We just rolled out the AIfIA Information Architecture Progress Grants:

Two grants will be awarded in February, 2005… Each grant is for US$1000… Applications should propose work that has the potential to benefit information architecture practioners in a practical way. This includes, for example, original research, a new synthesis of important existing research, or development of an innovative new technique. The resulting reports will be published on the aifia.org website.

While microwave-powered WiMAX is getting more attention these days, I was fascinated to learn on Thanksgiving of a relative’s plan to simply use a hi-gain setup instead. His plan is to go to markets that don’t already have wired broadband internet access — in his case rural Virginia — and put hi-gain antennas on the hills to reach those who don’t have access to cable or DSL. The market may not be as profitable, but the equipment and real estate costs are proportionately low. It’s a disruptive move, and there might be plenty of room at the bottom of that pyramid.

After Christina shared George Lakoff’s ideas on framing, I’ve been thinking about developing new frames from a progressive political point of view. We can’t simply react to what the conservatives do, we must proactively create the future.

Under the radar, President Bush is gradually moving towards a flat tax, and along the way the changes to the tax code will benefit the rich and hurt the middle class. The goal of my frame is to communicate to the middle class (many of whom voted for Bush against their own economic interests) how this harms them.

My idea is to succinctly and consistently repeat one phrase that communicates how this personally hurts a middle class American. I started by finding the average salary in the U.S., which is $36,520. I’ll round that up to $40K for my purposes, both to use a nice round, memorable number and to be appeal to people’s aspirations. Then I checked the tax tables which are available back to ’92. I came up with:

“Just before Bush was elected, a married person making $40,000 a year paid $6,000 in taxes. Now that person pays ____ in taxes.”

Theoretically taxes will be higher by the next presidential election. As of 2003 they were actually lower (which is even more scary, in that taxes were lowered and a war is being paid for at a time of historically high debt), but that will probably change, even if we have to crash first.

If you haven’t already discovered the Wikipedia then you should, if you at all like encyclopedias. And even if you dislike wikis it’s alright, there’s proper search and navigation elements, and enough content there already to be quite useful so that one need not feel guilty for not contributing.

Surfing it reminds me of when I was young and visiting a friend who had a set of encyclopedias, lying on the floor on rainy afternoons, paging through them.

Here’s a telling excerpt from the Creative destruction page:

Most economists agree that long-term economic growth is largely the product of technological innovation. Thus, some see it as a scandal that Schumpeter is absent from many 600 page elementary economic texts’ indexes. Schumpeter’s solution would be for a new generation of textbooks to emerge, which students would choose, in partial defiance of their lecturers. Wikipedia is now one of those texts!

The HealthWorks! Kids’ Museum is a unit of Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana and an organization truly focused on health care, not just illness care. In a recent profile, one employee cited the need for trial-and-error in the design of their education programs, “To innovate, we need to make at least eight mistakes a day.”

I recently read Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan, a writer for The Economist. He covers many of the more interesting ideas, highlights some underappreciated thinkers, and offers a sound perspective on a field that tries to stay within the boundaries of statistics while undeniably bleeding into politics and sociology. Also see Peterme’s review for more about this.

Here’s some of the concepts he covers, all of which are useful even if you never tread into what is traditionally thought of as economics. Most of the definitions are on the Wikipedia.

Incentives

• Creative destruction
• Prisoners delimma
• Law of unintended consequences
• Principal-Agent problem
• Dead weight loss
• Progressive and regressive taxes
• Externality

Government

• Property rights
• Rule of law
• Public goods
• Supply-side

also…

• Adverse selection
• Our skills and health comprise 75% of our wealth as a nation
• Rule of 72: rate of growth divided by 72 equals how long it takes for a growing quantity to double
• Interest represented as r, the rental rate on capital
• We often receive more utility via relative than absolute wealth
• Catastrophe bonds are a way to spread risk and rewards
• The Tournament model

“It’s been my life’s dream to see the parade live. Once it starts, it means the holidays are here. My other dream is to get a jet pack.“
- NICHOLAS PERDUE, a 16-year-old at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I just discovered the work of Mark Allen Nakamura who designed some of the old Quokka Sports site, still one of the most daring and bold layouts to appear on a mainstream site.

Tom Peters: Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age comes to PBS (in NYC, on Monday, Nov 22 at 10pm)

Each of the companies profiled faced revolutionary business challenges and responded by inventing entirely new opportunities. Each had to re-imagine the nature of work itself—and did so by soliciting the energy and engagement of each and every one of their people.

The company suggestion box is growing in size and sophistication. Taking a cue from the software industry which subsidizes innovation by letting passionate customers beta test new products, companies like Bose are setting up forums for ideas. They recognize that innovation needs to be open, tapping creativity from inside and outside the organization.

The system that Bose is using, Informative, stresses the importance of the brand relationship. It’s interesting that they go for this softer, more ambiguous benefit than simply saying they help commpanies harvest more ideas. Though they do realize this is a conversation and not just direct mail in reverse…

Our real-time interactive communications tools allow us to engage large numbers of consumers in ongoing, concurrent dialogues, and our patented systems explore these conversations and consolidate actionable insights based on what your customers want and need right now, next month, next year and beyond.

Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, The Long Tail, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.

C. K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is about making previously unprofitable products profitable by making them more widely available.

The primary difference is that Anderson describes it happening in the digital realm, e.g. .mp3 files, in ways that aren’t possible in the physical realm, and Prahalad describes how it’ll work in the physical realm. Anderson’s “tail” is all the products that don’t fit in stores and normally don’t get sold. Prahalad’s pyramid bottom is all the people that are poor and normally aren’t sold to.

Imagine locking Anderson and Prahalad in a room until they figure out how to best distribute our digital and physical surplus to the poor of the world and make money for companies in the process.

Frontline is doing the Frontline treatment on brand strategy and the latest marketing. There’s a few refreshingly honest people, and the rest are either critical of the methods or vary from slightly to very silly… A market researcher probes a participant, “Would you say you feel lonely when you eat white bread? Anxious? Trusting?”

Read Montague’s Neuromarketing — potentially the most far-fetched method — sounded the most convincing, mainly because he’s an actual psychiatrist and not a hack. “I get to the reptilian brain… in France cheese is alive, you don’t put it in the refrigerator just as you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It must be marketed as alive. In the U.S. cheese is dead, it must be pasteurized and put in the refridgerator, and it is sealed in plastic like a body bag, and put in the cold, like a morgue.”

From a design perspective, it strikes me that this approach could be upstream of designers, displacing parts of ethnography. The design brief may come from the psychiatrist.

And of course there’s the deeper issue of marketers creating an alternate reality, going beyond selling to obscuring the truth of issues. And that’s why I like Frontline, they’re very good at exposing the truth.

The architect, Yoshio Taniguchi, of the new addition to the Museum of Modern Art in New York said to the trustees at the beginning, “Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.”

John Updike adds,

And disappear, in a way, it has. The customary sensations that buildings give us—of secure enclosure, of masses of matter firmly supported—are diluted by a black gap, a mere quarter inch wide, that runs along the bottom and top of every interior wall, and even at the base of weight-bearing pillars, so that everything, subtly, floats. The gaps are useful for heat and air-conditioning, too, but their aesthetic accomplishment is to dematerialize the walls; the visitor moves through spaces demarcated as if by Japanese paper screens.

A friend just reminded me of a story from some time ago. I was giving a short presentation at a financial services company on the user-centered design process. The audience was a project team. I threw up some slides illustrating the various activities: researching users, designing the interface, implementing it, etc. Toward the end, the database programmer said, “Ohhhhhh, I understand, you do everything backwards!”

That’s because his process was: build a database, slap on a user interface, and test it… the exact opposite of what I would do.

I wonder if this is a way to explain UCD to technical audiences? “OK, what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there’s this whole field of people achieving great results by doing everything completely backwards!“

Since the 1703 Treaty of Methuen giving mutual trade advantages to Portuguese wines and English woolens, countries have recognized their own expertise and costs and opted to trade rather than compete in particular markets. So regardless of what our re-elected president tells us, the facts of economic life in the modern world will not change: we will lose jobs to less expensive workers elsewhere in the world.

But all is not lost. Everyone in the design world now has the gift of foresight and can adjust career trajectories to not only avoid pain in this, as yet, mostly unaffected field, but to additionally take advantage of the situation (I have). And this is the point I make in a new AIfIA editorial, The Best Sourcing of Information Architecture.