needs to rethink and redesign!

Meaney’s students came up with some interesting approaches to help folks make better decisions at the grocery store. These systems could work just as well for selling CF lights.

For instance, in-aisle education can come from stacking the shelves differently or displaying more information on the floor. (The original images aren’t that big; links just click through to the original piece.)

What about after purchasing your CF lights? You do know where your local recycler is right? No? Check out the handy list printed on your receipt. No excuses now.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

So just for a moment, imagine if the Cardigan’s Iron Man cover was the one they went with for the movie. (Sorry, another thinly veiled post to demonstrate a new feature, S3 integration.)

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

Testing out some new Tumblr-like code.

This is a time-lapse of an Adobe Illustrator master doing his thing. One of my favorite new Portishead songs provides the soundtrack.

Thinking of starting a business? Just follow along with these convenient lists!

It seems the trend with successful CEOs (and some less so) is to post a long list of things and call them your “rules for startups.” You get gems like “NEVER EVER EVER buy swag” or “Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work…” along with the ordinary new business penny pinching tips. Must be nice to have those sorts of problems.

If I did a list based on my startup experiences it would be pretty short. Just one item actually:

1. Find pain points and/or unmet needs in some current solution, fix them, have people pay you for the fix.

This is the hardest thing you’ll have to solve in your new business. Deciding on what sort of chairs and tables and soft drinks to stock will pale in comparison. Screw up Step 1 and you’ll be another small business statistic.

Since we’re on the internet, help (and more lists!) are just a search away. One of my favorites is from Evhead, Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea. His first item, Tractability, is probably the weakest, don’t let it slow you down. The rest ask very pointed questions about your startup idea: How much value can you ultimately deliver? Is it clear why people should use it? And so on.

Foosball or table tennis? Where’s the official startup CEO decision on that?

From Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans posted on March 4, 2008:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

And published a day later, on March 05, 2008, Reznor makes $750,000 even when the music is free:

And it appears to be working quite well for Reznor, who has managed to sell all 2,500 copies of his $300 package without major label backing or much in the way of splashy marketing. If Reznor’s earlier experiments in digital distribution failed to recoup their costs, he’s clearly learned his lesson: grossing $750,000 in the space of three days isn’t a bad haul for any businessperson.

So it seems Kevin’s concepts can easily work for someone like a Trent Reznor. Kevin does spend a good portion of the article on how a lesser known could make this work as well.

I’ve been trying to come to grips with CF lights. Saving money on my electricity bill is a good enough motivator, however I’m a stickler for nice lighting and won’t settle for something that saves money yet looks ugly. The saving the environment in the abstract makes a lot of sense, of course, but I also want an attractive room. Do I need to compromise on that?

So my first experiment with CF lighting was bad. Light bulb burned out at home, unscrewed it, saw it was a 60w, went to the hardware store, go to lighting aisle looking for a 60w, see nothing, ask clerk, clerk knows nothing but says check the packaging “usually says what wattage they are similar to”, find something that seems to be 60w-ish, take it home, screw it in, turn it on and nothing! Is it broken? Oh wait, now it’s sorta glowing. It has to warm-up? This is crazy. Now I’m bathed in a cool blue chemical looking light. Great. This is progress. So just knowing a wattage doesn’t work anymore. Now you need to know obscure terms like lumens and measuring color using degrees and spiral or reflector and will it dim or not and on and on.

The CF light industry thinks if it just repeats “SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT” over and over again it has done its job. How wrong they are. There’s a growing body of criticism online: Seth Godin weighs in with Why CFL Doesn’t Sell, a piece in the Washington Post last year back about the “wife test” for CFL, Fluorescent Bulbs Are Known to Zap Domestic Tranquillity, and Steve Portigal has a few posts, e.g. I wanna push you around, well I will, I will, too. Wrong story, bad story, whatever. It needs work CFL industry.

I fear for you CFL industry. Need I remind you of another industry that thought it was OK forcing people to use trivia & jargon? That’s the computer industry. And it’s full of weird words and measurements and spawned a whole new industry, the computer support business, to help everyday folks. Can you imagine a Geek Squad for helping people find & install the right CFLs? How wrong is that? CFL industry, before it’s too late, start working on a new story with a better ending. Educate us, don’t assume.

Found this little scrap in a pocket of a coat I rarely wear. Something I scribbled a long time ago when I was figuring out how best to transition to experience design.

It’s a list of things I enjoyed doing and wanted to spend more time doing: “Presentation, Conceptualizing, Communication: drawing, motion/video/animation, writing, Structure, architecture, env design” (Pretty certain I meant “environment” for “env”.)

Today, many years later, how much experience design fun am I having? Not enough! Hardly any video, no animation, very little drawing. Nothing but numbers buried in reports. It’s easy to blame the usual things: tight project schedules, disengaged clients, budgets, complacency, etc. Bah—lame. Really, there’s no good excuse.

Recently, in the design world there’s been a discussion regarding a research technique, the persona, and how they’re used and misused. For background read these: Persona Non Grata, Personas 99% Bad? and Personas are NOT a Document.

Couldn’t come at a better time for me. As I sit here fretting about research, along comes Dave Robertson with all the answers. His article, “What would we do if they banned personas?“, laid it all out for me and presented a very clear direction. Ultimately, personas are a tool to communicate and whether you use them or not, you still need to communicate. That’s my problem! Communicating through reports isn’t particularly satisfying or effective.

Even though Dave’s article was really focused on persona use, my takeaway was a reminder of the truly inspirational communication tools available:

• Steal ideas from great creative briefs by our friends, the account planners who know how to talk to creatives and convey emotion
• Get a lot better at telling stories from the field research
• Create an animation or film that explains the customer and their needs
• Create a briefing that uses the video and audio recordings to impart key learnings
• Hold a workshop to convey and discuss the key findings with the team and our client
• Have real customers participate in ideation sessions to help brainstorm solutions
• Use other participatory design techniques like paper-prototyping
• Post large images of research participants, artifacts and environments on a wall in the work space with explanations of key learnings
• Post diagrams explaining the customers’ key processes or thinking patterns

Go read the whole thing; lots of wisdom in it.

There are some interesting parallels between the ideas in Janine Benyus’s book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature and Richard Gabriel’s recent essay “Design Beyond Human Abilities” (big PDF).

Biomimicry is a survey of solutions the natural world has come up with to solve problems. Everything from spider webs to photosynthesis to the way chimps medicate themselves in the wild is covered. The end chapter takes a look at what we could learn from nature and apply to various industrial processes. After all nature works at room temperature, gets power from the sun and generates no harmful by-products.

Gabriel’s essay takes a look what it would take to build Ultra Large Scale Systems, which he defines as something impossible to build because of today’s software engineering technology. For impossible, substitute “trillions of lines of code, millions of computers, real time requirements with life critical applications.” His essay spins off on a number of fascinating tangents and brushes upon the natural world, both from a civic planning and a biology perspective.

So from Biomimicry, we see an end result (e.g. oyster nacre, incredibly strong, stronger than man-made composites, safe) without really knowing how to recreate and apply it. And in Gabriel’s essay, he makes a good case for extending the Biomimicry lessons and applying them to these ultra large scale systems as well. What are the technical analogs to “room temperature, sunlight, water and no harmful by-products” for ultra scale system design?

In lieu of anything actually new, how about a walk down memory lane Play with the Machine style?

January 2005

Tara Mcpherson: “Fantastic poster maker & illustrator. Letterpress-esque, check out the Stereolab one. She sells them, Stereolab is on $35.” Timely even! Her stuff is featured prominently in Juno’s (from the movie Juno) bedroom.

January 2004

FSDB: “FSDB is a file system data base. FSDB provides a thread-safe, process-safe Database class which uses the native file system as its back end and allows multiple file formats and serialization methods. Users access objects in terms of their paths relative to the base directory of the database […]” This was (is?) and all Ruby thing. Still kicking it seems—last updated October 2006. I never did anything with it, my Ruby love already fading in 2004. So many alternatives nowadays. What to choose? Amazon S3 and SimpleDB and Thrudb all look interesting.

January 2003

Foreign Groceries Museum: “Nice. Lingua de Gato isn’t what you think.” This one is bittersweet. Steve recently lost the 5000+ photos he had on Flickr to a phishing scam. The above link clicks thru to a Flickr Not Found error page. I don’t like to throw the word tragic around but I think this qualifies. Such a loss.

January 2002

I had a thing for photologs in 2002 it seems:

PixelPile now defunct.

lightningfield still around sorta, last updated March 2007.

Noah Grey still very much alive & kicking.

April 2001 (earliest I have with easy archive access)

Turning Point For BeOS, Users?: “It’s funny, I reformatted my BeOS partition this weekend. Needed more room for linux. Hadn’t booted into Be for over a year. Sad.” Everything in that sentence & title is long gone. No Byte, no Be. A lot can happen in 7 years.

Guess what still works? Amazon urls from 2001! For example, L’aventure Fantastique! Back in the day I used the weblog as my del.icio.us.

Thanks for your indulgence. One last one:

“Experience merely forgotten is seldom beyond recall, if we try hard and patiently to bring it back. It is only when we forget having forgotten that a door closes between us and the past.” Robert Grudin “Time and the Art of Living”

New stuff coming up! Really.

Not without the usual sadness…. So long Oscar Peterson, Ettore Sottsass, Don Herbert and so many more….

And hello 2008! Glad to meet you.

An interesting quote from Mark Bernstein about why conferences aren’t such fun places these days:

Still more fundamentally, the mass of guilt that weighs upon the field deadens our conferences. That guilt arises from the divergence of what we like from what we think we should like. We enjoy exciting new systems that do what nothing else could do; we think we should like systematic demonstrations that this widget lets students do a task 5% faster than that one. We enjoy daring prototypes and agile development; we think we should be planning our work and proving correctness. We enjoy astonishing code; we think we should write code so clear that our most mediocre students (and the management team) will grasp it without effort.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking but maybe some of that guilt comes from our lack of attention. Nowadays it is so easy to be physically present, yet mentally worlds away. With wifi & mobile service, you can be happily IMing or Twittering about the speaker with the monotone delivery anywhere.

So to that guy that was sitting next to me, typing madly and muttering to himself, during a really interesting session, I wished your batteries died and you lost all network connections and your pen ran out of ink. Time to face the present champ.

Mmmmm mmm innovation.