Victor – Page 54 – Noise Between Stations

Side Chair No. 14

I’m getting over my prejudice of chair-happy designers (why must every designer do a chair?). Niels Diffrient, designer of Humanscale’s Freedom and the new Liberty, describes the chair, in the new Metropolis, as ‘a psychological challenge: all architects and designers of note have chosen the chair as their ultimate note. it’s gotten to be hallowed ground.‘ We spend an enormous amount of time sitting, and so the chair has universal appeal.

A wonderful example of innovation-via-chair is Thonet’s No. 14 which was made with only six pieces of steam-bent wood, ten screws and two nuts. It addressed an exploding need for cafe-style side chairs and used highly available (in Europe) Beechwood. In 1859 it bridged the gap between craftwork and industrial production with a beautiful product.

Dillon critical of navigation

Andrew Dillon, in his report on the fifth annual IA Summit, gives me props but is critical of the idea of navigation….

…I really enjoyed, again, a session on navigation by Victor Lombardi, which probably appealed to my academic sensibilities more than some of the other sessions. I have been a strong critic of the whole idea of navigation as a driving force for design, but there is no doubting the allure of the concept for IAs â€“ it was standing room only at this session as Victor gave a detailed overview of the various strands of research that have emerged in this area and how best IAs might use the findings.

I’m not sure if he means navigation as in navigation bars (which Dillon has specifically questioned IA’s obsession with) or the larger practice of navigating through digital information, or something else. I’ll be sure to follow up.

Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness

Karl Long posted his new DMI article, Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness: ‘I’ve tried to take the approach of connecting experience design to a business imperative, in this case customer loyalty…. This means some issues need to be addressed by the design early on before you start trying to collect more information or value, like usability and trust.‘

A great example of an article we need more of, from someone who groks design and can connect it with business issues.

Biometric approaches the chasm

The fingerprint biometric device for $49 was inevitable, I’m just surprised it arrived this soon (should we thank the demand generated by the Dept. of Homeland Security for the accelated development?). I predict within two years someone will build this into a laptop, sitting beside the trackpad.

Update: Josh points out that fingerprint biometrics are already included in the $650 HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5550, probably aimed at corporate customers. At this price point, inclusion on a consumer laptop will be probably happen sooner than two years.

InfoDesign interview

Peter J. Bogaards was kind enough to chat with me for the InfoDesign Profile series. One question I didn’t have an answer for was, Who is your role model? It’d be great to have one, but it feels like the world is changing too fast for anyone else to consistenty interpret the world in a way I strive for.

Beers and Carbs

The beer wars are cracking me up, as product design meets marketing, awkwardly. Bud light, feeling out-marketed in a category they already designed for, runs ads that remind us ‘All light beers are low in carbs.’ Miller Light responds, ‘That’s right, so choose on taste.’ Here’s the beer carb chart if you’re curious. Interesting that the beer designed to be low in carbs — Michelob Ultra — is described as watery. I guess Michelob discovered water is low in carbs.

Like the author, if I’m in the mood for a beer I’ll drink a beer, even a Guinness that has twice the carbs of anything else. If I want something lighter, my Summer choice is gin and tonic (0 carbs) and in the Winter it’s red wine (lower in carbs than light beer).

Example of weird info shape

A few months ago I presented Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method (.pdf) at the IA Summit, which included an overview of using familiar information shapes. Afterwords Thom Haller approached me with this wonderful Chinese menu, a deviation from some Chinese menus I presented. He just said, ‘Look at this one. Try to figure out how much is a bowl of noodle soup costs.‘ You can see the logic in their modular approach, but when it takes 60 seconds to determine the price of noodle soup then something ain’t right.

Massive Change

What is Massive Change? It’s Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries trying to wrap their arms around the whole thing.

Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change: The Future of Design Culture, will map the new capacity, power and promise of design. We will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image, information, and software.

Stimulating mental models

Yesterday my wife received a call from John Kerry, the American presidential candidate. She was pretty excited, but realized fairly quickly that it was a recording. When she was done listening, she tried to delete the message.

‘No honey,‘ I said, ‘it’s a phone call.‘

‘Which number do I use to delete again?‘

‘Honey, it’s not a message, it’s a phone call.‘

‘What do you mean? I’m listening to a recording.‘

Fascinating. To her, listening to a recording (plus the reaction to the notoriety of the caller) was equal to listening to voice mail, a natural response. She was thrust into the mental model of listening to a voice mail by the characteristics, the stimuli, of the call.

Examining the stimuli that activate certain mental models would be a nice complement to Indi Young’s mental model thingy. So we not only react to what people already understand but also stimulate them into using information in a certain way.

MIT Sloan discovers design

The Evolution of the Design-Inspired Enterprise (abstract free, article not free) in MIT Sloan’s Management Review is another article in the avalanche of recent business publications discovering design…

…companies such as Master Lock, Procter & Gamble, BMW and Cambridge SoundWorks have employed design research â€” including the use of multidisciplinary teams and a variety of ethnographic and psychophysiological techniques â€” to build organizationwide identification with the customersâ€™ needs and aspirations, keeping everyoneâ€™s eyes on the same prize.

Narrow vs. board perspectives on business

Steve Diller, who is collaborating with Nathan Shedroff on a book about Designing Meaningful Experiences, raises the issue of how writing for business differs from writing for academia (and, IMO, designers)…

Most people I know who manage businesses complain about the simplistic nature of much of what’s available. At the heart of the “typical” business book appears to be an assumption that ideas are, essentially, opportunistically-applied tools, rather than frameworks for broadening one’s perspective on the world. Academia, in contrast, focuses on the broadening of perspective, but frequently at the expense of usefulness.

He’ll be writing more on the Cheskin blog, which incidentally has a cool photoblog.

The cure for the common cold

I’m home today suffering the apex of a head cold and thinking, ‘This would be a great design challenge, curing the common cold.‘ I’m way out of my area here, but it’ll make me feel better to look at the problem.

In What causes the common cold? HowStuffWorks tells us, ‘There are many different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, but about half of the time a cold is caused by a class of viruses called rhinoviruses.‘ In their article on the immune system they say, ‘Many diseases cannot be cured by vaccines…. The common cold and Influenza are two good examples. These diseases either mutate so quickly or have so many different strains in the wild that it is impossible to inject all of them into your body.‘

The trick in battling the cold virus seems to be quickly detecting and vaccinating it. The mutating virus problem is a tricky one, and the plethora of strains makes having the right vaccination on hand difficult. But what if we went for an 80/20 solution, something that allowed us to detect and vaccinate just the more common strains, say just the rhinoviruses.

Let’s look at the patient’s experience. Here’s how my cold progressed:

Sunday I felt an annoying discomfort in my throat.
Monday I had a full-on sore throat
Tuesday brought a runny nose and sneezing, to the dismay of my co-workers.
Today, Wednesday, my head feels like it’s in a vise.

Now I’ll go into pure exploration mode. What if, on Sunday, I swab my nose with a special strip that performed a litmus test just for the rhinoviruses. If the test is positive, I go to the pharmacy and the pharmacist slips the strip into a machine that reads the strip, telling the pharmacist which vaccine to dispense.

Or, let’s say the vaccinations were still too varied for a pharmacist to have on hand. A positive test might enable medical associations to dictate specific recommendations to help your immune system fight the virus (zinc, rest, fluids, etc.). This litmus test plus the official recommendation could be recognized by employers, so one proactive day of rest would cure a cold instead of decreased productivity as the cold approaches plus a day off.

Putting email in it’s place

Michael Cage, who earns most of his income through writing, takes drastic measures to organize his time:

I just want better strategies for focus. So, I bought an iBook. It does not have E-mail set up and never will. When itâ€™s time to work on important projects, I carry it into another office…. As for my main, office computer, Iâ€™ve made a life-changing shift there, as well. I only check E-mail once per day, at the end of the day….

Iâ€™ve noticed many people are happier with the illusion of progress than they are with progress itself. You can spend an entire day â€œappearingâ€ productive by banging out E-mail after E-mail, writing memos, and barely taking a break. But at the end of the day you are where you started. Low-value, low-return busy work took up your day, and you are confronted with the fact that high-impact projects arenâ€™t done. Or much/any closer to being done.

I used to do this more in my previous job, unplugging the laptop and moving to a lounge-like spot in the office. Sadly my current job lacks loungeness, and a laptop.

Stanley Cup

Hockey player holding a giant silver cup over his head in victory

I’m not a hockey fan, but I must say this sport has far and away the best trophy of any major sport, a giant silver cup that can be proudly hoisted over the head. Look at that thing gleam.

Author: Victor