When you build a tool, you never know what it will be used for. We used Flickr to document where Heather's borrowed book was.... Flickr: The Heather's Book Pool

Reading MSNBC - Does Your iPod Play Favorites?

But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites.

I have to ask-- do you really want true randomness? Because I don't. I want my shuffle to learn. I want it to notice when I fast forward in the first ten seconds of a song, and when I fast forward toward the end, or through the rest of the album. I want it to read the tempo and genre,a nd make decent mixes for me. I want it to stop putting chapter five of Art of War between Bireli Langrene and Abba.

The fetishization of true randomness is such a engineering thing to do. True serendipity comes from designing a user experience not calculating an abstract one, and a great algorithm comes from studying humans, not studying math.

In Concept Cars Don Norman writes

Want to design properly? Take concept cars seriously as design prototypes. Explore those constraints. Playfulness is a wonderful design stance that can produce out-of-the box breakthroughs. But there is playful and silly. Ford seems to have confused the two. Too bad -- there are excellent ideas hidden away inside the SYNUS armor-plated exterior.

No Don, no.

The point of the concept car is to design properly but not to design for use, and the two are not synonymous. The point of the concept car is to create a shift in cognition in the viewer, to help him or her imagine something that was not possible before. We can all imagine a useful ergonomic car (and some of us spend huge amounts of time doing so) but it's not so easy to picture the role of wifi in a car. And because a mental status quo it is almost impossible to break mental models with timid steps.

A certain foolishness, a certain grandness is needed in a concept car. It's physicalized science fiction. It's made to make you dream of going to the moon, not made to carry you there. When pragmatic car designers who prototype the real cars see the concept cars, the spark of innovation in their mind is fueled, and they can press against the many well know constraints of car design to create a surprise. Do you remember the first time you saw a Bug on the road, or a PT cruiser? The design concept that gave birth to that initial moment of pleasurable surprise was born first in an unbuildable concept car, when its very unbuildablness gave the designer the freedom to dream. Only later would it be dialed back, the most useful ideas harvested and put to work in a real car.

from The Origin of Things

Concept cars are also made to a certain degree to help the consumer get excited by cars again-- something that's hard to do with normal SUV's and midsize cars, no matter how many mountain roads the commercials show you. Concept cars are thusly comic book cars, ridiculously endowed with extreme qualities to entice and arouse interest, and sometimes repulse. The thrill of the impossibleness makes you dream of being a hero, capable of great feats due to the wonders of technology.

from The Origin of Things

It's hard enough to to get an industry to look forward, it's hard enough to say "lay down your rulers, we're gonna dream now" but to try to make the concept cars really work in today's world would lengthen the time it takes to create a vision of the future, make it less practical as an exercise and castrate the results.

If you make the concept car practical, all you are doing is making everyday design slightly more edgy, and simply creating another design team like the others. The concept car must be an unbuildable dream, because dreaming is what makes innovation possible.

Of course, it's pleasantly ironic to remember that making cars more suitable for humans was once driven by a concept car. Freed of the constraints of making concept cars all about sex and science, Marc Newson designed the 021C in 1999 that was all about having a good trunk, making it easy to get in and out of the car, and making far more readable dials and usable switches. Sometimes the wacky idea is to make things usable. But that should make us protect the concept car's inherent unshipableness even more fiercely. Only in a dream, sometimes, can we dream of better products. And yesterday's foolishness is today's best practice.

from Marc Newson's site

Do check out The Origin of Things. It's always good to remember where stuff comes from.

A9/Amazon is sporting a new Yellow Pages feature, whose claim to fame is its use of photos...

Palo Alto-based A9 said it compiled the index by covering tens of thousands of miles in trucks equipped with digital cameras and global positioning system, or GPS, receivers.

Bistro Elan is exactly the kind of business you would want photos for. They have no conspicuous sign, and are nearly hidden by vines. But a search on Palo Alto showed "Bistro Elan" as a listing, and when I clicked it I got this.

Can you imagine showing up at these people's house?

"Hi, reservation for six!"

The real Bistro Elan, shown here (I took pictures up and down California Avenue to kill time while Philippe made copies in Kinko's.) Have fun comparing the real photos with the ones Amazon is currently showing. I'm sure this is a temporary issue, but it's been temporarily wrong all weekend. And with the extensive news coverage, I'm sure I'm not the only one to spot issues. Is this really how they want to launch a ground-breaking feature that introduces their customers to a new body of competency? Hopefully no one is really using it yet.

As an aside, Bistro Elan is a terrific place to eat. One of the best in Palo Alto, IMO.

I'm spending the morning surfing. I haven't done that in ages. Flickr led me to an amazing blog, which led me to this: The Thought Project. A beautiful example of the power of proximity. Each photo/interview means nothing by itself. But at about the 10th one, suddenly your brain exands and you feel the nature of humanity.

I may be biased, as I am speaking, but I think this is quite an interesting line up, and registration is cheap right now!

~~~
The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute's Leadership Seminar is January 28th. Sign up now to get a significant discount for this star-studded event.

The 1 ½ day Seminar “Advanced IA: Topics for 2005 and Beyond” will precede the 2005 Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, scheduled for March 3nd.

This highly interactive forum will connect leaders and provide an invaluable way to learn from others across a variety of disciplines. The sessions and speakers include:

Blake over at AA-RF sent me this article How Companies Turn Customers' Big Ideas into Innovations and there is a ton to chew on here... first comment:

"Specifically, 48 percent were unhappy with their company's ratio of innovation hits to misses, and 51 percent were dissatisfied with how their company identifies new service and product categories."

The first statistic suggests there is a general lack of understanding about how innovation comes about. A ratio is not a good way to measure innovation success. If not only because success is so hard to measure, and failures are often successes, or at least critical to learning. Over and over again failure is a benchmark for innovation-- companies have to fail early, fail often and fail cheaply. Only through multiple rapid failures that teach (and teach something other than don't fail in front of upper management) can innovation occur. This is one of the reasons so much innovation comes from small companies, who have less to loose and fewer managers who are afraid to be caught failing... The Innovator's Dilemma is required reading, if by some chance you haven't gotten to it yet. Despite the book's bestseller status and the insane number of business articles stating more or less the same thing (fail! fail often! fail small, but fail!) seeing this statistic makes me wonder. Of course it's possible that executives are complaining in a way that allows for failure-- what, .02% success? I want to see that ratio up to .04% by next quarter!-- I rather doubt it.

It's hard though, for a company to be comfortable with low success rates-- especially public companies who are expected to show quantifiable success every quarter, and for whom revenue per employee can be a success-measure. This drives companies to do more with less, and get productivity up. But productivity suggests a taylor-esque approach to work. The assembly line is rarely a home for innovation -- as you squeeze each second for efficiency, idle thinking is abandoned and no opportunity to explore alternatives (and fail at them!) is possible.

A common solution is the creation of a R&D team. But this is problematic on many levels-- innovation is done for its own sake apart from the main work, so it is not always easy to understand how to apply new ideas to existing business. Plus it creates innovation ghettos where the "blessed few" of a company can innovate and outside ideas are left to flounder. Programs like Googles 20% provide an intriguing alternative, but posts like this one do raise questions about its effectiveness.

In my experience, innovation comes out of the unfettered pursuit of excellence... and that provides the clues to managing innovation. It's not something you do, but rather how you do everything you do. And that is the beginning....

From Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger"

"I think it sucks!" said Jobs.

His vehemence made Tim pause. "Why?" he asked, a bit stiffly.

"It just does."

"In what sense?" said Tim, getting his feet back under him. "Give me a clue."

"Its shape is not innovative, it's not elegant, it doesn't feel anthropomorphic," said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.

"You have this incredibly innovative machine but it looks very traditional." The last word delivered like a stab. Doug Field and Scott Waters would have felt the wound; they admired Apple's design sense. Dean's intuition not to bring Doug had been right. "There are design firms out there that could come up with things we've never thought of," Jobs continued, "things that would make you shit in your pants."

There wasn't much to say to that, so after a pause Tim began again: "Well, let's keep going, because we don't have much time today to-" "We do have time," said Doerr curtly, changing his own ground rules. "We want to get Steve's and Jeff's ideas."

"The problem at this point is lead time in our schedule," said Tim.

Jobs snapped his head from Doerr on one side to Dean on the other, as if he'd been slapped. "That's backwards," he said, his voice rising.

"Screw the lead times."

I keep returning to this article. I love Job's stellar ADD and vivid vocabulary, both loosely disguising a superlative design and business sense. I am not an Apple person, nor an apple user (except my recently acquired ipod), but I am becoming a Jobs fan. He knows who he is.

heard at tonight's talk with Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's list.



Audience: so when someone requests a new city to be added, what happens, you put it up and email them and it's up to them to get the word out?

Craig: I wish I was that organized. I wish I was organized enough to email them back.



OMG, he doesn't email them back. He not only doesn't promote new cities; he doesn't even email them back.



Audience: how much of your traffic come from search engines

Craig: we don't know



Audience: are you afraid that google or someone will take your audience?

Craig: we don't think of them as competition. There is plenty of room for everyone.



it's a different way to be. And they thrive. Kinda makes you question accepted wisdom, doesn't it?

-- Sent from my Treo

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language / is a lovely curiosity. I'd love to see other ideas on how to represent this, though... what if you could see all the five-letter words, and up? What if you could see it tracked over time?

Nick Finck added me to wikipedia:Christina Wodtke .Now they are threatening to delete me! Please save me!

Excerpt from Comic Wars, a book on Marvel Comic's near bankruptcy and uncanny recovery:

"[Jim] Shooter had a huge impact during his nine-year run as editor. He pushed Marvel's corporate owners to introduce good medical insurance and a system of royalties, sharing the wealth if a comic book sold more than one hundred thousand copies. The quality of the books noticeably improved, as did sales. Marvel commanded 70 percent of the marketplace, and some of the writers and artists were earning over half a million dollars per year.

Shooter said that the old way, simply paying a set fee per page, discouraged anyone from taking more time and care to produce a terrific page "I started finding ways to get people more money, to find better creative people and hold on to them. Because the problem is that an artist started to get good but he couldn't make enough money in comics, so he'd go off into the advertising business. And you'd loose them."

Why should a designer or IA learn about business? I can hardly think of a better example than the one described above. Without an understanding of business practices, a terrific creative (like Jim Shooter's predecessor Stan Lee) can't make meaningful change in the quality of a product.

Making good work isn't just about loving what you do; it's also about feeding your family while you do it. Stress about health insurance, making rent, paying your bills can drive even a fierce comic fan into a new line of work. What is so impressive about Shooter's model is it not only rewarded good work, but created a star system which fed the dreams of young artists, encouraging them to starve awhile until they could make it big. The promise of a big payoff is critical to a talent-based line of work.

How are people motivated to do excellent work in your company?

Are they?

Is excellence rewarded or reliable mediocrity?

The conductor was singing rawhide.



--

Sent from my Treo

From DMI eBulletin - Viewpoints

After Peters made comments about how men couldn't really design effectively for women, I asked, "Couldn't designers, with their powers of observation and problem-solving skills, design for Aliens?" He replied, "No, design is personal. Somebody needs to get pissed-off about something before it gets fixed. The best design comes when someone recognizes a problem that personally affects them and sets out to fix it."

I've always felt you have to use the products you design, and the best improvements comes from overcoming everyday annoyances -- but what does that say about user-centered design? At one point I had a "You are not the user" sign taped to my monitor. I know very well designing for yourself leads to unusable products.

The answer is simple. I am a user, not the user. Using the product everyday reveals lots of tiny details about how the product can be better. But it will never lead to real innovation-- innovation comes from seeing a larger picture of needs that are unmet. Sometimes that is personal, such as in the case of a CEO hates something-- like Reed Hastings and late fees, but sometimes it's that a bit of ethnography has shown a whole market segment is suffering.

That's what Peters might be missing... design is essentially an empathic activity. One can truly get pissed off for others' suffering, just as one can get pissed off at one's own. You simply have to crank up the empathy and understanding via qualitative activities such as ethnography or usability (depending on if you wish to innovate or improve). Data is less relevant than caring, which is why five users are enough... if your designer team watches them suffer. It's not about mapping a curve of diminishing problem-finding-- it's about creating a team that demands an end to unhappiness in their customer base.