I’m psyched that IDEA — a conference on designing complex information spaces of all kinds — is happening in New York this year, with a great lineup of presenters like Jake Barton, Alex Wright, and Chenda Fruchter.

And from now until September 15th October 3rd you can get 10% off the price of the IDEA 2007 conference when you sign up for a class at Smart Experience.

And, if you register for IDEA by September 15th, you receive 20% off any Smart Experience class. Here’s the details.

Hip hop culture (at least here in America) has influenced not only our musical preferences but also our language, clothing, movies, and car styling. But you won’t see much of it online. The websites for hip hop artists resemble those for other artists, and the more innovative things are mostly done by us geeky white kids.

Why is this, and will it change? I asked my friend Elizabeth who’s familiar with both the online scene and hip hop. She says,

i’m not sure if the problem is available tools or simply culture and education. there are many tools available on the web. it may also be a difference in priorities. most of the people I know associated with “hip-hop” culture are more active/interested in making relationships in person and going to events vs. spending time online. online is just somewhere to sell things and post pictures and event invitations… maybe there is some web-evolution that cultures have to go to to adapt themselves to the web…?

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of hip hop infecting the web. And frankly I think the technology is a barrier to many low-income students. Rather than merely educate low-income students on tech issues, framing the offer as hip hop online — starting with what’s being done now like amplifying the functionality of event invites — could be more attractive and generative.

If you ever need a little online design inspiration, check out the screens that Michael Angeles captures so lovingly…

I just noticed that Worthwhile magazine dodged a trademark suit bullet and re-emerged as Motto magazine. They had good spirit before, I’m looking forward to checking out this new incarnation.

I was very frustrated at work yesterday thinking through a key business issue with a lot of variables in play, and the emotion was clouding my ability to think about the problem. Approaching the problem creatively was even harder, even though I was aware of this obstacle at the time. And of course this is not a novel problem, it happens to most of us in business.

I’ve written before about not denying our emotions, channeling anger at work, and seen evidence that managers need high emotional intelligence.

But I haven’t seen much discussion on the topic from people who are interested in business design. It’s a taboo in corporate life that won’t be discarded easily, because we associate calm, collected behavior with professionalism, and anything else can be scary. All the more reason to address the use of emotions at work head on and figure out how to summon and channel productive emotions that fuel creativity and motivation without making individuals upset with themselves or others.

The start of a list of ideas for doing this:

• Identify what kind of work arouses each person on a team and try to focus them on it
• Teach everyone on the team the concept of flow and when to recognize their own signs of anxiety or boredom, and to communicate these to others on the team so the work can be adjusted accordingly
• Develop a trademark style or practice of the firm that has a positive emotional effect. Broadcast this so that others who respond to it naturally come to the firm (as employees, clients, etc).

A colleague recently complained that furniture company Room & Board has a great website but the buying process stops halfway and must be completed by phone. By coincidence we recently bought a bed from them and I have to admit the order was completed much quicker using the phone compared to a typical online shopping cart process. Even better, the bed was just delivered and I assembled it in 3 minutes. Literally. With no tools. And since the pieces were delivered by their own service and wrapped in the truck, it required almost no wasteful packaging. Overall a great customer experience, sans eCommerce.

Meanwhile, my new (deep breath) Gillette Fusion Phantom Power Razor cost $11, has 6 blades, and runs on a battery and a microchip, bringing us closer to Kevin Kelly’s prediction that chips will be in everything everywhere. Shaves nicely too.

Update: the next day Room & Board sent me an email (from a person, not just botmail) making sure the delivery went alright. Very nice.

After successfully launching Smart Experience this Summer with a prototype course, I’m very happy to have a stellar line up of teachers sharing their expertise this September and October. Here’s the class listing, and if you follow these links you’ll get a 10% Noise Between Stations reader discount…

Information Architecture 3.0
Oct 16 with Peter Morville

Interaction Design for Web Applications
Six sessions starting Sept 5 with David Malouf

Managing the Online-Offline Partnership
Oct 9 with David Wertheimer

Moving User Experience into a Position of Greater Corporate Influence
Sept 8 with Richard Anderson

Foundations of Interaction Design
Sept 12 with Karen McGrane

Scanning the Internet-centered design mailing lists these days, I have to wonder if the inward-looking conversations aren’t doing more harm than good.

Earlier in my career, mailing lists and blogs were incredibly useful tools for learning my craft. The mass media hasn’t really covered the story of blogs as more than journals and citizen journalism. For those of us designing complex Internet systems there were (and are) tons of interesting problems to solve, and we wrote about them and shared invaluable information with each other, desperately trying to push the discipline fast enough to turn new ideas into functioning reality. It wasn’t just writing and reading, it was joint, remote problem solving among an entire community.

As I became more accomplished, I didn’t need quite as much of that communication to practice my discipline, the work become more about how to manage teams and help them ascend the learning curve. So these days I blog less frequently and mostly scan the mailing lists. And what I see concerns me. Some of our brightest minds are still having the defining the damn thing discussion, which we realized years ago was proving fruitless.

Perhaps just saying no to something seemingly pleasurable isn’t enough; we need compelling alternatives. So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about tools we use to do our work and tools we make to empower others. The difficulty of programming is a threshold that reduces designers to asking others for help, but we need to funnel our energy into creating tools to solve our problems and then move on to more interesting problems.

More on this in the coming months…

Apparently a lot of people are suffering from downtime at Dreamhost lately. I’ve run one site with them and found everything they did frustrating, from the control panel to the uptime to the customer support. I’ve been a Pair.com customer since 1999 and love them. They’re not the cheapest, though when I consider they’ve had no downtime ever and I’ve only had to contact customer service once, that makes it quite a good value.

Feel free to use my affiliate code when signing up :-)

This is another question I hear a lot, especially from managers, is just where to find talent these days. The real straight dope is that you should already be connected and have a wishlist of people you want to hire. But in the cases when that’s not possible I created a list of job sites for software-oriented jobs.

I was hanging out with my peeps last week and a couple times Paul used the word awesome, as when we were talking about building tools for customers and he said, “The tools should make them feel capable of awesomeness.”

Making people feel capable of awesomeness. That in itself is awesome. So this is my new mantra. Let’s make it awesome, and if it’s not, why the fuck isn’t it? Life is too short not to be awesome.

UX Crank purports to be cranky, but is actually a delightful look at experience design from one of the most intelligent, friendly guys in the Washington D.C. area — Dan Willis, Director of User Experience for the Public Broadcasting Service here in the U.S.A. Onto the RSS reader it must go.

If you haven’t yet heard David Weinberger’s position on authority vs. truth in media — the disclosure of accuracy in mainstream media vs. Wikipedia — you should, it’s one of his best ideas.

If you visit the article on “conservativism” at Wikipedia, you’ll see–at least as of this writing–a strong warning at the top, complete with a graphic of a hand warning you to stop:

“The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see discussion on the talk page.”

…The question is why we don’t see these warnings in newspapers and especially in newspaper archives.

Luke has a nice outline summary of Weinberger’s opening plenary at IA Summit 2006. The whole summary is worth reading, but especially the part on authority.

I’ve gotten this question from students and others entering the field a few times, and frankly still ponder it for my own purposes, so I’m going to lay down some thoughts on it here.

The question is:

I’m very passionate about pursuing design strategy and bridging the gap between developing engaging user experiences (product side) with the economics/marketing/strategy (business side).

The way the question is framed is telling. 99% of us still think of business and design as separate concepts. And all the Fast Company cover stories aren’t going to change managers’ attitudes for several years.

If we acknowledge these concepts have not been bridged already, we can expand this question to ask “In what kind of situation can I experience the sort of personal growth necessary to learn what I need” as well as “What kind of organizations will have greater success in bridging these concepts?”

To know where to work to experience personal fulfillment requires knowing what companies will have some success in this area. And that requires knowing what clients these companies are likely to have. Taking a client-centered approach I ask who is this client? Maybe it’s Steve Jobs, because although he already does it better than the rest of us he might want a staff that can do what he does. It’s not a manager at a conservative company, because he won’t experiment with new approaches. Probably the client is someone who has a need for a new approach, is open to learning on the job, but can’t do it herself.

So what sort of business designer will be more likely to service this client? Let’s go through the usual suspects:
Design firms: Have creativity credentials, but not necessarily the business rigor needed to help the client feel comfortable experimenting with her budget.
Management consultancies: Have business credentials, but aren’t positioned well to sell the more customer-focused, qualitative, creative approaches to the work.
21st Century firms: For lack of a better term, these are firms that are relatively new but started with this sort of challenge in mind. At MIG we attacked this problem head on, did some great work, but as a new, small firm faced a tough business development environment — if business and design are still two different concepts, selling them as one ain’t easy. Others like Jump Associates do great work and thrive, I suspect, because they emphasize a traditionally-valued competency, like customer research. Ditto for Katzenbach Partners with organizational development.

What does does that mean for the person wanting to learn and do business design? I’d say look for 1) a firm committed to developing this offering, and 2) a firm that emphasizes a competency that parallels your interests.

Given my feelings on the humanitarian, labor, and political problems in China, I’m not too sorry they’re going to take an economic hit on product safety issues. It was just a matter of time.