I took a photography class a little while ago. It was held at a local high school. I has been a few decades since I’ve even been inside of a public school.

I’ve never been a fan of public school. The only thing I can say I learned in high school was how to type. Now that’s a pretty valuable skill, but it doesn’t take 3 years to learn.

My time back in a high school class room seems to have revealed something both mundane and interesting: The chairs are incredibly uncomfortable.

Now that might seem obvious and trivial, but its not. Because they were so so uncomfortable I found that I simply couldn’t concentrate on anything the instructor was saying. Sure I heard him, but I didn’t have the attention to internalize it. Most of my attention seemed to be going to finding the least uncomfotable position in these chairs.

So my experience of a typical school room is that the design and planning of it physical environment has direct and powerful consequences on learning.

I wonder how much more I would have gotten out of high school if the chairs weren’t tools for mass torture?

I cannot stomach David Brooks. It began with my attempt to wade through the heavy, self-important pop-pointlessness of Bobos in Paradise, and deepened with every simple minded, retrograde, apple-polishing neocon suckup article he published in the Times.

That said I still sometimes read him, if only to discover what new diabolical way he has concocted to infuriate me.

However his latest article in the IHT caught me by surprise. It caught me, not just because it gives hipsterism a well deserved jab, but because he addresses a trend I posted about a year-and-a-half ago.

This trend relates to the growing cultural importance of aggregation–the idea that not only does the thing produced have value, but there is also value in mixing it up with other things. So James Brown gave us great music–but so have the DJs who have sampled him and mixed him up with other artists.

Brooks disdains the aggregator. But regardless of anyone’s opinion this trend is here and growing. It is part of a larger cultural trend that blurs the distinctions between consumer and producer, and indeed between production and consumption. And this isn’t just slippery word play — it has very real implications for design and how the roles of designer and user relate to each other and to the people who adopt them.

One of my favorite and former professors at CMU is Richard Florida, who has spent many years studying the relationships between creative work and economic productivity. Recently he moved from George Mason University in D.C. to the University of Toronto in… well… Toronto. Apparently Canada offers the kinds of intellectual freedoms and diversity that support creative work, and that many see vanishing from the U.S.

Now it seems that Stephen Hawking, frustrated with the stagnating pace of scientific creativity in England, is now considering a move to Canada.

I think what resonates with folks like Florida and Hawking, and so many more whose names don’t grab headlines, is that Canada is an incredibly tolerant place. And that’s pretty important when you’re in the business of thinking up crazy ideas–crazy ideas being the heart of creativity.

The dangerous counter current to this is exemplified in bill C-61(1)(2) — an intellectual iron curtain of sorts. The bill appears to assume that everyone carrying an electronic device or storage medium across our borders is a criminal mule for contraband bits. Should the bill pass into law here in Canada, border guards will likely be expected to confiscate property like laptops and cellphones on the slightest suspicion that they may contain such contraband bits.

What counts as contraband bits? Well the backup application you use to safeguard your work counts, because it technically circumvents DRM on your iTunes songs in backing them up. Reading the bill, it doesn’t seem that you would actually have to have made a backup of a DRM protected song to have committed a crime–merely possessing the software capable of doing so would be illegal. Sounds insane? I agree. It is.

Welcome to Canada Mr. Hawking, we will be taking your laptop now because it seems to contain documents that quote copyrighted material. Quoting, even in an academic context, is mostly illegal here Canada. We’ll take your wheel chair too, because we notice it has a USB port, which means it might also contain such illegal data and we can’t take any chances. Feel free to dispute our decision with… what’s that? you can’t communicate without your laptop? That’s unfortunate Mr. Hawking, but rules is rules.

So will Canada become a lightening rod for the world’s creative class, or an intellectual police state? The two are mutually exclusive, and I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that our future prosperity and democracy depends on the answer.

Update: Looks like the rumours may have been a little premature, and Hawking might stay in Cambridge.

I was recently replacement-part shopping for my broken grill, when I saw just how many different grills there are to choose from. And choice is good. Right?

When it comes to trivial choice, I’m not sure it’s good. In the US when you go to elect a president you get 2 choices. When you go to buy a grill you get dozens of models from dozens of manufacturers from a dozens of retailers. This picture is of the 16 nearly indistinguishable Weber grills available at HomeDespot.com.

While a good steak is obviously important, I’m not sure it’s in the same league as choosing a national leader.

Political absurdities aside, this got me wondering about waste and cost. What are the incremental costs associated with designing, manufacturing, assembling, delivering, retailing and supporting such an unnecessary variety of products? How much cheaper would my grill have been had the manufacturer made only 3 models?

Are there really so many contexts for grilling that this variety really is necessary?

Take Apple’s merchandising for example. In virtually each and every one of their hardware products you get three choices: small, medium and large. And it seems this is quite enough to keep all their customers happy.

Granted most of the components used to assemble each grill are probably identical across product models with some minor variations. But material costs are a small fraction of the cost of goods sold—and it’s all these other costs that scale with the variety of models. Everything from assembly lines, to training, to packaging and shipping scales with variety. Retailers need more complex systems to handle the variety, more space to show it, and again more training to ensure staff know all the subtle differences.

This leads me to my big question:

As the west bleeds manufacturing to China due to cost, couldn’t manufacturers (of everything, not just grills) keep more production here and closer to consumers by cutting unnecessary costs like those inherent in offering too much trivial choice?

A few months back Victor posted about the difficulty of getting approval to do design research in a project. This reminded me of Don Norman’s post last year about realizing that research actually does not belong in design.

Vic is right–Its hard to convince managers to okay research. His commenters though are wrong. Euphemisms are not a solution. Whether you call it “research” or “split pea soup”, management still won’t pay for a fishing trip–they want a solution.

Norman knows research does not belong in design. Management knows this. Designers don’t.

Gasp! What am I saying?!

Reflecting on my own work I realized that I have always separated research and design, problem modeling from problem solving, diagnoses from treatment. Often this means separate research and design projects, with separate proposals, plans and bills.

Coupling the two is dangerous because they are so very different from each other.

Since management holds the purse-strings design has to stop navel-gazing long enough to understand management’s perspective reconcile design and research needs for management (after all we are supposed to be professional problem solvers, not professional whiners).

Here are three simple suggestions:

• Have a small ongoing user experience research effort that is funded outside of any particular project. Every project can then pull from and contributes to this body of knowledge, which is immediately available, always growing, and never needs to be rediscovered.
• Treat research and design as their own projects with their own goals, budgets, resources, deliverables and schedules.
• If there is no time or money to do research then document the nature and magnitude of the risks, and then just do what you can with what you’ve got. Be sure to conduct a project post-mortem to see how these risks and their consequences have manifested themselves.

The “username” and “password” fields are required. Yet the the instructions are to absolutely NOT fill out these fields. So “username” and “password” are both required and prohibited.

This is the the UI equivelent of Jacques Carelman’s “Coffeepot for Masochists.” Well done guys!

A couple months ago John over at Brand Autopsy posted a series of simple images from Zag Book that brilliantly illustrates the differences between advertising, marketing, pr and branding.

Your brand is your story, your myth. At its best your brand captivates and fires the imagination, it inspires and seduces people, it marshals markets and makes them hunger for you. A great brand, like a great story, is frighteningly powerful; and maddeningly volatile. Indeed, just like the author of a story, you don’t control your brand–we do.

Sure the post-structuralists and deconstructionists and guys with super cool Serge Gainesbourg accents may have gone a little far with many ideas, but I think they were mostly right with the idea of the author’s death; the idea that after writing a story, the author is no longer relevant and all of the power to make meaning of the text now resides with the reader.

Indeed this is what made the medieval church authorities so terrified to have the bible written in the vernacular: it would allow people to read the text free them from an orthodox intermediary interpreter and construct their own meanings. In this case, the death of the author meant the death of the church, of faith, of God. That is the power of the reader, a power that has terrified thinkers from Aquinas to Darrida, and a power that you need to learn to manage and embrace if you want yours to be a great brand.

So while the reader may have no control over the artifacts of your brand, they have complete control over their interpretation of these artifacts’ meanings—and it is the meanings not the artifacts that captivate, fire, inspire and seduce.

Treat your brand as an author does a story, not as an ad-man flogs a soundbite.

Related posts

• Design Must Relinguish Control (10/16/06)
• Metaphors for Design part I(02/27/06)

I recently had a request from a loyal reader about my attempt to make a custom closet. So here it is…

I’ve been slowly working on renovating my condo. One of the big issues for the reno is maximizing storage space, because there ain’t much of it. So I invited 5 closet builders to show me how they’d redesign the closets and how much it would cost. These builders were:

• California Closets – expensive, and unresponsive–we had to ask them twice for the quote
• Canadian Closets – the cheapest bid, but we hear they use lower quality hardware
• Metropolitan Closets – had hard time listening to what I wanted, then told me they wouldn’t do what I wanted
• Original Closet Warehouse – decent price, but inefficient design
• StoreMor Closets – had to ask twice for quote after they visited, and they ignored each request

My first lesson was how hard it is for people to think beyond where they’ve thought before. Indeed Metropolitan Closets told me that they would not take a job that required them to think beyond. And none of them managed to design a closet system that maximized the space, because the space is unusually large such that thier standard modules and assembly practices wouldn’t work for the space.

In other words thier thinking was entirely restricted to the standard modules they carry and the standard ways they use them.

Well standard wouldn’t solve my problems so I had to do it myself. Fortunately I had the whole thing designed in Sketchup and all I needed to do was go buy the pieces and assemble them. Of course I had more lessons to learn.

My second lesson was once you have a plan stick to it, don’t improvise. When you’re in the design phase you’re free to do what ever. But once you’re in development, stick to the plan. I ended up with exactly what I planned out, but only after trying a couple of mid-project improvisations that didn’t work out, requiring a lot of back-peddling, and forcing me to waste hours and hours of time and near countless trips to the hardware store. Ready, Fire, Aim simply does not work.

My third lesson was once you have a plan and know all the matials you need, buy all of the materials at once, in fact buy more than you need, and don’t start building till you have all of the materials. Do not go off half-assed.

And the biggest lesson was get it done right, the first time.

I have learned these last three lesson before, doing other home improvement projects and rebuilding an old 73 BMW 2002. I guess it just takes a while for lessons to sink into my head.

This is a great example of how seeing should no longer be believing. The power to manipulate images translates directly into the power to manipulate what you think and feel. Check out just how much power we have these days to effortlessly maniupulate images and your feelings of self worth.

See more videos on NibTV:

There’s a post over at medgadget about how searching google for “vaccination” turns up mostly anti-vaccination “moonbats”. One of the reasons is the medical industry’s preference for the word “immunization”.

So doctors say “immunization” while regular people and moonbats use “vaccination”. The lesson here is in a world run by Google, if you don’t speak like regular people, regular people will never hear your voice–even if you’re a doctor.