Disseminate

Does technology drive history?

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:18:00 +0000

I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn't happen.

Donald Norman's latest essay, Technology First, Needs Last starts with a fairly provocative statement.

Two interesting responses I've seen so far to this position is Steve Portigal's post on his blog and now Nicholas Nova's post on his blog.

I'm anxious to read the Brian Arthur book which Norman refers to, as he was one of the protagonists in the book Complexity which chronicles the foundation of the Sante Fe Institute, which happened to be the book I couldn't put down last month. It's not a new book, but I found the 1992 book to be really quite engaging.

It seems to me to be a debate around the value of inductive reasoning, using observations to power and fuel design innovation. That's also a hot topic with Roger Martin's new book (another I'm hoping to read soon) focusing on the difference between inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning and the role of abductive reasoning in "design thinking" -- a powerful meme in the world of design right now.

So if technology comes first, as Norman claims, then doesn't this bring us back to an old debate in the field of the theory of technology? Does technology drive history?

Time to dust off the old textbooks...

While I've been gone

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:24:00 +0000

Is it really 6 months since I posted anything? I guess it is. And what a 6 months it's been. I suppose I can't be blamed too much.

A quick link roundup is in order of some interesting blog posts that I've seen and events that have happened since I got back. A massive Bloglines purge (14,000 unread: oof) made me feel a bit sad. There's so many smart people writing so much great stuff out there.

So some things that caught my attention since returning.

Daniel Pink on motivation at TED. Not that surprising if you've read Alfie Kohn's book Punished by Rewards, but a passionate presentation nonetheless.

Nokia bought Dopplr. I guess that happened while I was away. Ex-Nokia employees found company that gets bought by Nokia, then assume senior roles at Nokia. One way to climb the corporate ladder, I guess.

And on that Dopplr front, I personally think Matt Jones is one of the most provocative and intelligent writer/designer/thinkers out there. His City as Battlesuit post at io9caught the attention of a few other heavy hitters. Lots of brainpower in those comments.

Leading us to cities and urbanism. And what better example of the modern city than New York City. Sat behind Stephen Rees at the Vancouver talk given by Janette Sadik-Kahn, the Transportation Commissioner for NYC a week ago. His mad typing led to this detailed transcript of the event. The integration of cycling within New York is impressive. I loved being their last fall and would love to go back.

On the work side of things, the Dachis guys have rolled out their Social Business Design "thought piece" in an attempt to define their ideas on how they see the world of collaborative, social workplaces. They've taken a bit of flack on their language, but Peter Kim has taken a run at clarifying the terminology. ThoughtFarmer is a Dachis technology partner and I'm keen to have the opportunity to work with the team, a few of whom I've had the pleasure to meet in the past.

Another great thinker, Dave Snowden posted a definition of Knowledge Management in September. True to form, Dave puts human intuition and experience at the centre of the definition. Dave's Cynefin framework came to mind when I stumbled across a piece about management guru Peter Drucker's 4 types of problems, which reminded me of the four domains espoused by Dave. Dave's work references Peter Drucker for sure, but I was unable to find any other mentions of these two sets of ideas and any influence one had on the other.

And how we recognize and define problems is always interesting for people hired to provide solutions. I wrote a quick ThoughtFarmer blog post about how the intranet is often misunderstood as a "problem" and how that leads to an oversimplification when searching for the solution. Certainly the types of intranets we build at work have more in common with complex social systems (which they afford) than they do with a physically designed object (say a screwdriver or a car engine). Thinking about design, as opposed to Design Thinking, is important (oh great, another book to add to the list!). I wish more professionals had some basic design literacy.

Finished up a quick read of Tom Kelley's book the Ten Faces of Innovation. It's a great collection of IDEO stories, if you're an IDEO buff. The personas are useful, some of the characters are stronger than others. Like the work we do on archetypes for our customers when building design personas, I think Tom could have collapsed a few and made the family smaller. But 10 is a nice round number (5 to 7 Faces of Innovation, plus or minus... not quite the same ring to it). And for anyone who's ever worked with / visited IDEO, there's some familiar stuff in there, like photos of the Palo Alto office and the description of the office tour.

Not to be outdone, I've got Tim Brown's new book on my desk, Change by Design. If there's one thing I love about IDEO it's their visual communication skills. I need to learn how to do that better.

Phew. Well there it is. Link roundup for October 2009.

Dealing with the uncertainty of the complex

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:10:00 +0000

Fresh off of a week spent receiving Cognitive Edge Accreditation with Michael Cheveldave here in Vancouver, its not surprising to me to be seeing the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic all over the place. We are, as Dave Snowden and company are bound to say, pattern-recognition beings after all.

Three related posts on the problems with applying ordered and simple domain thinking to the complex are worth reading.

First Dave Snowden takes a run at public service reform and the increasing desire to try and implement more rules and measurements in an inherently complex environment (drifting towards the cliff of the chaotic).

Second, Barry Schwartz, author of the wonderful The Paradox of Choice, talks at TED in February 2009 about developing a more practical wisdom (experimenting, innovating, learning from failure [safe-fail probes that guide us from the complex back to the complicated, from the unordered back to order]).

And finally, friend and local Vancouver author, Sanjay Khanna contemplates the role of experts and expertise in the complex and uncertain domain. Expertise works well, according to the CE folks, in the complicated and simple domain. The domains of best practice and good practices. But in the complex, it's anyone's guess.

For more on the simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic, catch this short video put together by former IBM-er and complex sense-maker Shawn Callahan of Anecdote.

Good stuff. Expect more on this topic and the wonderful power of narrative in the near future.

cyclocross season recap for 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:03:00 +0000

After a couple of years of sporadic racing, I returned to regular competition this fall by partaking in the BC Cup Cyclocross series. I'd left off racing Men's B back in 2006 and having done only half a CX race in 2007, I figured it would be a safe bet in that group. New this year: a Masters category. A lot of the usual suspects from Men's B in days gone by had moved over to the old farts category. Of course, 90% of everyone racing Men's B could be in Masters...

After getting back on the bike in May and bike commuting every day (minus travel days where I was on a plane or out of town), I was curious as to my fitness levels going into the season. The odd Tuesday Nighter and big weekend ride kept me improving my fitness all summer long. But Cross can be hard and it's really anyone's guess as to how your body responds to doing 45min at max in October.

I was pleasantly surprised with my season, quite proud all in all. My first race at the Delta Watershed, just across the street from where I grew up in North Delta, was a good indicator that I had more fitness than I thought. I managed 6th. And the results got better from there.

BC Cup #1: Delta Watershed
Men's B - 6th place

Technical course, more "mountain bikey" or "single track" than I'd prefer, but a great way to start the year on a hot September day in the forest that I spent a lot of time hiking and running through as a teenager. Was with the lead group for the first couple of laps, then died a slow death during the second half, losing spots along the way.

BC Cup #2: Wedgewood (New Brighton)
Men's B - 3rd place

I got a lucky call-up for the start of this race and put the hammer down from the gun with Graeme Martindale (Trek-Red Truck). We set the pace for the first half of the race, then he dropped me running through the sand section. I got passed by big Mike Sidic (Superchampion) towards the 3/4 mark and hung on for 3rd place. Loved the course -- lots of grass, open sections, power course. My kind of cross. Lucky to have Joe Sales out to immortalize my legs and suffering that day.

Cross Crusade #2: Villebois (Portland, Oregon)
Men's B - 45th place?

Headed down to Portland for Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving, that is) to race Cross Crusade. Having heard so much about it, I was keen to see the real thing in person. And what an event. 105 guys in the Men's B. Over 1000 total cross racers in all categories. Oatmeal. Beer. Waffles. It was a great scene. I went to the line 20 minutes before the start and sealed my fate. I was about the 60th guy of 100 to line up and no call-up luck here. The course was hot and dusty and bumpy and not my favourite. I rocked all of the flat road sections, but had chain problems (it came off) elsewhere. Just to be in Portland for the Oregon Manifest, Rapha Roller Races, and Cross Crusade was awesome though.

BC Cup #3: Westcoast Racing (Vanier)
Men's B - 5th place

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: that's my summary of this race. Spent the race in a lead group of 4 or 5 guys, crashed early on after getting tangled up on some off-camber grass, chased back, saw Mike Sidic ride away for first place, and then after attacking hard on the last lap, managed to crash 200m before the finish to drop from 2nd to 5th. Great classic Vancouver course, again lots of grass. Disappointing result, but happy with my attempt to put it away for 2nd on the last lap.

BC Cup #4: Local Ride (Maple Ridge Pumpkin Cross)
Men's B - 12th place

My worst finish of the year. I can't blame it on the polyester leisure suit I was wearing or the wig... or the glasses. I will blame it on my inability to ride technical single track. I shut this one down about lap 2 and rode it pretty easy. Pick your battles. It was not my day or course.

BC Cup #5/6: South Surrey / Aldor Acres

Managed to skip both of these. Pouring rain, feeling tired, and generally full social calendar stopped me from doing either. Aldor Acres looked very, very muddy.

BC Cup #7: Crossquitlam (Poco)
Men's B - 2nd place

EV's very own course, I really liked the format of this race. How much course can you stuff into one park? Crashed hard on the first lap, yard-sale style at 30kmh on a grass corner leading in first place. Picked myself up, chased Matt Newsome (Local Ride) for the better part of the second half, then he just rode away. Finished about 20 seconds down on him, unable to stick. A hard earned second spot. Still no victory though.

BC Cup #8: South Surrey
Men's B - 1st place

So a bit of a skeleton crew in the Men's B thanks to upgrades and people saving themselves for the BC Provincials being hosted the next day (another fine EV event). I went hard off the line, sprinted full out for 200M and got the hole-shot onto the grass. By the end of the first lap had a few seconds gap and just kept adding to it the rest of the race. Finished nicely ahead of the field, some 45 seconds up. First bike race win since 2004 or 2003. Must admit, it felt nice. It's been a while. And first CX victory ever. First prize: 12 Belgian Beers. How sweet it is...

I wound up with 19 points in the BC Cup series in Men's B: enough to race Men's A next year, most likely. I spent the Sunday at Provincials wondering how I'd stack up in the Masters race or in the Men's A race. It was a course that favoured my style of riding: long, power, lots of flat sections, not too technical. But I was pretty cooked from a full season and happy going out with a win.

Now we'll see if I can keep some of this fitness around for the Spring 2009. March is only a couple of months away, after all...

Where's the Square? Public space design contest in Vancouver

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:45:00 +0000

Inspired by my recent foray into the public spaces of New York and being the "armchair urbanist" that I am, I attended the VPSN's Where's the Square design contest kick-off session last night. Three interesting speakers (Berelowitz, Oberlander, Thom) mused on the topic of where Vancouver's grand public space / square could be and should be. And what other cities have done so well (and we haven't).

My raw notes are as follows.

More information at the VPSN website for the Where's the Square contest.

------------------------------------------------------------

Imagining a public space for Vancouver: the Grandest Gathering Place

Andrew Pask - VPSN
First of a 4 part event

VPSN - 3 years old
Outreach, education, advocacy on Vancouver's public realm
One question: every mtg: how come we don't have a central public square
Victory sq, smaller plazas, like the VPL
Parks - lots of them
Not quite the same as a public square
South end of the art gallery
Was it just that the city was built this way?
1901-1950: cambie & beatty: park
Central gathering place in the city, now a parking lot
Great place, but lost
Other spaces: queen e theatre plaza, barren space, not realized

Where's the square?
Other questions: where could it have been?
City of Vancouver plan, 1959 plan to 1963
Capital plan
50 years ago: 5 year plan, called for a civic space
Mentioned a few analogues: Union Sq San Fran, LA, Mellon Sq, Pitts
All built with underground parking
Part of the total concept of downtown planning
Conclusion: $2.0M set aside for the project
Site to be determined at a later date�

Defining a sense of place in other places
Slideshow of sample places
Various things you can do: all spectrum of social activity

Proper plazas and squares not really a "BC thing?"
Good examples around BC: whistler, victoria, kimberly
Intrawest: designers recognized the squares and plazas
Social capital, economic capital

Is it possible now? Aren't we too built up?
No, not if there's will and interest
TO: Dundas and Yonge: new square, just 5 years old

Where's the square? Ask people, where it should be, what it should look like
Design ideas competition
Don't have the money to build, but means to foster and stimulate discussion

Prizes� released later this fall.

Intent: each event, inform people's ideas on the subject
Hope that we'll all submit ideas

Timeline:
Walking tours - oct 08
Events: nov 08
Contest released: nov 15 08
Panel discussions: nov 26 08 / dec 11 08
Submissions due: mar 09
Shortlist: apr 09
Final selection: may 09
Public square activation: summer 09

Wheresthesquare.ca

Opens to citizen at large: pros, students, armchair urbanists�
Anyone that's every wanted to take the question to the next level

Intro to speakers

Lance Berelowitz
Urban forum assoc
Town planning, worldwide clients/work
Transit oriented plans, etc.
Written about Vancouver
2005: dream city
Relevant tonight: absence of the centralizing grand space

Edge City
Impressed by turnout
Gordon Price: thanks for the slide (you in the room?) yes. He was.
Picture of english bay: fireworks at the water
So much of public life happens at the edge, at the waterfront
Pre-fireworks evening: 250,000 people on the 4 nights, downtown, line edges, turn backs on city
Wait for sun to set, then watch, and go home
Speculate in dream city: sociological phenom
Very un-centric very familiar with other cities
Ultimate vancouver public gathering, at the edge, linear way

What is our sense of place? Unique public life all about? Not a place at the centre
So much focused on the edge
Public and private funding is at the waterfront edge
Darker side: less effort and money on the traditional centripetal public spaces

The cult of the view
US embassy: look out towards the water (now landlocked by coal harbour)
Stanley Park seawall
Public square 3 meters wide by 10km long
Great social condenser
Something peculiar about that
Centrifugal vs. centripetal models of public space

Other side: what has happened at the center: not much
Vancouver's forgotten square: 1912 - courthouse and Vancouver hotel
North of the art gallery
Fore-court of the main entrance of the square
Height of its use and engagement: 1912 postcard - formal event, flags, crowds
Semiotics of the space: center

High point then
Now: orphaned space. No where near the same energy and importance,
Or identity. Few people know what the space is called.
1967: rename centennial square - who knew
Divorced by center of city: streets, the buildings, and with redevelopment into the courthouse into the art gallery: permanent closure of the front door. It's not the front anymore.

Other landscaping that's been put in there. Filled in the space. Hasn't helped.

Reconsider this space. Go back. It's a candidate site.
Worth reconsidering. Take that space on. Not defined by steets - the space defined by the buildings.

Elements of an urban square
Small town in Andalucia: picture
Elements of a successful urban square: not that complicated
Containment and enclosure
An outdoor urban room: rooms need walls
Scale and proportion: height of buildings to width of square
Buildings too high, square to small: not good
Fa�ade of the square
Ground plane: space between the square and the street
Gigantic overscaled traffic circles: place de la concorde - fail

Climate matters: inside outside, seasons, flow

Durability and multifunctionality
Has to be many things to different times of people, different times of day and night
Square uses change over time, what they do, who they are.
Low key at 10am in the morning, then market, then protest, then etc.
Public facilities adjacent to the square matters

Surface
Urban square, not a park
Conflate the two terms here
Hard surfaced horizontal place
Primary material of the square, needs to be largely hard surfaced
Common denominator: landscaping has its place, but not replace the function
Passive landscaping, not active use

Pedestrian access
No cars going through them

Serve social condenser function: locus of public life of a city
People come together: exchange: love, politics, etc.
Definition of a city: do it in public, not just private space
Location: needs to be a center

Slide: Plaza reial, Barcelona
Built in 1848

Not an amenity, but a necessity if to function
Needs a place for public assembly
Not about passive amenity
Critical to have one
Recent history: soviet bloc, etc. kiev, capetown, etc.
Places where celebrate, commemorate, demonstrate important events

CBC: called earlier: what about Robson St? it's a problem

Don't have an answer. Conflicted about it
Missing the traditional eurocentric square, but done well at the edges
Maybe that's tapping into the zeitgeist. Interested in hearing from you. Maybe it won't be, build it and they will come�

Cornerila Oberlander
Landscape architect
Work on robson square
Animated public spaces

21st century: densification of vancouver
Urban life is here to stay
We will be a community that will communicate on foot
Won't drive cars downtown
Square: urban and downtown
Shoulder new responsibilities, to make a city on foot
Need fresh air
Find places where we feel safe, comfortable, achieve passive & active activities
Don't have enough places for fun: first night example: all but forgotten
Having fun: different than sitting on the seawall at the edge, dangling our feet

IDEAS: Union Sq, San Fran
Seen renovated union square
Had everything in it that Lance identified
Superb execution of paving, all the materials
People lounging on steps, lie down on the grass, etc.

Moveable chairs: very cheap, stored overnight, no-one takes them. Everyone has a fine time arranging their own seat: White / Social Spaces 1962. We sit where we want to sit, not where parks board puts benches

Elegant furnishings: Starcke - wait for table, caf�. Crowded. People want to be there.

Steps, walls, ground, flower pots, all great elements

Library square Vancouver
Moshe Safdie: garden on the roof, theatre on the roof - can't have that (province)
Wound up with green roof: look at it, but not good enough
What's left of the idea: atrium
Amphitheatre: nothing happening there
No commitment on behalf of city to have a program - a dead space
Paving: pre-fab, totally awful
(laughter)
"This is what I had to work with"

"Most of my landscaping money at national gallery in Ottawa went for doorknobs"

Robson Square: Vancouver
In the olden days� opening of Robson: skating rink that worked
Performance platform
People would sit all over it
Watch performances, etc.
No commitment for programming
Skating rink died

Robson Square in 1980: huge opening, gathering, restaurants, active, alive
All gone now, of course no-one goes there

Animated public spaces
- Listen to what is good for us today in 21st centruy in the city
- Funding
- Continuity of programs
- Built in seating and moveable seating
- Shade/shelter
- Access to public transit

Bing Thom
Bing Thom Architects
Order of Canada
Chan centre, pacific canada, aberdeen center, surrey, new sunset community center

All cheer up: env crisis, financial crisis�. Chinese: opportunity and danger
Bad enough, will become really good.
Think there is something stirring in Vancouver
Cornelia, there's hope

Contour study of downtown Vancouver
The square is at Robson Square
Never got to finish the job: NDP got in, Socreds got in
Front of the courthouse never finished

It is the natural centre of the city
High point of the peninsula
Fantastic space in the front
Walk up lane, vista to the courthouse is fantastic
Crying to be fixed

Couldn't convince the art gallery to make the front door up the steps
Annex and courthouse can be 2 uses: after art gallery goes
New front door: breathe again

Reviving skating rink
Many new skating rinks being built in europe: skate in the rain
Spend a few million fixing a skating rink, don't need a lid
Put the new rink in front of the courthouse
Examples of skating rinks

Long term solution:
What's going to happen when 1.2Bn people want to come to Canada
Best country in Canada - they all want to be here, so get ready

Metro Vancouver: 10Mpepole, Erickson crazy, but think about it�

What are we going to do? The next square: after Robson square
The whole east side.
Beach on the north east side of science world, false creek
Why not make a beach: east side beach
Art gallery: on axis with Georgia St.
Make it an island, floating element�

Why is Vancouver so square? (laughter)

Question & Answer: Panelist discussion

Andrew: what's your favourite public square?

BT: linear square: Barcelona
CO: place des boges(?) Paris: all elements you dream about
LB: il campo, sienna, Tuscany: run a horse race, very theatrical, city hall
Personal/sentimental: lost my virginity there�. (laughter)

Q: amphitheatre - how can we make sure buildings and square work well together?

LB: problem: orthogonal street grid, rectilinear. No curves
Overscaled public realm, but underserved
Roads to wide, public space too mean
How little the pedestrian dimension is served
Interrupt orthogonal street grid

CO: agree
Don't have a typical city sq
Rethinking as to how we get to place of pedestrian destination
Arrange living spaces

BT: want to change scale
Plug for beach on east side
Water square: don't think we should be like europe, should be like Vancouver
Focus on the east side, opportunity there, VAG moving down to false street
Take down viaduct, connect to harbour, china town
Opportunity that will last for next few years
Left forlorn, forgotten
Debate back to a longer range debate about squares�
Different scale of square: variety of sizes of space

Q: how do we focus on spending money on the arts? As a consideration on how public squares function

LB: starting to see a re-investment in public realm
Granville st mall - 10 blocks
Hopefully pleasantly surprised when rolled out
Rather than pointing fingers at sr level of gov't, ask ourselves:
Do we value it? In street? Arts? In materiality?

Spanish village example: small village rebuilding public square
Craftsmen, built to last, tradition: build for long haul. Not thinking about long term buildings
Attn to detail, quality of materials, investment in the front end
Constant battle: spend money up front, other spend 10x longer
See it as an investment in the long term
That kind of thinking let to percolate down to middle level decision makers

CO: working on several projects: for how little can you do it?
Dreadful attitude
Idea of sustainability: produce work that sustains a longer period of time

BT: crisis theme
Financial crisis on wall st, env crisis will come together
In the end, get rid of throw away society and credit society
Willing to have less shoes, shirts, go to more concerts
Investing in spiritual things, less material goods

CO: 1963, husband had invited speaker
Circular garages, Philadelphia, how did you dream them up?
Dreamt up during the depression
Semi depression: rally to invent new ideas: challenges are enormous
Attitude changes will make us freer, more interesting people

Q: programming first? Reason why Trafalgar works, isn't the space, but the fact that there's a reason to celebrate. But not here. What is it that we want to celebrate, who do we want to celebrate?
Talk about celebrations first, then where we'd put it.

LB: cultural factor
Not just about hardware, it�s the software
How we're wired, our values, what do we celebrate or demonstrate about
Public space design needs to be integrated in that
Different from historical homogenous European city
Younger city, mixed city, all immigrants on the panel
Different set of design solutions
Might be more diffuse, more linear. Not sure what answer is
Needs a cultural input: not just theoretical aesthetic solution

Example: in Italy, they go out to be seen in the evenings. But we don't have that activities here.
So maybe we need running lanes or inline skating�

CO: we're somewhat hedonistic
Ski, sail, run along sea shore, don't have time anymore to go downtown to a city square
Rethink how we want to live these days

Q: Vancouver as necklace: edges. Focus on downtown, idea of how much is outside of downtown, transit, where city hall is, what's a socially viable statement
North stairs: sleeping place
We keep dispersing, we aren't bringing it together

Amazing public space between the two stadiums: BC place & GM place

Andrew: northeast false creek: being considered
Dispersal, focus on the downtown� re: competition, open to any concept of space anywhere

Appropriate downtown? Why the focus on downtown?

LB: pg 140 of LB's book, noticed a rich tradition of small neighbourhood parks
Throughout city - block, half block
Have a system, undeveloped, suburban, neighbourhood urban squares
As urbanizing, neighbourhood parks will be more like plazas and piazzas
Not a bad thing, reflection and city becomes older, layers of development

CO: spaces came about in 1928: Bartholomew plan
Parks where people gather, now they're too small - densification, too small

BT: programming
Tremendous energy in this room
Take time out, we care about city; 70's, people cared about city, then less, now people care about the city again
How you make connection of how you care with political leaders you elect
Are we electing leaders or representatives?
Civic election: stir it up: want to be politicians: leader or a rep?
You figure a way of how our values come together
Programming: nothing wrong with robson square, but its not programmed
No-one asked what do you want it to be?
What it is that we need, vs what people think we want and they give us
Enough hardware around, just don't use it properly

Q: formal squares: designed, squares: vs. informal squares
Opportunities for informal squares
People watching along robson st

BT: great spaces are accidental spaces
Designer, you design something, but great things happen when people use your designs in different ways
Accidental collisions, unexpected
Risk: uniformity of experience, people
Singapore: boring place. Homogenous. All uniform: no accidents
That can't be designed

Q: how can we change the mentality of people who think that town center is shopping?

BT: crash on wall st going to solve a lot of that

LB: place for shopping: a sexy thing to do
Enclosed space like a mall not an invalid part of the answer
Danger: exclusively that
Need places not programmed, filled by public, no private interests
Needs to be places for both
Public realm as theme park, controlled and contrived, scares many of us
Need unmediated spaces
Strong strain of law and order, governance, etc
Don't have spontaneous public expressions
But very spontaneous expression at the waterfront�
Hoping over time, less planning on the waterfront; now over planned
Just occupy, claim it
Public places: go, gather, yell, shout

CO: What would you like to do in these spaces?

Q: looking at original design for the library. How can virtuosity flourish?

CO: having been part of library team - after 20 yrs, review the library roof
Made accessible
2015
Safdie: already thought about the access
Movement afoot to revitalize it: come here, sit up there with a book
In the making, will be, able to sit on the roof

Q: sustainable means affordable�
Big thing here: food. Have a food festival there in robson square
But think about re-zoning areas

LB: robustness and flexibility: forget about zoning: allow just about anything
Places to allow more or less anything
Give ourselves permission to relax. Hang out a bit more. Less zoning, not more
Virtuosity is here: no shortage here in society
Deprived of: more liberal rules and regulations what can and cannot be done
Sidewalk table caf� regulations, inhibits creativity and virtuosity
Unprogramming of public realm

Q: this building: 8th and 9th floor of VPL: interior public square?

CO: when prov gov't moves out, something could happen
Library would like to expand when gov't moves out
But a good idea

Q: which building do you consider looking at in Vancouver for more than a couple minutes (from a square)

LB: perhaps Vancouver has benefited from natural setting, banal architecture
Courthouse square on north side, exactly that. Foil to setup major public building
Very basic strategies and tactics - how to set off public buildings with public space
Can't think of another good example of a historical building

Train station on main st? CN station. Ought to have been a public square. Never built out that way.
Thornton Park. Example

CO: has too many trees! (laughter)

Q: shape of public squares, morphology.

BT: Robson square, was built with transit in mind, underneath
Land use planning, transit planning, two different divisions, sometimes don't talk to one another
GVRD and Translink and the relationship:
Real estate development: if done well

Q: Bryant Park (Alisa): sitting there yesterday
Why public squares in Europe instead of south america, what it is about those squares? Or is it the culture of living in those squares?

CO: know bryant park very well, fave in NA. has all opportunities for everyone to feel comfortable and safe. Movable chairs and tables, perfect. We haven't developed this yet.

Didn't talk about this ghastly liability affair. Makes designing public space so difficult

LB: why euro squares
To great regret, haven't been to those place yet�

Andrew: wind up
Thank speakers

next year

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:40:00 +0000

What I missed whilst flying home from NYC...

Starcrossed Cyclocross 2008 from bce on Vimeo.

Next year. It's on.

Kudos to the EV guys for a strong showing down there this weekend. Our Saturday morning cross adventures at Jericho and UBC appear to have paid off.

Content Matters - Web 2.0 Expo - Danico, Wright, Zeldman, Ford

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:52:00 +0000

Liz Danico, Jeffery Zeldman, Alex Wright, Kristina Halvorson, Paul Ford
Sept 19/08 - raw notes

Changing minds about role of content in wireframes
Importance of content strategy in terms of user experience.

Audio recording started: 8:08 AM Friday, September 19, 2008

Original names: copy matters
Off limits: "copy"

Content matters, can't be used copy

You may have heard:
1. Content drives traffic
2. Users don't read online (Nielsen) - something we don't aspire to

Crossroads?
Two disparate beliefs

Transitions in media: TV: radio with pictures
Early films: Camera stationery, didn't move it around
Early MTV: just bands on a stage playing (video?) choreography didn't occur
Old to new: metaphors borrowed

Looking a the web: publishing medium
Stretch the web to fit into publishing metaphors
Weren't able to modify it, make it our own
Print: can't modify, cut, enlarge, cut and paste -- only highlight, photocopy, so on.
But now, syndicate, mobile ways, etc.

Different publishing medium
Different roles for makers, creators, and managers
Facebook: looks a lot like content
"we aren't writing, we are speaking in text" - Erika Hall, Mule Design
[secondary orality] - talking as interface

"the internet looks like writing, but it's actually a conversation" - khoi vin

Designers of conversations? New responsibility?

What kind? Wikipedia content strategy articles for deletions

Types of content
Navigation and orientation content
Labels and actions content
Help content
Non-textual content
Content content!

Navigation and orientation content (daytum.com): Hello!

Labels and action content: Vimeo under "explore"
Tick: just kidding, I remember now (Chris Fahey example from yesterday)

Help content

Visual content: story corps example

Content content: pacific blue cross site
Business week (editorial content)

How do we make it work?

Ask the experts!

Liz Danico - moderator / bobulate.com
Alex Wright - information architect / nytimes / glut
Bre Pettis - videographer / cult of handmade objects / etsy / nycresistor.com
Kristina Halvorson - content strategist / braintraffic (web writing firm)
Jeffery Zeldman - evangelist / a list apart / happy cog / zeldman
Paul Ford - editor / ftrain / harpers magazine - since june 1850

Discuss!

Each of the 5 have different relationships to content
KH: creating content, wrangling, standards to govern content
Got into content strategy: wireframes filled with lorem ipsum
No-one had thought about the content: came to content strategy

Bre: started making videos on how to make things
Weekend projects
Video guy thinks print is the thing of the past

JZ: a list a part: writes for the mag, writes a long time, copywriter, etc.
Tell the truth experience of journalism, other experience of advertising
1995: all about self publishing
You could write, find your voice, find your audience, didn't worry too much about if you sucked
Develop content strategy & IA at the same time
Design isn't a style exercise, it's a communications exercise
Bring design in late at the end, you've worn the client down
The order of operations matters: make the client malleable
1998: magazine - staff, make enough money to pay everyone a little
Labour of love with a little bit of money, which is the web
Kevin Cornell illustration: garnish at the end on ALA

PF: on a bad day, subscribers send stuff that things are broken
Good day: 75 year old woman who found a 1962 article
Working directly on editorial content, but also how the site communicates
Get people to subscribe, get involved.

Question: combo of visual & textual content
How do you deal with a combo of both
How do you organize it

AW: NYT produces a lot of content
300 articles a week
Publish a lot of images, slideshows, flash movies, video, etc.
Nature of what journalists do evolves
How to accommodate that within the website: issues that come up: metadata layer
All of the photos are huge centralized photo DB
Exists separately, from article db
Good taxonomy
Tag all the articles, topic pages
Some tactical issues at the taxonomy level
From a design POV, weave content into the structure of the site
Interactive content vs. traditional linear text

Bre: Text is dead
Main thing: find passion, share
Obsessed with video: no matter how bad, point it at something interesting a share it
Etsy blogging team: the stork
Hand made stuff
Passionate users
300 people who write articles, lots of authors
Video team, things that they make
Text isn't necessarily dead, but about sharing passions

How are you educating your clients to think about publishing content
KH: all the content that exists for a client, who's creating, reviewing, publishing, trying to govern brand standards, trying to figure out print vs. interactive publishers
Marketing folks, PR folks, sales, folks, etc.
Get all people under the same umbrella: internal editorial governance and infrastructure
Challenge is enourmous and sometimes unthinkable to a CMO
Spend all money on brand, but how to plan, create, govern content that's useful for people
Raise awareness of the issue right now, do their best

JZ: mostly luck
Woody Allen: luck/love: sometimes lucky, sometimes not
Sometimes you were lucky, client got it, sometimes not
Make recommendations, style guides, etc. sometimes lucky if client follows the guidelines
You hope that everyone is passionate and committed, but it's tough

Liz: Designers responsibility for creating frameworks
Implicit rules to create their own content (ugc): one step
Second step: users to be involved and engaged and do that
Third: editorial responsibility: monitor that content

Paul: monitor / moderate
Community: something you'll get for free
Totally untrue
Have to create a rigid and structured set of forms
Editorial community that enforce norms
Form/structure has to be enforced
People fight, take a stand for it, stuff gets better
Takes a ton of time to come out with these structures up front
Hard to see this ahead of time

JZ: Powazek: 1996
Fray - content from editorial side, user content
Simple leading story: have you ever fallen?
Lots of great story telling readers
Not just a lot of junk, some really good comments
If you have really good writing, you'll get back good comments
NYT: always going to be crazy comments
Some really well thought out comments

AW: wishful thinking about user generated content
Users will just do it for us
Works well: channeled - help users focus input
Big public forums experiment: a bit of a train wreck, just a lot of noise
Can comment on certain articles
UGC works well when constraints on it
Need to be some kind of constraint
Delicious: works really well
Users do very little
No comments originally - genius.
Network effect took shape, etc.

PF: half dead wiki sites floating around online
3 pages, nothing sites, no-one wants to go there
Half dead
Lack of structure
Active site, but not in a way you want

You can get content for free, you can't get editing for free - Paul

KH: Millions on a CMS - yeah, that will fix the content
Investing in infrastructure to plan for, create, and govern their content
Don't care who's publishing
Infrastructure has to be in place

Wrap up: one last question
Everyone in audience doesn't have a "content person" in their company
Quick take from each: if a person doesn't have a FTE, what should they do?

AW: do it yourself
Put in a lot of placeholder copy, come back later
No, it's part of the design process
Ted Nelson - inventor of term hypertext
Despondent about state of web: the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors
Boxes and process flows, but it's more important
Think about what they'll use on the screen

PF: make sure if you're doing it, easy for people to talk back to you
Paul: sole guy doing copy on harpers.org, user feedback is beneficial
What's confusing, what's working for your users

Bre: DIY: shocking, businesses that hire people to develop content
Farming out their passion
Stop it, find people who are into doing, find within, hire, get them to share their passion
Own it!

KH: everyone I know who's tasked to it, also has to do content
Business leaders allocating resources to create content
If not, then hire it out
Scale back: don't conceive of a site for content that you don't have to create, b, resources to govern. Lots of great ideas. Do we have people and resources to keep it timely, accurate, relevant, and useful

JZ: Scale back: grand visions, but no-one to write sections

Content strategy google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/contentstrategy/

Thank you!

http://www.bobulate.com/

Web 2.0 NYC Keynotes - Day 3

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:52:00 +0000

web 2.0 nyc keynotes - day 3 - sept 19/08
raw notes

Tim O'Reilly and Ariana Huffington
Politics, media, publishing, etc.

Genvieve Bell - 9 minute version of the talk from yesterday
Internets of the future, different world experiences

Irene Greif - IBM - Many Eyes
You can observe a lot by just watching - yogi bera
There is a pent up desire to analyze data
Neat to see how it's grown since the Viegas presentation at IDEA 2006 in Seattle
Save the visualization, comment, click, be back at the same place, use it, work with it
Save visualizations in any state
Surprises: once given the tools�
Surprising domain, typical pattern
User uploads bible data, visualizes as a social network, takes it to a religious blog site
Hundreds of blogs, got cross posted, then came back to many eyes
More important: create visualization, allow people to take it back to their own community
Then come back to Many Eyes
Finally: words rule
Text of a whole novel, play
Became so interesting, added a ton of visualizations
Word visualizations are really cool
Sarah Palin's acceptance speech as a word map: using Wordle
Comparative word maps: Obama vs McCain speeches
Political speech analysis section of the site
Former AG Gonzales: I don't recall visualization
What IBM research knows
Scalable real world deployments required to keep up with wisdom of crowds
Central theme of IBM's center for social software - new centre, Cambridge

Jay Adelson - digg.com
Organizing Chaos: growth of collaborative filters
Collaborative filtering
Hyper personalization
Monetization of web2.0 apps
If only I knew you better, I could target an ad better and make you buy a product

Ben Huh
I can has cheezburger
FAIL Blog tshirt
Dude 1: "hey, this is funny"
Dude 2: "heh"
Jan 2007: icanhazcheezburger started
LOL builder launched: 3 lines of text. Weekend's time to build LOL builder
100% user generated content
8,000 submissions / day
Apr to Sept 2007: 8m pg views/month to 15m
Raised money
Cat site VC
Undervalued part of the internet
ICHC is purchased
Make users happy for 5 minutes a day
6 posts a day, 9am eastern start, strict promotional guidelines
37M pg views / day
Start observing customers
Act 2: build a network
Feb 2008: ROFLrazzi.com
Mr T: I pity the foo�
Aug data: 100M page views / month
8 sites
5 full time employees - moderate comments, pictures, twitter, etc.
Lower the bar for funny content creation
Get over the hurdle of content creation
So what's Act 3? Where to?
Don't know. 30 days at a time. One month.
Icanlol.com/web2expo.pdf

Shana Fisher - IAC
IAC brands: Ask, citysearch, match, evite, vimeo
Getting into video games
Online video game market
Instantaction.com
Web-based games: pretty impressive graphics for a browser-based game

Dan Lyons - Newsweek
"Fake Steve Jobs"
How it happened
What I learned
Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
Basic blogger site
Newsweek: story goes through 7 people
To get 800 words into print
This model: you toss stuff up
June 2006, started anonymously
Character: not really steve jobs, not Dan, but an alterego
Hiaitus since June - but can't keep doing this joke
Woke up, can't do this anymore
Was a forbes property
Options: the secret life of steve jobs
RealDan: his blog - it sucks
Why?
Why Steve Jobs?
Why does it work?

Why: boredom
At Forbes for 10 years
Covering IBM, EMC, terrible
Huge squadron of PR people make your life living hell
Fear: disruptive technologies
Bloggers are doing this, then what about my job

Jonathan Schwarz: sun ceo blog
Ripe for parody
Naked conversation
Foaming at the mouth: drunk, high, blogging, awesome
Why steve jobs? Is ripe for parody
Huge apple fan, but culture cracks me up
Parody: jobs and blogging
Comic strip evolves into news
Mostly fiction
6 weeks, had fun, shut it down
Someone put it back up
A few months, 90,000 people reading
Revelation moment: no money, nothing, 90,000 readers, 1.5 M people
Guy on a hunt to find him
Publisher of Forbes
Who is Fake Steve Jobs
East coast, time stamps, etc.
Looking right at me, still didn't get it�
Offers fake steve at Forbes.com� delicious irony

Right about to launch as a forbes thing: nyt figures it out
Came clean
Damn, I'm so busted, yo
Relieved: sucked living a double life in some ways

Why does it work?
Once outted, it's over. But it did still work though. Willing to suspend disbelief
Community - the audience, they liked it.

Consume & create
Fake Vladimir Putin, Fake Noam Chomsky - people only in the comment stream
Performance space: comments were performance spaces
Twitter and facebook:[ dramatalurgical theory of self (Goffman)]

Hitting Them Where They Live - Steven Berlin Johnson / Chris Tolles - Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:52:00 +0000

Steven Berlin Johnson - outside.in
Chris Tolles - CEO topix

Sept 18/08
Raw notes

How local is emerging on the web

Topix: aggregator
Categorize geo-locally to zipcodes
Half traffic on 10% of pages that were local
At the time, no-one else doing that at the time

We spend locally
90% of consumer purchases are made within person's home or office

Internet influenced sales
Offline sales, but internet influenced

Local online ad forecasts: very big market

Steven Johnson
The Geo-web
6,000 placebloggers in outside in
Roughly 100,000 who write about location occasionally

Founded Feed Mag in 1995, turned into full time writer, living in Brooklyn, writing books
Last book: 2006: compulsively going to this new class of sites
Local bloggers: place bloggers
Lots of them in browstone Brooklyn
Covering a part of world that no traditional form had covered to date
Vitally important to me: physically proximate. Flying under traditional news sources.
Suddenly: coming via media

Really interesting: couldn't have gotten a year ago. Zone of life I care most about. My neighbourhood.

Maybe we can organize this information. Can't say show me all the conversations about schools within 10 blocks of my house.

Maybe we can organize stuff coming from local bloggers
Built outside.in

Geo-web: emerging movement
Geotags are to the geo web what links were to the original web

Agreed upon geographic location of pages on the web
Real world space, not just virtual space of URLs
Once agreed upon, you can build a lot on top of it.
Disagree what it means if you agree on where it is

Geotag adoption is slow. 5% of flickr photos tagged
70% of twitter messages come with default location of user
< 1% geocoded precisely

3% of hyperlocal posts tracked by outside in

Geotoolkit: launched today
Helping publishers optimize their stuff for the web

Hyperlocal at Web 2.0
Panel at web 2.0
Outside in: recognizes Javits Centre - place attached to this post
Figures out neighbourhoods that it's tagged to
Dedicated page on Javits page. Shows up throughout outside.in

Radar: 1000 feet of what's happening here right now
Van has exploded within 1000 feet of your house. Outside in: restaurant: dizzie's, near SBJ's house.

Something that would never show up in the NY Times. But it matters to me.

Entire flow of info that got to me, not professional journalists. Amateurs, blogging, posting, etc.
A bit of automation magic. Recognition of patterns

Storymaps: submit your feed, see a map of stories written about, etc.
Combination of geographic and temporal - last 2 weeks, 4 weeks, etc.

Post: hyperlocal at web 2.0 on SBJ's site.
It's not just a post, it's kinda an ad.
It is an ad.

People creating ads. I'm interested in getting this ad out to people within 10 blocks of the pizza place.
Possible due to geoweb platform.

Extraordinary change. As platforms more commonplace. All of that advertising money trapped offline, much more effective way to get to people close to them.

Chris/Topix

A different approach: we had 30,000 zip code level news pages
We could geotag news content semantically
There weren't enough stories to fill the pages
We gave them the platform to roll their own.

Launched in 2004 - local interesting.
Chris's background: started Open Directory project

Uh Oh: not enough news
The problem: not enough local content
1400 daily newspapers, x 6 papers / day
1200 news stations x 3 stories
1700 tv stations x 4 stories/day
Total number of local stories / day 22,293
But 32,000 zip codes, 22,000 stories = bad user experience

Local news is not yet a search problem

Little towns like this stuff. Local hits: 40 to 50% comes from outside of a designated metro area
Outside of major cities in USA. Local content, small towns. Everyone wants local news.

Creating local voice on the web

Screenshot: Albany Forum
Last updated posts in the forum
Albany google ads

Screenshot: Paris, Tx
Larger amount of comments in the forum
No Paris Texas ads. Texas ads

Screenshot: Somerset, Kentucky
Even smaller town, Huge forum usage
No local ads: phentramine ad!?!
But no ad inventory in Kentucky.
Lag in the ads going locally. But a lot of people who buy here.

The punchline:
Market for local advertising is big
Growing 4 to 6 times in next 4 years
8B to 12B market by 2012
People buy stuff in person where they live

Geoweb emerging to connect content to location
Geotagged content in place, in volume today
Big opportunity

SBJ:

Everybody (online) lives somewhere - mantra

Pothole paradox: other people's local news is the most boring stuff ever
Highschool sports news from somewhere else, least interesting thing you can imagine

Small town / big city difference
People would come to neighbourhood page
They did, but vast majority is going through search to place pages (school, convention centre)
Neighbourhood is almost too big
Want very precise information
Looked at logs: correction facility in LA was #1 page for the day
Where paris hilton was spending for 30 days
One of two pages
Huge traffic for place pages

Distribution of traffic vs population centres
Top 50 cities that you track
Less media competition in smaller places
You can rank higher, better search, etc.

What's the right neighbourhood unit - how do you divide it?
Not postal code? Harness community to help you define that.
Lot of commentary about

Steven: when are you coming to Canada? (Gord asks SBJ a question)
Didn't have to invent the platform: geo maps, coders, get the place database: next few months
Easier to build for Canada, given the geoweb platform exists
Figuring that out: next few months - also UK launch

Reluctance about local: people think pizza guy
But there's a lot of businesses beyond the pizza guy
Tons of interesting local businesses that could be doing advertising at a local level

Radar: pulling out neighborhood names
Twitter tweet can show up in 1000 feet view
Adding geo data in
Feeling that you're overhearing conversations: Clive Thompson: Ambient information in the Times
Within 1000 feet - interesting to see what people are talking about
Have to be able to turn it off, have to turn off people (real estate dudes)
Noise: don't want to hear people, filters

Topix: search engine geeks
About vs. mention
Create a vector, radius, how much its' about - math stuff
Sometimes you want it, sometimes you don't. Tough heuristic problem
Depends on kind of stories. Vague description of area

Potholes vs. exploding trucks: core problem of geobased content & scale?
Given piece of content has radius of relevancy
How do you determine the "radius of relevancy?" - don't have to wade through 300 photos of what people took in my neighbourhood.

Let you know if you're on fire: SBJ haha.

Filters: zooms out: long zoom
1000 ft, neighborhood, city, places you're following (powers of 10 type stuff)
Track things you care about
What you see in neighborhood view: 3 stories that came along from 3 different blogs
Van example: organically happens

Experiment: techmeme type hot topic. People talking about this in this community, cluster that.
Gonna take some thinking.

Volume of newsstream is critical
Whether using Digg: humans
Google news: aggregate stuff
How many people writing (intensity), closeness
Need a lot of people
Only one person wrote about it: not intense, but still may be important

Until you have a lot of stories about a given area, cross posts, then interesting
But takes critical mass
One story vs 10 stories, good job, but 1 story vs 2 stories, not good

Location of device (reader) matters, but location of content really matters too.
Geo contextually relevant advertising about content

Local content in a local context: 4 times more effective
Local content and local advertising: more digestible

Seduction of Interaction Design - Christopher Fahey - Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:52:00 +0000

Christopher Fahey / Behaviour Design
Sept 18/08
Raw notes

"Love at first sight?"
How many believe: 2/3rds of Americans

Even when they do fall in love, you have to work at it. Take a little time. Go through a process to complete falling in love. Seduction.

Wasn't quite love at first sight. Had to make mix tapes. Talk about what seduction means in the case of interaction design.

Secret forbidden arts of seduction. Blogger at graphpaper.com, partner at behaviour - 4 partners, 20 people now.

Personally: interaction design, ux designer.

Interactive seducer. Secrets of web design re: seduction. Not hot and heavy. Really about subtle seductions of interaction design.

And merchandising. Clear about what that means.
Not about marketing strategies. Focusing on design of web centric interactive products.

Merchandising vs. marketing.
Merch: subset of marketing?
Not taking a brand and slapping it on things
Marketing: creating biz relationships, advertising & promotion, message delivery, etc.
Merchandising: strategy and implementation of how a product is presented to customers as they decide whether they wish to purchase it

3 aspects
Selling context
Packaging
Products that sell themselves

Butt brush effect: Paco Underhill
Planograms: subtle details of physical space and product layout

E-commerce selling contexts: still learning about how to optimize placement, price, sequence, nomenclature

Packaging of products and stores: same thing online (box and store)
Packaging = selling context

Store is built into the product (basecamp)
Not designing a box for your product
Packaging is the part you throw away.

3rd category: products sell themselves

Designing for People - Henry Dreyfuss

Designers should be responsible
Liaison linking management, engineering, customer, communicating to all 3

Designers have to be responsible for the sales of their product

Marketing vs design
Battle between the two online: need to get over that
Designers are responsible for marketing too.

Ux is so integral: impossible to sell one, without convincing the user that it's going to be a pleasure.
5 senses: hearing, smelling, tasting, etc.
Sources of pleasure: avoidance of failure, success, surprise, psychological pleasures, not just physical ones

Brain desired to seek pleasure: Attractive things work better - Don Norman, emotional design

Things that are attractive work better. It primes you and your mind. Good for products to inspire pleasure.

Human desire for pleasure: core of seduction.

Web-native products: seduction has to be built in. Alive with pleasure: twitter.
Don't see TV ads for facebook and flickr� hear from someone else.

Every other traditional product context: job of marketer is to convince user that it will be awesome. Job of product designer is to make the experience really really good.
Web 2.0; UX is the key factor

How the design of web 2.0 user experiences change how products are marketed:
Subscription based product models
Vibrant communities around and within products
Fully functional demos, easily distributed and managed
Free!

Conversion
Zero sum model: converted or not. At some point, user clicks, boom, customer. Captured. Converted.
A lot revolve around that.
Direct mail thinking: get people to come to the site, some percentage will sign up, etc.

Object of seduction: not just have someone to click submit
Not about giving up, giving in, making someone fall in love with you
Conversion is obsolete

Connection
Soft sell, not a hard sell

Seduction: falling in love with our products

3 stages of seduction
1. Inspire their attention, interest and desire
2. Draw them in (lead them astray)
3. Capture their ongoing devotion

Inspire attention: choose your victim
"your victim"
Don't think of your users as victims

Robert Greene's Victims - The art of Seduction
Various types of victims

Mark & Pearson's "archetypes"
The Hero and the Outlaw (Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson)

Your users as distinct personalities
Not marketing segments: creative focused, not research focused

Yahoo's : competitive spectrum
Caring, collaborative, cordial, competitive, combative
Direct effect on features they design for users

Developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=competitive

Make up your own: detect your emotional qualities and speak to them in your UI design
Rebelliousness and difference, power and control, modest, authenticity, acceptance in one's social group, fun and release from stress
Avoidance of embarrassment

User personas
Persona usage guidelines: differentiate seductive qualities from genuine user functional needs
Separate emotional drivers and functional drivers

Make the first move
You have to do something to make it happen
Use motion, use words, careful with audio

Create a sense of mystery
Silverback - clearleft product
No-one knows the product, but a huge buzz
Since launched, more info on the page as to what it does.

Appear desirable
Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd
Testimonials on your site
Real users, put it on the website
Not just media
Other people want you, must be really good

Flatter them
Make them feel capable
Treat them nicely

Tempt them
Peek as to what's inside�

Stage 2: lead them astray, draw them in

Dazzle them with wonder
Seduction of the Innocent: Frederic Wertham - 1950's comic books
Appeal to people's childlike feelings: secret headquarters comic book shop in LA

Have a sense of humour

Tick: time tracking system
Instead of a cancel button: just kidding, I remember now (extra step to be clever)

Be stylish
History of product design: stylization
Change the style from year to year
Obsolete products by changing the style (clock radio)
Redesign site because it looks old: not a bad reason to do it

Affordances of desire
Imagine it as part of your life
Whole product becomes an affordance
Dopplr: share travel - people 2 or 3 times a year: useful? Maybe not, but part of a jetset world
Envision themselves as more than they are

Distract them from their responsibilities

Stage 3: capture ongoing devotion

Continually grow
Nike Plus example: ecosystem of products
Real win: what happens afterwards: all kinds of new products
Share results on blog, etc. A whole ecosystem. Social stuff with Nike Plus
Ongoing seduction. Nikeplus costs $30, but spend couple hundred bucks.

The design process:

Goals and scenarios and paths.
Users have goals, write them down, let them inspire your design
Sketch it out, define it, etc.
Find spots where you can have delightful moment

Plan for delight: the long way (Schauer - Adaptive Path)
Make it an objective to delight the user

Understand yourself
What kind of seducers are you? (Greene list of seducer archetypes)

30 second seduction: Andrea Gardner

Seduction is�
About love, togetherness, enchantment and pleasure
User centric
A journey
Proactive
And nothing to be squeamish about - use the word in your conversation

Seduction is no longer the responsibility of the people of marketing people. It's a design job, so do it.

Designing for the Internet(s) of the Future - Genvieve Bell - Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:52:00 +0000

Genvieve Bell / Intel
raw notes
Sept 18/08

I'm an anthropologist, not a technologist
Apologize for being Australian
Freshly back from home: jetlagged, will swear at the drop of the hat

Please forgive me if I swear, cultural

Anthropologist: can't talk about technologies without talking about stories
Fieldwork
Stories about the internet

Shearers in an Australian pub, talking about the internet
Nearest internet is 100km away. Less an experience, more of a destination
Parking lot of a macdonalds when you got there
Internet of Terali (sp): what it would take to get internet there.
Conversation about value
Trade off between cattle dog and 2 years of broadband
What will that get me?

Footie on the tv, porno on the cell phone. What do I need the internet for?

Next revolution is already happening.

Product of social, historical, political forces
Encodes its moments of inception and conception
Manifested in our lives in more ways than the web

Democracy, transparency, openness, accessibility of all information are cultural values and not just anyone's
All born out of particular cultural practices: metaphors like highways, wild west, etc. surfing: what does that metaphor mean if you've never experienced it?

So what comes next: social practices that are intensely global
Fragmentation, re-alignment going on

Internet goes feral: domestic to wild, but had a domestic moment in its past
Parallel to the internet & web
Web an internet now run on a bunch of other devices: phones, tvs, etc.
Affordances, constraints and preferred usage models mean the web is changing shape
There will be some people who never encounter the web on a pc

Lists, text: mobile phone experience in Africa, other countries. That's pretty fabulous.
Highly transactive. Use the internet, never have it in your hand.
Story about woman in indonesia: no electricity in the house, woman's illiterate, no computer in the house. Regular user of the internet: don't have a computer. Is that necessary?
Son comes over, she has tea, I want to send a message to my daugther, son says fine. Son goes to cybercafe, finds a computer, sends email, email is returned, son tells mother how it is.
For her, she was using the internet. And who are we to argue?

Put us in touch with people we care about, transcends time and distance. Her son mediated the process, but that's fine. She knew the internet meant she could reach out to her family.

Internet as "imagined" - experience through intermediaries.

What does it mean to build out interfaces? How devices work? How identity is played out (one device, hundreds of users) - different notions of what the internet could be�

Radical shift. End of the Anglosphere. Mainland china: eclipsed the number of US users (> 253 million)
Transformation of user populations. Different visual appeals, writing, reading, design impact, different "attendant practices" - forms, conventions, affordances, and practices
New sites, new experiences, new services will arise.

Cockney slang examples: Americans: sepo's, septic tank, rhymes with yank. Plays on words in Chinese: different ways of expression, similar.

Meta subtext: not just hypertext. Chinese consumers: watching the broadcast news and what isn't said is just as important as what is said. Silences, gaps, and spaces: visually and pragmatically a huge difference. Multiply that out to 10 largest languages in the world.

Screengrabs:
Shanghai city gov't- bury your ancestors online, state sponsored
Korean cyworld (sp?) - dress avatars as to what they're doing today (copy): dress avatar, then dress me
Says something about cultural world of Korea. Regular users: 50, 60, 70 year olds
Indonesia news website: bahasa language: first leaping off point.

Problems for searching / translation: most of the web no longer in english. How do we search for relevance? How do we search for surprising facts? When all references points are different�

Fat pipes narrow pipes.
Finds language endless entertaining to a feminist

Different models of connectivity:
Korean: fat pipes up and down
UK: fat down, narrow up
Variable speed: Australia
Indian: async connectivity

Video content requires more bandwidth
BBC i-player felt UK wide
20% of episodic content viewing occurs online in US

Different payment structures are evolving
Contracts, pay as you go, all you can eat, capped downloads

Internet delivers on a promise: info that's relevant, bridging time and distance, connecting places that couldn't be connected. People are willing to pay for it. Different internet, than what we experience.

Might not be able to rely on infrastructures we've had in the past: might not be getting better. Some infrastructures not globalizing. India: gave up on electricity to all people, focused on water instead.

Regulating the internet
Participation, citizenship, and control

Gov'ts make strong links between ideas of good citizenship and technology usage

Govt's also play an important role in contextualizing the internet and access to it
Treaty of Waitangi (1840) Maori - shapes contemporary spectrum policy.
Cairo wireless cloud - debate about first application to run on the cloud
Minister for technology: call everyone to prayer, broadcast mp3's of call to prayer

Govt's are controlling content (types and experiences)
Limiting access to sites
Regulating internet practices

Porn, trolls, and social regulation
Internet/web has a complicated dystopian side

Lies about location, context, intent, identity are all possible with the internet
Cornell: researchers found 100% of us online daters lie about something
Websites and services target cheaters and those cheated

GPS sat nav: 5 last locations an Oregon drug dealer was, when pulled over by the police. Oops.

Social "regulation" and "stalking"

What other experiences are created?

Socio technical concerns: new anxieties, old anxieties
Linked to well known set of sociotechnical concerns
Privacy, trust, security, risk, identity, access to inappropriate content, threats to kids, regulation

New devices, infrastructures and services, produces new socio technical concerns
Reliability, access, reputation/images participation, health/wellbeing, sustainability, responsibility, authenticity, authorship, ownership, surveillance control, cultural health, digital literacy, dumbing down, distinctiveness.

Big brother is being reframed
Is google making us stupid?
Does my tivo think I'm gay?
Does the internet know too much about you?

Designing towards the futures
The possibility of many webs

Increasingly there is no single or fixed notion of the web and no single trajectory of adoption or use
Cultural, social, legal, historical, political contexts all matter
Shifting landscape of socio technical concerns and compelling value propositions
Changing interfaces, user paradigms and expectations

New challenges & questions
Non-user and ex-users require a great deal more study
Disconnection and switching off are all interesting phenomenon

"ex-users" - came to the internet, went away again
Never not have it? Data suggests, people not compelled to start, some not compelled to continue to use it
Set of compelling values: global tech, but people buy out. How do we account for that. Fascinating research question

Get away from all tech: buy way out of being connected, switching off
Choices made of being on holiday - dead zones. No broadband. If it did exist, disappointment.

Designing for the future: accommodate both users and non-users

"That's nice dear, but why does intel pay you?"

Can't design for the future without knowing the present and future, understanding human contours and practice.

Not just solving engineering problems, but creating possibilities of experiences.

ROW: rest of world. Language not used at Intel anymore. Challenge: thinking about using social sciences at intel: how do we change the conversation. Not about moore's law, not set of tech features, but a set of possibilities, what inspires and motivates people, frustrates them. Don't know that: building the guts of machine is tough. Reproducing own experiences all over again.

Larger conversation we should all be having: not just our specific products, what are the potentials we're creating? Doesn�t just reflect our own experiences.

Electricity 2.0 making electricity like the internet

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:15:00 +0000

James Governor - Red Monk / Green Monk
Sept 17/08 raw notes

Don't think about how energy networks work

Red Monk: industry analyst business
Do things differently: lots of time using open source tech, social software tools
Started a blog called Green Monk - personal interest

Economics of energy
People wanted to pay him money, once the blog
Speaking about sustainability
Content syndication deals talking about energy, etc.

Tom Raffetery - hyper efficient data centre in Cork Ireland

Most interesting about sustainability space: people creating their own roles
Not a top down phenomenon. It's bottom up. Making a difference within
Their companies

Big Switch - Nicholas Carr
Why can't electricity be more like the internet?
Electricity 1.0

Electricity networks are read only? Why can't we publish?
Does anyone have anything that generates electricity? Publish it?
It's read only. Passive model
Electricity 1.0: top down, controlled. Electricity companies are scared of change, top-down approaches.
Not joined up. They don't connect. Widely separated: islands of electricity and energy.
What if electricity is not available: buggy? Rolling brown-outs.
It's kinda dumb. Static. No flow back and forth in the networks. Controlled system.
Closed network: not easy to participate. Even if you have electricity, could publish, why would they allow that? Locked down system. Traditional approach. How do you get access to that network.
Regularity: important part of energy planning. Have to be a metronome. Anomalies: networks have problems with that.
Network built for an earlier time, when needs were less.
Entire UK electricity network predicated on cups of tea: that's the spike
Eastenders: everyone turns the kettle on for a cup of tea when it's done
Entire provisioning in UK based on capacity spike at 8pm everyday.

Oh Noes!
Soaring oil prices
January 2000 slide from BBC - $30 / barrel graphic
Southwest Airlines: hedged aviation fuel for 5 years
Everyone getting squeezed
Airlines in trouble, can't pay for the energy to move us around
Electricity also getting more expensive

Then comes along�
Renewable Energy - very scary to energy companies
Pretty effective: chart of spain's renewable. Wind accounts for 17% of energy needs at certain points
Politicians: renewables, can't rely, won't cut it.
Demand doesn't meet supply. Wind blows at night. Asleep, when electricity not needed.
Wind effective, but not guaranteed. We're not in control.

Irish market: wind supply, 50% at some times. But over course of year, 6.5%
Can supply majority of needs, in some geographies, at some times, but not all the time

How can you store energy? Can't put it in a box.
Storage: investment really needs to be there.
Exotic storage solutions: limestone caverns, air compression, etc.
Really expensive, unproven.
Hydro electric: pump up when have energy, run down when needed.

If energy created, have to turn it off sometimes. Can't store it.
Wind energy example: NY Times - Maple Ridge Wind
Wind company gets turned off, bumps up against the other grid
Oversupply shutting down operations

Can we make it into a big network? Bi-lateral deal: Scotland & Norway
Scotland: we'll give you wind power, Norway: we'll give you hydro back
Big pipe transfer between two countries. Peer to peer. National Agreement.

Europe vs. Africa: energy transmission
Transfer over long distances is a problem.

Learned so much from the internet about routing, open standards, etc.
Proven principles
Learnt from the internet, apply to other areas. More sophisticated energy markets.

Peak shaving: provisioning for the spike, not just the actual need.

Peak shaving in the home: who's keeping an eye of utilization on the home.
Usage: twice a day: in the morning, then when get home.

Price will be high if everyone wants it at the same time.
Markets work that way.

Demand stimulation
Sometimes we have tons of energy. But no-one says, "hey, use it now"
Please use this surplus
How do you stimulate demand when you have a big pool of it available?
IBM: swimming pool as heat sync in Switzerland
Part of their network

Demand stimulation in the home: night storage heater
Idea is good, don't work that well.

Read/write grid: solar roof graphic
Publish our electricity onto the network.
Solar panel: if people are away, it's wasted energy.
All sorts of ways of generating electricity, but no-one pays us.
Might cut our bills by X, is this a good investment?

Not impossible to move to read/write
German market is interesting
Long view on energy resources

If you want to publish onto the grid, guaranteed pricing available in Germany
Electric devices: cars, segways, etc.
Cars as huge batteries: full of energy, when needed, take it back.
Subsidizing market to have distributed storage capacity
Distributed storage a big challenge

Eric Schmidt (Google) quote: I could plug in my car, make money cost shifting, climate change, etc.
Efforts in energy management might be the biggest revolution for all of us
Invest in wind power, water power
Data centres off shore in the ocean, on huge boats
Very innovative thinking

Metering: key to this
Infrastructure requirements
Hacking your home electric
Twitter: andy_house
Someone's house. Andy Stafford Clark - IBM
Build a better mouse trap: instrumented his house
His house twitters and talks about the high energy use.
"I'm depressed. my house has more followers than I do"

To know me is to change me: Current cost meter picture
Only when you measure, you change your behaviours
Green IT -- IT doesn't pay its own electricity bill
Only when you pay the bill, you change your behaviour
Current cost meter: tells usage, watts, cost, etc.
Totally grassroots movement
Home hacking for energy. People enjoy hacking

Barriers to participation?
In energy networks: face the Berlin wall
Politics are a big deal here. Energy lobbyists.
Don't want to see change.

Difficulty of storage
Difficulty of transmission
Have to storm the barricades. Call for bottom up.
Emergent: like the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The electranet presumes that every citizen is a producer and seller of electricity as well as a consumer - Jock Gill.

Why are we so passive, waiting for someone else to change it for us?

Electricity 2.0
Architecture of participation
Bottom up and up down
Hackable
Massive routable network
Multiple sources
New entrants
Open api's
Publish and subscribe
Read and write
Sustainable

Clinton Foundation work
Cisco routing technology in Lisbon - basis of energy routing technology
Completely new market for Cisco. Routing the new "electricity internet" - Lisbon as a proof of concept

Sustainable: do have some scared moments
Have polar bear moments
Sustainability is really important: but let's get real. Flew from London to New York. Last week, Seattle.
Use a service called Dopplr, calculates carbon usage

Energy networks are creaking: demand greater than supply

Yes, I flew here. Sustainability day one: putting food on table. Not about hairshirts, but need to start agitating for change.

And that's it! The new electricity network.

Tom Raftery - was supposed to be here.

Green Monk blog:
http://greenmonk.net/

Feels like the internet space in 1995. Analyst business. Public relations, investor relations, but no analyst space.

Drink Fat Tire Beer: supplied by wind power

Bit miles: like food miles (local food, eating, carbon getting food to us)
Organic, but grown in Chile
Bit miles: moral imperative to digitize: long tail is profoundly green
Data centres have energy costs: 2%
Digitize, don't print everything out. Atoms have a cost. Electrons cost lower.

The Real, Long Lasting (and negative) impact of Web 2.0 and Technology Adoption - Fraser Kenton: Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:30:00 +0000

Fraser Kelton, Adaptive Blue
Sept 17/08 - raw notes

VP of business dev @ Adaptive Blue

1. Web 2.0 trends
2. Impact
3. Ways to adapt

Product pitch: Funded by union sq ventures, product downloaded 1.6M times, NY Times implementation, etc.

1. Web 2.0 trends
Since 2003 trends
Nuclear winter: 2001 to 2003 innovation not really there
Trends: open source software + commoditization of hardware
Given rise to capital efficient companies
Past 5 years: one or two people, start a company at a coffee shop
Decrease in cost required to start a company = a ton of startups

APIs, cloud computing
Build on top of things look google maps
Utilizing Amazon S3, Google, etc. Building a layer of innovation on top of that
Ability to stand on the shoulders of giants - google, yahoo, msft, etc.

Blogs + aggregators
Increase of velocity and frequency of information
Discovering a new startup is faster

Social features + read/write web
Huge network effects
Increased participation of the sites we're on, invested
Uploaded thousands of photos, saved our favourite bookmarks
Built on back of consumers and their activity

4 trends:
Capital efficient startups
Ability to leverage great amounts of existing innovation
Increased velocity
Engaged user base

Clayton Christensen: this stuff didn't exist when he wrote his book
World he discussed, how web 2.0 has impacted it, then ways to survive & thrive in the world
Harvard Biz Prof: crossing the chasm
Laid out a model
Growth and adoption: tech adoption curve

Innovators
Early adopters
Early majority
Late majority
Laggards

Psychological preferences of these groups (maximizers -> satisficers?)
Prefer that others deal with the pain prior to

Goal: focus on market segment you're currently in
Focus on innovators and their needs, feedback provide, to step into next market segment
Critical at every step along the way
Can't just shoot for mainstream adoption, product is not ready for it yet.

Use each segment to move forward

Company failure zone: early adopters / mainstream majority
Geeky enough to work through your products problems before the early majority

Well known theory

Web 2.0 has changed the curve and the strategy on top of it.
4 trends have systematically changed the marketplace.
Chasm has changed and the way we cross it

Capital efficient companies
Too many of them, hard to discern the signal from the noise
Too many young startups to seek them out
Tech crunch 50: filtered lists of companies that launched.
Hundreds of companies - how can any early adopter figure it out?
Increase signal & noise

Leverage existing innovation: negative impact
Introduce a feature on top of google maps: low innovation
Just a feature, not a product
Single idea, lend themselves to being copied

Velocity of information
Competition between brothers anecdote
Used to be able to hire PR companies, you were well funded, you got attention
Now, not so much

Engaged + networked user base
I'm committed and invested to flickr. Thousands of photos
I'm not going to change. Lock in effect is occuring
Network has gravity, not going to move
Not going to switch to new bookmarking, even if better, because I'm
Happy/committed to the system
Non-technological reasons for people to not discover your product
We have the site we're happy with, not the best from a tech perspective, but
Invested into it

2 big impacts on tech adoption
Increase number of web companies due to capital efficiency + velocity & frequency + non tech costs = difficult to acquire the attention of the early adopter

The early adopter used to seek out the technology
Easier to do so previously
Changes the way the strategy works on top of the tech curve
Christensen: foothold, target niche, early adopters
No longer can you find them

Copycat companies + 1 feature company with minimal innovation = difficult to retain the attention of early adopters

If they discover you from the noise, they won't read a white paper
Read a bullet point
Complexity in the product, deliver the benefit? Good luck
Compare to Christensen's strategy: early adopters would help you refine
Now: early adopters won't even ready copy on your website

Web 2.0 adoption paradox: obtain attention, retain attention

Have to rise about noise, but then because you're innovative, they fall off, because you're too complex

Level of simplicity to retain attention is often times the reason why you're not obtaining their attention in the first place.

2 people who can help to solve this
Lauren Conrad, Richard Belzer

"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - arthur c clarke

Make it magic: google is magic
Capture attention of early adopters by making it magic?
Retain them, because don't need to see the details?

Lauren Conrad - MTV, Laguna Beach: how'd she get to be a big star, The Hills
Augment current system
Bring additional value
Deliver immediate benefit
Build implicitly
Back your way into rich features

Friendfeed as an example of something that built on top of existing systems
Attracted early adopters
Backing into a full system -- added features to their system
Didn't try to rebuild all of the services, didn't change behaviour, won over early adopter crowd
Manage digital life on this site
Rapidly grown into adopter base, pulling a Lauren Conrad

Richard Belzer - actor / character "munsch"
16 years - outlived every single show he's been on
Single character, thriving in a world where shows he's been on, coming and going
All of Law & Order, x-files, same character, same characteristics

Integrate into current system
Deliver a new feature or improve existing feature
Bring new value
Grow on the back of the current entity

All different shows, same guy. 8 tv series, but the guy is in all of them
HBO to ABC to movies (cross platform)

Summize / Twitter Search
Summize launches: fully rich feature world, red/orange/green, a complete system to tell you the sentiment of products that exist across the web
Flash memory reader example "swell opinions"

Scrapped being a feature rich product, became one feature for one company: twitter search
Feature that doesn't currently exist, let's own it.
Hid the magic behind the scenes
Zero adoption to being acquired by twitter in a few months
They could have powered sentiment search across the web, had they not been acquired

Worlds changed, tech adoption curve has shifted
Biggest chasm: find, retain early adopters
Two people as to how you can do it: LC and Mr Munsch

Jason Fried / 37 Signals on Lessons Learned: Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Jason Fried / 37 signals
Sept 17/08 - raw talk notes

1. Momentum
Graph of project - cone of uncertainty like diagram
People trend towards losing interest
Don't want anything longer than 2 weeks

2. Planning is vastly overrated
No roadmaps, no specifications, no projections
3 6 9 months: rough ideas, but forget it.

Don't write specs, don't write design docs
We don't do them
Don't push back enough
Spec doc: contain a thousand yeses - no push back
Lead to illusion of agreement
All read the same thing, interpret them differently
Can't come to authentic agreement
Don't do projections: big huge guesses
Especially financial projections

3. Get rid of abstractions
Work on the real thing, right now
Not what we might do in 2 months, but what's happening now

4. Decisions are temporary
Paralyzed by decisions, because think they're permanent
Do 4 day work weeks: recent announcement
Pay for hobbies
You guys are fucking crazy
Only 12 people
If 100 people, you can't do that
Not setting in stone (for now, this is what works)
Optimize for now

5. Red flag words
Need, can't easy, everyone, nobody
Lots of needs, but really few necessities
Watch out for red flag words

6. Interruption is the enemy of productivity
David & Jason: chicago/denmark story
Got a lot less stuff done when working together
Closer in proximity, less work you get done.
Invite interruption
Tap on the shoulder, required meetings, call someone's name, check this out, phones and blackberries
Avg work day = work moments
No span of uninterrupted time anymore
"solitary work = real work?" is that the subtext?
What is "actual work"
A fragmented day is not a productive day
Only see each other once a week
Personal interaction isn't valuable? Stay away from each other. Anti-collaboration?
Passive collaboration instead of active collaboration? Time shift collaboration.
Real-time interruptions vs. async interruptions?

7. Focus on what doesn't change
Tech & software: obsessed with change
Find out what matters today and what matters ten years from now

8. Worrying about things that don't matter yet
Reasons projects are late: sketch with a sharpie, not a pencil
Accuracy vs. precision (resolution of a pencil vs. a sharpie)
Can't create details: which is good, early on, it doesn't matter

The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it will be to launch it

9. Underdoing
Cold war going on in software world: out-do (feature war)
Keep doing more than everyone else
Hard to win the cold war
Not something a small business can compete in
Underdo: one-down, not one-up
Target non-consumption (Clayton Christiansen - innovators dilemma, solutions)
Non-consumers: existing products are too expensive or just not accessible
Solutions are already upmarket: want to be consumers, but no options (think road bikes)
So aim downmarket

10. Find the right size
2 things that grow forever: business and tumours
Find your right size. Doesn't have to be a billion company
Don't need to set the goal to be huge
Grow slow: 10 to 100 in right year, you might miss the size
Don't have to be in a hurry, find the right size
Ricardo Semler - Maverick (Brazillian business author)
Oxford U: why aren't there oxfords everywhere? The one that exists, is about the right size.
If there was 100, they wouldn't be Oxford.

11. Follow the chefs
Inspiration from famous chefs
Lagasse, Batali, Flay, Child, Oliver
Not the best, but they out-teach, out share, out contribute competitors
Watch me. Show you this isn't hard. Here's my secrets, buy the book.
Not afraid to put ideas out there. Not afraid that people next to them will put them out of business.
Out teach, out share, out contribute.
What's your cookbook? How can you share?
Getting Real: everything that they know. No secrets, not in the book

Company with customers, lucky, fans, even luckier, audience, very lucky.

12. Always be questioning

Why are we doing this
What problem are we solving
Is this actually useful
Are we adding value
Will this change behaviour
Is there an easier way

13. Give up on hard problems
Nothing wrong with being lazy
Lots of easy problems that need solving
To be good, take on hard problems
Abundance of easy problems
Not worth solving hard problems, leave them to your competitors
(Solve 10 little ones in 1 month)

14. Work less
Industry plagued with workaholics
32 vs 40 hrs
Work less, it's better
Work is just as good and people are happier

Question & Answer session: Let's talk - 20 minutes to talk

1. Planning is vastly overrated: how do you align that to a strategic goal: 10 years out
Can't run a 5 billion company where you have shareholders aligning things with strategy
Even if you change your tactics

If you don't plan, how do you align with big picture ideas
Don't care, not what we are: big rich huge companies: planning preventing things from going wrong

Basecamp: big idea per product: communications is all about PM
Is this feature still relevant to the idea
Keep stuff out of our products

Big picture idea: keep referring back to it

2. Advice in an in-house situation: half the org is tied to an older idea of software development.
How do you convince this behaviour that there's another way?

Suggestion: people pay attn to results
Find a small project, show you can do it in 2 weeks
Skunkworks - don't swear at your company
Should swear more.
People work better: fuck you!
Heckle!

Find a smaller project, slowly change things. Start at the edges

3. 2 weeks, momentum: 6/7 months until you see results?
Small projects out of big projects?
Don't do stuff that takes 6 or 7 months
Release half in 3 months, best in 3 months
Second half might have been the wrong half anyhow
Cut your projects in half, cut it way back
First version should be barely releasable.
Chunk into smaller and smaller bits

Basecamp: new feature (comments on everything)
A month worth of work

4. How do you sell your customers: cut scope?
20 pages to 10 pages? Not in the client services business anymore
Used to do long proposals
No-one reads them
Price, how long
Long proposals: think you have to do them
Cut proposals down
Client work: proposals were one or 2 pages
Doesn't work for everybody - how the client reacts
Getting out of client work: short answer: what was so bad about it?

5. What's so bad about client work?
Depressing
Not that satisfying
Lucky if you get 3 good clients
Won't let you do work. Just what happens
Build our own stuff, build our own client
Do things you think is right. Project make yourself your own client
Shifted from client to product

6. How to be a great client for a vendor?
Rail on clients: but then when I became it. Pain in the ass.
Why are you hiring them in the first place, trust them, stop trying to do
The project yourself
Spend less money on something� ? Stupid: answers are temporary
Respect them more. Disconnect between client and firm.
Listen to them. Client services: weird: plumber tells you something, you do it.
Designer, you second guess them.

7. How do you know when to hire if you don't plan?
We hire when it hurts
Not hiring in anticipation, we hire for stuff people need to do right now
And hire for stuff we're doing right now
Time to hire an accountant�. Not hiring an HR person yet.
Not in anticipation, hire people we need, replace jobs we're already doing

8. Unique culture: how do you find people that fit in?
How do you brainwash people?
How do you immerse them in culture.
Drop people in, let them figure it out
Don't have a training process.
Campfire: real time chat tool, most important to them.
Jump in, they're in. See how people work together.
Tend to hire people we've worked with before (open source world)
Try people out: 1 month at a time, weren't the right fit, temporary decision

9. As a company, working at one thing at a time?
6 products, Ruby on Rails, lot of stuff going on at once.
Multitasking is overated and costly
Stick to a product at a time
Switch off to something else, basecamp to highrise or backpack
Tried everyone working on same thing for 1 month: in theory worked okay, doesn't work well
Broke off into project teams, then move off to something else
Do all the same thing? No. Different roles. Programmers, Sys Admin, Design, etc.
Design screens first, then code.

10. Best way to motivate users to give feedback?
Make mistakes: they give you a lot of feedback. Give them great products. No shortage. Do a survey every now and again, but most part, just get customer feedback, sit there, get 150 emails / day.
Handful of feedback, customer forums, scour the web. Monitor that. Go out and find it if its not in your sphere.
No worries, they'll give it to you. Most will be negative, but not a bad thing. Not pure praise. That's not honest, nor is it useful.

11. How do you allow feedback to focus on featureset or development
Take it all in, make decisions on behalf of customers
Do what they're telling you, but a few of those things
Customers tell you what's right for them, but maybe not the product.
Museum curator role. Does this collection of features need this? Editor, curator, what's right.

Technique: read feedback, throw it out
Don't keep a list of all requests
Huge ass lists don't get looked at
Listen, then forget about it, things important, keep coming up
Customer base will remind you, due to frequency of request, what's important

12. Sharpie: stay away from details - visual mockups: paper and sharpies? Or other methods.
Ryan, Jason, Jamie: no set "you gotta do it"
Sketch on paper first
Then Jason goes straight into HTML
Paper to HTML, make it real. Share it with someone else

13. How do you avoid unforseen issues (miniscule detail): comes back to bite me
Jason: just don't know. Only know when something is being used and real. Can't anticipate it.
You adapt. Otherwise you're just guessing.

IDEO on Knowledge Sharing: Web 2.0 Expo NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:57:00 +0000

My raw notes from the IDEO presentation on knowledge sharing at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC - Sept 17/08 @ 9:00AM
http://webexny2008.crowdvine.com/talk/by_track/40

Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood, IDEO

Approach to knowledge sharing and collaboration
Innovation as a buzzword
Thousands of quotes about innovation

Who is ideo
600 people
30 years
8 offices

What ideo does
First mouse for apple, first laptop, etc.
Resort work in india
n-gage for nokia
Kidney transporter
Prada stores
Kickstart pump
Samsung screens
HBO: cable content, on the web, etc.
Diversity of clients

Design thinking
Human centred work
Social, cultural, cognitive, physical
Don't just ask questions, observe behaviours

Understand, observe, synthesize, (visualize, realize, evaluate, refine), implement
IDEO process

Iterative circle of rapid prototyping (viz, realize, eval, refine): early and often

Clients they work with: clever slide of names (red/white text on black)

Strong desire for disruptive innovation (vs incremental innovations)

From efficiency to innovation
Ford model T to lego blocks (picture)
Industrial age companies to information age

"What we're doing now is right" vs. "the rules are always changing"
Efficient / effective vs. adapt & innovate
Defined, fixed problems vs ambigious, dynamic problems
Divide problems and responsibilities vs. increase communication and collaboration

Products & services (industrial vs. information age cont)
From simple to complex
From products to experiences
Individuals vs. ecosystems
Local vs. global (? - really?)

Hierarchies vs. networks (how orgs are changing)

Nice simple hand-drawn graphics (white hiearchy diagram on black slide)

Distributed organizations
Self contained units in various places around the globe
Sharing between multiple locations is difficult

Adhoc structures
Personal networks are limited by who you know
Find other people across the personal networks

Doug: wrap on who we are, what we're thinking

Knowledge Sharing @ IDEO. Pass to Gentry
Project lead

KS @ IDEO - 1.5 years
Overcome limitations in our org and other structures
Questions: how can we find ways to empower our teams to learn from one another, benefit from experience
How can we connect offices around the world?
Enable collab across skills and passions & interests
Reveal individuals expertise and experience

Experiments with�
Blogs, wikis, telepresence
Social networking, crowdsourcing

The Tube: intranet system
Home for intranet tools we've put together

Combines social networking, with project pages
Incorporated asset management system, tags, commenting, etc.

Spaces - wiki system: working well, more about
Blog system, movable type
Portal type

Released tube in middle of march: everyone got a people page
By Sept, 350 people signed up
Can't force anyone to do anything at IDEO, but graph of adoption
80% adoption
Project pages: over 1000 by August 2008 since March 1/08

Wiki: steady growth - just about 10,000 pages on the system, only 500 people
Very actively used. Very happy with that as well.

Seven Lessons we've learned along the way

1. Build pointers to people
Just get people communicating together
Key bits of info that help you find a person
Facilitate conversation
Get it out of the db, get it into a communication (not just knowledge dumping)
Borrowed ideas about facebook, for example

(IDEO Eyes Open New York (book?))

"Me in 3" - 3 high level statements of who you are, what you do in 3 sentences

Project pages, point back to people
Core team members, contributors list on the project pages
Automated through timecard systems

Rex: marketing content
Shimano bike example

Search example: all interaction designers in Palo Alto
Nice list of faces
Graph view
Shows resources

Slider that pushes project out
Resource slider is so cool

2. Help groups help themselves
Spaces: ThoughtFarmer
Turned it loose, no formal training
Emergence of pages within the system
Every dept: disciplines, interaction design community, have big pages
Keep track of things, meeting notes, etc.
Saw an interesting thing: passions
Spaces dedicated to groups that care about an area: ie: sustainability
Social impact: group has formed since the tool was implemented
Create your own spaces
Benefit of wikis: don't have to set that up all the time
Small team couldn't do it otherwise.

3. Keep it simple and intuitive
Tried about 25 different tools
Simple, but difficult criteria
WYSIWYG editing
LDAP auth
Automatic navigation
No training & setup
ThoughtFarmer logo
Make participation and easy as possible

4. Go where people already are
"work in the flow"
Blogs: lots of staff have blogs
Paralleled email distrib lists
Died in inbox: email where info goes to die
Feedburners: in-house rss to email subscription service
All blogs email
Then customize parts: nice effect - post goes out, everyone gets inbox
Blog posts are being read

Status updates for people pages - large displays
Real time stream of status updates. Very cool flash caf� screens
Watched status update changes. People know updates will be seen in publci space
Using displays to encourage content creation

Touch service, dig around, etc.
Great responses to put names to faces

5. Reward individual participation
Altruism doesn't quite work
Rewarding to me as an individual
Big spike at the start of the graph: seeded the wiki to start
Benefits info: HR did a lot of work
Took all the benefits, salaries have been recalibrated: all that was done to launch
Carrot that got people involved, rest was history

Motivate to build up people & project pages
"My work" - concept - building a portfolio of work

6. Aggregate the myriad of voices
Content goes through the roof
Good and bad
Gather / filter is tough
Expirimented with different aggregating methods - home pages
Status updates, disciplines, all locations who are new, aggregated blogs, tags, etc.
Nothing new for a web20 perspective, but this is all self-organizing

Projects home, also done the same way
Have a "digg" type button (applause button)
Keep the names involved. Name carries a bit more value in their community
Recently applauded projects

7. Iterate early and often
Larger standing tradition in IDEO - fail early and often, succeed faster
Pushed 20 new features on Monday, every 2 weeks, rolling stuff out
No substitute for putting stuff out there and the org shows you what's working
And what's not

What's next?
Continue to develop stuff
Using own organization as guinea pigs
How IDEO can collaboration with the outside world
Knowledge sharing with our clients

5 or 10 minutes for questions

How does project workload get generated?
System called "the brain" - extension of MS project, forecasting, pulling data out
Using project pages to manage that process
Sketch a team, pick times, feeds the graph (entirely contained)

Easy to use: looks great: associated images, etc.
Tougher things to get: having folks prep images before they go up?
How do get UI to get people to add images.
A: bulk uploading (many at once)
IDEO has a visual culture - spaces to put them, community wants to put them in there
Some images auto added (digital asset mgmt system)

How many in the team? KS
Started with team of 3 or 4, did research, strategy, HF
6 or 7 people
Networked graph: need help, body of contractors, come in and help
Another 20 people who contributed, but core team

Ways that you track or quantify benefits?
No quantitative ways (other than growth / utilization): key metric
But not an ROI to our business
Qualitatively, a ton of feedback
Helping people share across offices - Palo Alto to Munich

Migrate from IDEO to the world? How does that work?
Fairly early: insight gathering (ethnog) to innovation, concept generation
Ways that we can involve communities, broader in reach
Add to our one on one in person, with virtual insight gathering?

Project pages? What's sorts of info is in there?
Vision: from lead, to team working on it, to sanitized version of key assets, process, research docs, sanitized, sometimes marketing team (professional quality story telling assets) - what it's done
All the people involved, what they did. Name of a project gets discussed, go in and look

How do you deal with negative aspects of intranets? Not everyone wants to participate in
Knowledge sharing that jeopardizes the whole network?

Fortunate that the culture at IDEO is collaborative. Hired on basis of working with others.
No issues: system is transparent, no locks on the doors, haven't had any malicious behaviours
No negative effects, other settings, perhaps, openness, transparency and trust, works well in IDEO.

the longest day ride: take two

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

I guess I'm not the only one daft enough to propose a big bike ride on summer solstice. A quick google of "longest day ride" has revealed that others, like me and my friends, have done similar rides in the past and will probably do so in the future.

And after the long winter/spring rainy weather we've had here in Vancouver, who can blame us for wanting to get out and ride until the darkness settles in?

This year the ride was a bit different -- a new group of adventurers were keen on tackling the dream: a 290km circumnavigation of the Sunshine Coast & Vancouver Island in one day. Plans were set in motion earlier this year to have previous participants Tim and Jason also exact revenge on the undulating roads and late ferry schedules, but business travel and a serious season-ending injury sidelined both. Jason's broken ribs, collarbone, scapula, and punctured lung suffered at a Coastal Thursday Nighter was a sombre reminder of the risk involved in cycling -- one that I remembered all too well as I visited him at VGH the night before the big ride. Jason jokingly gave me his spot for the ride... I laughed and said I'd pass this year.

So it was that with Jason (one of the instigator's of last year's lunacy), in mind that 12 brave souls met at the Bean Around the World on Cornwall in Kits for the second running of the Longest Day Ride. It was 5:30 AM, the weather forecast was favourable -- not great, but not cold and rainy either -- and 5 Cat 1/2 riders were looking nervous. Only one, Paul Beard, had done the ride before. The others, Jeff, Owen, Andrew, and young Mike, were all first timers. Jak, the ever supportive 1/2 team manager, provided vehicle support and encouragement.

The guys would need it.

This year a second group would do the "short ride" -- a mere 220km out and back to Earl's Cove. Not having the pressure to make the 10:15 AM ferry in Earl's Cove, we could ride at a fairly leisurely pace and make it back down the coast in time to catch the 2:30 PM ferry back to Horseshoe Bay. 6.5 hrs to do 164km of rolling roads seemed about enough time. We certainly didn't need to ride at 40kmh the entire way.

Corky, Bryan, Ted, Ben, and Kenny joined me for the B Team.

So 11 of us rolled out of the Bean at 6:00 AM and cruised along the low road to Horseshoe Bay for 6:50. It was a nice ride and we saw little traffic so early on a Saturday.

Breakfast and caffeine at Blenz followed, along with the loading onto the Ferry to Langdale. We left at 7:20 AM and sailed the 40 minutes across to the Coast.

The ride starts immediately with the "bypass" climb off the ferry up towards Sechelt. Ben and Ted shot by and joined the lead group -- they were keen on helping pull some of the way for the guys, taking a small amount of pressure off of the 5. We watched them get further and further away at the top of the 2km climb, then after a few corners towards the top end of Gibsons, they were gone. If they were on the same pace as last year, they'd put 10 minutes on us by Sechelt easily.

Like two booster rockets left behind by the Space Shuttle, Ben and Ted would work hard for the others until they couldn't work anymore or they reached the ferry, whichever came first. But now, we'd have to wait another 2 hrs to find out.

Back in the B Group, we pulled through evenly and steadily doing over 40kmh on the flat bits, descending over 60kmh and climbing at a pace that worked for all 4 of us. Bryan and Cork were sporting high-tech Garmin devices, recording the ride with GPS data.

We had a small mechanical stop near Red Roofs Rd, where at the top we discovered the source of Cork's mal-shifting. A missing spacer for his 10 speed cassette had it wobbling a bit and not wanting to engage in that 25 at the back. But really, like Cork needed a 25. Pshaw.

Near the 2hr 10min mark, I noted that the guys better be on the ferry by this point. We were past Garden Bay, but not much. There was roughly 30min still to ride -- the pace wasn't easy either. It was tempo for much, as indicated by my heart rate monitor. I kept wondering how I'd managed to make it last year.

It was humid. With knees, vests, arm warmers, and jersey pockets stuffed with extra gear, I was really overdressed for the occasion. But after last year's freak downpours and frigid winds, I didn't want to be caught out. This year the soaking came from the humidity -- I was drenched 30 minutes into the ride.

We glided through the final corner before the ferry terminal at Earls Cove to find an empty parking lot, no sign of any ferry, and Ben & Ted rolling around. I was pleased to know that the guys had made it -- at least the first leg.

The 6 of us caught up in the small cafe next to the ferry terminal, scarfing back some baked goods, and refilling on water and Gatorade. Ben tried to convince us that Ted was a Nascar fan. We contemplated whether the 2:30 ferry from Langdale was doable. And at just after 11:00 AM we headed back out to ride our 82km back down the road.

It was a great ride down -- 6 guys in a nice formation, rolling through and keeping a pretty good job of staying together. It's not often that you get to ride 80km with little or no stop lights. Even the longest rides in the Fraser Valley have you stopping at intersections or 4-ways. But not on the coast. There's literally 3 lights you encounter. Makes me wonder why we don't do that ride more often.

We stopped at a Wheatberries Bakery and Cafe at 2:00 PM, took in some more caffeine and pizza, sandwiches, and baked goodies, then at 2:10 bombed down the curvy descent into Gibsons, past Molly's Reach, towards Soames Hill, and the awaiting ferry. We pulled in with 10 minutes to spare (they had started loading) and were on our way back to Vancouver on the 2:30 sailing.

Kenny opted for 4 wheels on the way home after doing his longest ride (by double) since April. Ben, Cork, Ted, Bryan, and myself headed back over the Lions Gate in the direction of Kits. "Chocolate milkshake," said a voice in my head -- and a Vera Burger. And so at 4:00 PM, we returned to our starting place, 220km and 2800m of climbing later, to tuck into our post-ride meal.

It was at that very time that the A Group was getting off their ferry - in Earl's Cove. They'd missed the Powell River to Comox ferry by about 6 minutes (their estimate), much the same as we missed it last year. Their ride down the coast and into Gibsons would eventually put them onto the 8:20 Ferry back home, landing in Kits in the dark at 10:00 PM.

Their day was full of stories and epic pulls and big wattage. I'll let Jak or Jeff or Paul tell that tale. Hopefully they'll post something soon.

We met up at the Coppertank that night for some more calories -- pizza and beer this time -- and speculated on whether it could be done. Motor pacing. TT bikes. Pro riders... All options were considered and reconsidered.

So year two, it remains elusive and possibly un-doable. I'm not sure how many years in a row you need to try in order to declare it impossible. I guess we'll find out in 2009.

Congratulations to all the guys for a great ride and their fundraising efforts for BC Children's Hospital. A huge thanks to Jak for giving up his summer solstice to drive the Sunshine Coast and text message the internet with progress updates.

And thoughts of a speedy recovery to Jason, who no doubt, will want a second shot at that ride next year.

best birthday card ever

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:34:00 +0000

Don't send a lame Birthday eCard.
Try JibJab Sendables!

Thanks everyone. That was quite the sing-along.

rock and roll velodrome

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:20:00 +0000

Some nice video handiwork of the action-packed racing at the Burnaby Velodrome.

Captures some of the moment's from the last May event. Well done.

writing lots, writing little

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 06 May 2008 04:04:00 +0000

May has arrived.

Officially a few days ago, but it really seemed like May in Vancouver today with the warmth, sunshine, and green. And it's been a very intensive few months at work. I'm leading a large website redesign project, have been writing quite a few proposal responses this spring, and am conservatively guessing my word count to be somewhere in the 60,000 to 80,000 word mark.

As such, writing anything of substance on this blog has suffered somewhat. To all of my 10 non-yacht-stalking readers, my apologies.

I have taken up a much smaller form of publishing on the web, with a Tumblr site that I setup last year and decided to dust off in March. I'm using it to capture quotes and ideas from books I'm reading and photos I'm taking. Less of what I'm writing and more of what I'm reading. Not sure it will be much interest to anyone other than myself really, but it places the ideas in time, in context with the images from my everyday life, the passing of the seasons, etc. I like the elegance of the publishing format, the minimal effort required to add something, and the end result. A bit of a scrapbook, really.

I've also taken to posting to Twitter on occasion, still questioning its utility and relevance.

Posting content like that probably isn't helping Twitter further the cause of relevance.

Certainly our recent Tubetastic marketing campaign for ThoughtFarmer has utilized it with a degree of success to communicate with enterprise 2.0 pundits and experts. It's a source of traffic referrals to our site that has grown over the past few months of use.

Of course, good old blog posts about the product, like the one on ReadWriteWeb and this evening's TechCrunch post are better for reach and acquisition. But I've been able to have a few quick exchanges on Twitter that I might not have had otherwise.

So that's that. At some point, when my writing for work wraps up, I'll try to be inspired enough to write something of substance here.

Or, when in doubt, I'll post something about bike racing. Like the fact that World Tuesday Night Championships are starting up tomorrow here in Vancouver or how Cycling Fans Anonymous is the best cycling blog going.

But perhaps it's just as well. As my Tang's Noodle House fortune cookie told me tonight: "Even a brief pause to rest should be worth taking now." Fair enough.

Burnaby Velodrome Six Day

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:22:00 +0000

Spent a couple of nights this past week at the Burnaby Velodrome, watching the Six Day race. In 2005/2006, I was fit enough to ride the madison and suffered night after night against a lot easier competition than what's up for this event. Pearce & Friedman from Slipstream are the world ranked #2 madison pairing and they're currently 2 laps down on Symmetrics' Tuft & Bell -- a couple of amazing riders in their own right, Tuft the #1 ranked cyclist in North and South America for 2007 and Bell a seasoned World Cup track rider, as well as an impressive road cyclist.

Anyhow, one more night - if you have a chance, go watch. It's amazing.

And if you don't get a chance, here's what it's like to ride the boards of Burnaby. You too can take a Learn to Ride lesson and experience the thrill for yourself.

Edward T. Hall meets ThoughtFarmer

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:50:00 +0000

I read the Hidden Dimension in second year university doing my undergraduate degree in Communications. Working in IT, it's not often you get to dust an anthropology book from the 1960's, but Hall's notion of proxemics seemed like a fitting backdrop for trying to put a structure to the social software problem of activity notifications and the potential firehouse of information you can be drinking from in a busy corporate social intranet, like those that ThoughtFarmer affords.

So it's a work in progress, but today I blogged about the proxemics of the intranet over at the ThoughtFarmer blog. I think it's got some legs and is a meaningful way of thinking about the gravity of content, interpersonal relationships in an enterprise 2.0 setting, and the problems of notification / activity monitoring in complex information environments.

Should be interesting to hear what people think.

on the giving of gifts

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 21:03:00 +0000

Every year around this time, give or take a week or so, I head out to purchase gifts for Christmas. I try to stay close to home, accomplishing my gift buying on foot on Broadway or throughout Kits if possible. And if not, then within walking distance of my office in Gastown. I try to stay away from malls. They can be an efficient use of your time at certain periods throughout the year, but this is not one of those periods. I don't mind crowds that much, but supporting local businesses that make my neighbourhood so enjoyable during the other 11 non Christmas shopping months of the year seems important to me.

Santa visits OpenRoad

I also sit down and read a brilliant little essay by Clive Dilnot called "The Gift." It's an essay from the book The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. There are many brilliant essays in the collection, but this one and its opening few pages always prepare me for creating my list and heading out into the blustery December weather and the crowds.

Below is the first major passage of the essay.

A paradox of gift giving, often alluded to, is that when conducted as obligation, it is profoundly depressive. There is something wrong here. After all, the act of giving, if we disengage it from Christmas and its horrors, should be a positive thing. The gift ought to be that which, when proffered by the giver, induces a double joy -- that of the receiver in the object, and that of the giver at the receiver's joy. Neither of these joys is inconsiderable. It is worth analyzing them because they tell us something about how things work for us and, therefore, something about the character of design activity.

Ideally the receiver of the gift obtains a double joy. First, and most obviously, there is a joy in the thing itself, the object received. The proper gift gives happiness because it matches perfectly one moment of the receiver's needs and desires. Sometimes it even helps receivers discover and satisfy desires they did not know they had. Second, the gift gives joy because the successful gift affirms a positive relationship between giver and receiver. It is concrete or evident proof that the giver knows, and has understood, recognized, affirmed, and sought to concretely meet the other's most intimate needs and desires. Moreover, the receiver finds additional joy in being the subject of the imaginative work undertaken by the giver in securing and giving this gift. The successful gift proves to us that our relationship to the giver is more than merely formal or nominal.

For the giver, the joy is perhaps more subtle, but nonetheless significant. It is a joy, first and foremost, in pleasing others, in getting to know their tastes, interest, and character, in recognizing and accepting their needs and desires (even if contrary to our own). But it is also a pleasure in successfully finding a material thing that successfully concretizes these desires - that gives receivers "exactly what they wanted."

Note that the gift is not just the thing itself. If the nature of the object or product that we proffer is essential, it is, nonetheless, not all we give. What the giver gives beside the gift-object is recognition -- which both Lacan and Hegel recognized as the fundamental human desire, which we crave above all else.

- from "The Gift" by Clive Dilnot in The Idea of Design, MIT Press, 1996.

2007 Canadian Cyclocross Championships

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:34:00 +0000

Headed up to Kamloops this weekend with EV'er Jason Thompson (yes, that Jason Thompson) to check out the Cyclocross BC Provincial and Canadian National Championships. A nifty course, in Riverside Park, put together by Cycling BC VP Mountain Bike Henry Pejril, who happens to have now organized a Mountain Bike Nationals, Road Nationals (twice in Kamloops) and now Cyclocross Nationals. Impressive.

I took some pics of the event and even some small videos on my phone. The anticipated Plaxton vs. Reain battle didn't materialize due to Plaxton busting his seat and not having a spare bike. And Reain didn't manage to defend his title, losing to a hard-charing Garrigan. No Kabush, no Tolouse, no Pinner -- last year in Nanaimo was perhaps a bit more exciting and hard fought, not to take away anything from the two man duel that did materialize.

In the women's race, the 3-way Bessette vs. Simms vs. Sydor race was pretty entertaining. Simms took it in the end, leading into the final run-up, which I managed to catch on video. It was anyone's guess as to who would win. Sydor looked to be struggling anytime she had to get off the bike and run, Bessette and Simms had tested each other the day before during Provincials as a warm-up. It was a close race.

Here's a few 30 second tidbits from the camera.

Elite Women Start:

Elite Women First Lap:

Elite Women Lap 2 Run-up:

Elite Women: Sand!

Elite Women: Last run-up (30 seconds from finish)

And the crazy-fast Elite Men start

Yes, that was the sound of a train in the background. Very apropos.

All in all, some great racing. And some very entertaining fans.

More cowbell! Ukraine is weak! More carnage!

information r/evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:49:00 +0000

Another good video from Michael Wesch. A shame I missed IDEA 2007 this year. Next year.

all persuasive influences

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 05:02:00 +0000

Lately, I've been binging...

When are binging and compulsive behaviors a problem?

Binging and compulsive behaviors are a problem when they:

Interfere with your recovery which includes trying to control consumption of a target element such as food, alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc.
Are done in secrecy or are hidden because you don't want to admit they are a problem and don't want to remediate them.
Are denied by you and swept under the covers.
Are allowed to have an all-pervasive influence in the course of the lifestyle you choose.
from coping.org

And I figured it was time I came clean. No more sweeping these behaviours under the covers. No more secrecy.

The last six weeks have been characterized by some increased media consumption on my part. Sure, I read a fair amount of books during the course of a year, but the rate of consumption has intensified. And the volume.

Shocking as it may seem, I've actually read some fiction.

Even more shocking, I've watched TV. Or rather DVD's of TV. In marathon sittings.

It started innocently enough with a trip to Chapters. I picked up William Gibson's new book Spook Country, determined to give this whole sci-fi thing a try (if I'd known what Gibson wrote was like this I'd have started a lot sooner on his books). Then a non-fiction book: From Lance to Landis by David Walsh, the doping expose about the 7-time winner of the Tour de France. This conveniently coincided with Lance being in town here in Vancouver. No, I didn't go ride with him.

Then onto Pattern Recognition, another William Gibson novel. And then as I was finishing up No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life by Heather Menzies (non-fiction), I picked up J.G. Ballard's dystopic paperback Kingdom Come.

Whilst not burning the midnight oil turning pages, cable-free me watched all of Season 2 and Season 3 of Arrested Development (thanks Kate) in 3 sittings, each about 5 hrs or so in duration. After going through that experience, I think it's probably the best way to have done it, just to keep up with the intense narrative structure of the show... A year ago, Dan Hill had some things to say about this habit (apparently I'm not the only one to have done this). I recommend reading that if you have some time.

So 5 books and 2 seasons of a TV series in about 5 weeks. I guess it's not really that much, but everything was done all at once, without really pacing myself. Usually a book is a couple of weeks worth of bus reading, down times on the weekend, and before bed. This wasn't the case recently:

Lance to Landis: one 8 hour sitting
Spook Country: 3 days
Pattern Recognition: 2 days
Kingdom Come: 3 days
Arrested Development S2: 2 days (2 x 4 hr sittings)
Arrested Development S3: 1 sitting (6 hrs?)

This time of year definitely has something to do with my propensity to read: that back-to-school feeling in the air, mild academic cravings, riding the bus to work on rainy days.

But I think something else is at play here. Immersion into a given subject or storyline for 4 or 5 hrs at a time, deep focus on one thing and one thing only, has been intensely satisfying, if not a bit disruptive to getting to bed at a reasonable hour. I contrast that to my professional waking hours which, while satisfying at times, take the form of slices of projects, clients, employees, problems, solutions, messenger chats, emails, and voicemails all recorded in 15 minute increments in timesheets.

The impact of this modern working world, one which I help create and recreate through the magic of web-based software development every day, is not so ironically the theme of Heather Menzies' book No Time. And while I take issue with Menzies' critique of an increasingly scattered and symbol-based world (she fails to critique books in that symbol-based world, the very medium she choses to share her ideas which happen to be comprised of the very same symbols you're reading on the screen right now), I will admit that my continuous partial attention span is being stretched in funny ways by the technologies I choose.

True to October form, a quick book roundup of those listed above...

From Lance to Landis
David Walsh
Genre: Sports expose

There's a reason I read this book in one sitting. Pieced together from personal interviews and court testimony, David Walsh has published his evidence against Lance Armstrong and some of his teammates for doping throughout his career. Even if you don't believe the stories told about Lance and the US Postal team, the stories of the early to mid 1990's when the peloton was riding at two speeds, one group on EPO and the others not, and the general frustration from the "non-doping" (really non-EPO or blood doping) riders are pretty convincing. One year riders are in the best shape of their lives, seeing the best V02 and power numbers they've ever produced, and the next year, they're pack filler on the steep climbs of the Alps and the Pyrenees. A sad but engrossing read and no easy answers as to what to do for pro cycling to get any better.

9/10

Spook Country
William Gibson
Genre: cyberpunk? science fiction?

As I'm not a big fiction reader and when told the words "science fiction" I tend to think of stuff that happens in outer space, I wasn't sure what to make of the seemingly present-day, technologically plausible fiction of William Gibson. No galactic outer space battles here... At its heart, I felt the book was a good mystery story involving some interesting characters with a technological twist. Locative art, GPS devices, CIA agents: it all seemed pretty here and now to me - I'm going to have to look up what falls under the Science Fiction genre and reconsider my relationship to it. Loved having part of the book set close to home and Gibson's description of Vancouver through the eyes of someone who's just arrived. The beginning started a bit slow for me, the multiple story lines sometimes a bit hard to get a good flow going when reading. But enjoyable nonetheless.

8/10

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
Genre: cyberpunk/science fiction

I probably should have read this one before I read Spook Country, especially given the books share a small plot line. A little more action-packed than Spook Country, I really enjoyed it and devoured it in 2 days, basically 120 page sittings at a shot. The London setting was good - especially the Camden bits, which were still fresh from my 2004 visit to the UK. In the story, Cayce Pollard, hired coolhunter/magazine writer, gets caught up in tracking down the source of mysterious video clips that appear on the web. Her allergic reactions to certain brands (oh no, not the Michelin Man!) was quite good and I enjoyed Gibson's sense of humour that ran through the book. Lots of plot twists and international travel. Great reading.

9/10

Kingdom Come
JG Ballard
Genre: dystopic fiction, Ballardian

I'd read Super-Cannes not that long ago, Ballard's novel about a swanky French business/tech park where things go a little sideways, and thought I'd pick up this novel set in a shopping mall in the London suburbs. Oh sure, sounds pleasant enough, but its... um... a bit on the dark side to say the least. A failed ad executive heads off to suburban London to investigate the murder of his father, killed in a shooting spree in the local mall. Hooliganism, consumerism and fascism figure prominently (simultaneously at times) as he digs deeper into the rotting underbelly of this seemingly forgotten place off a motorway near Heathrow. A bit over the top, I found the plot doing circles sometimes, repeating itself, and sometimes generally confusing me. Hard to like anyone in this book, no real hero to root for or even empathize with mildly. In the end, I finished it off, but didn't find myself enjoying it as much as the Gibson novels. Mixed feelings and wondering whether that's the whole point (mission accomplished?). Will have to read the interview on the Ballardian site for some perspective.

6/10

No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life
Heather Menzies
Genre: non-fiction, theory of technology/society

Completely at home within the pages of this book, Menzies reminded me of the sincere tones of many a Communications lecture at SFU during undergrad. She quotes McLuhan with ease, interviews Arthur Kroker and references Ursula Franklin (ps: Franklin's profile is on Barry's science.ca website which I secured the domain name for back in the day!). It's a good survey of some key themes as to how technology impacts our lives and how late-stage capitalism operates at an individual and societal level. It's quite chatty and anecdotal in its tone, telling stories, recounting interviews with actual snippets of dialogue. As such it made for an easy read and is a good on-ramp to the subject. I could see it on the shelf with Postman's Technopoly or something along those lines as a primer for a 100 level course at university. So not much new, but a good antidote to lots of screen time and computer stuff. A nice reminder to stop, pause, read a book, and connect with people (says the guy spending his evening typing a book review into a text box).

7/10

So that's it for September. We'll see how the pace holds up in October...