Digital Digressions

Dyslexicon: Inventing Brand Names

What is it about company names these days? Why do people have to invent random names that tell you absolutely nothing about what the company does and moreover, all sound similar too? Just think of Clari, Claris, Clarins, Clarion, Clarus.. some of you will know what they do, because you will have come into contact with their products - others? Have a guess? It is a disease, a name generator disease which is spearheaded by various brand consultancies, who will charge a fortune for coming up with a eponymous, but completely forgettable word.

The Brand Channel puts things in perspective: "The Post Office’s rebranding follows a long line of stodgy- and storied-sounding British organizations choosing to become less identifiable, including National Power becoming Innogy; British Steel, Corus; and Welsh Water, Hyder. However, the Post Office’s change to Consignia was met with the most outcry for a number of reasons."

To me the Post Office or Royal Mail is synonymous with red post boxes with the royal insignia stamped on the side, red logos and branding of high street presence. Works a treat, as British postboxes are part of the popular imagination, just like proper old British phoneboxes and those Routemaster buses. However, for some reason it was thought appropriate to abandon this very well recognised brand, in favour of something more 'contemporary', hopefully signalling a drastic turnaround for the company, which had been losing money for years and in many cases referred to as 'totally up the spout'.

Going into the word 'Consignia' a little bit - the word consign means:

• commit forever; commit irrevocably 
• give over to another for care or safekeeping; "consign your baggage" 
• send to an address 

All being fine and dandy, those are reasonable things to expect from Royal Mail or the Post Office. Consign, however, is often used in the context of 'consign to oblivion', which to me is not a good association to make with a company you are paying money to deliver precious items. Moreover, when turning 'Consign' into a noun, mysteriously this word instantly becomes very transitory. 'Consignia' makes you think of... well, nothing much to do with sending a letter.

As Brand Channel continues:" Sometimes a branding overhaul is necessary, even after a long and estimable history (The Post Office was founded in 1635 by Charles the I) – the Communist Party and New Kids on the Block come to mind, as does, for separate reasons, Andersen. And, several of the reasons Consignia gives for its change do strike with some validity.

 

To begin with, as the group looks to expand internationally, Post Office proves to be too vague. A Consignia website dedicated to answering questions about the name change defends: “The Post Office name would be confusing abroad and would also be difficult to protect.” Further, “The Post Office group did not fully describe what we do as a business.” And they’re right, as Consignia also banks, retails and tailors logistic solutions. However, the site adds a defensive: “The name was received extremely well in customer research.”

Royal Mail, a pre-Consignia proposed possibility and seemingly what Consignia has become, may not play well in certain former colonies or in nations where not-so-benevolent local royals were violently separated from both throne and head."

Hmm.. all good points, but why not go for something post related in your name - United Parcel Service (UPS) deliver .. parcels, no beating around the bush here, but finding out what DHL stands for takes a little bit more work: DHL is an acronym of its founders Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn and as this is less common knowledge, it seems that annoyed customers often substitute the letters for 'Dumped, Hidden or Lost'.

"Come to think of it, maybe you've got Consignia" said Dr. Smith to his ailing patient. Sounds more like a malaise than a company name or as job cuts have continued at a break-neck speed "Resign-ia" has also been proposed as a new name by a number of disgruntled formed employees. Needless to say, this remarkable feat of pointless re-branding was ditched in 2002.

Going back to pointless brand names - this is but one sad example of a much wider problem - the rise of so-called 'brand strategists' and accompanying consultancies, who pride themselves in making companies alien and virtually unrecognisable to a base of loyal customers.

This link leads onto a website where you can find the Dislexicon v3.0, a nifty 'English expansion tool', that invents non-existing words based on a root word you submit. These consultancies must have this program listed in their Favourites - just look at the words below generated from the root word 'logic"!

	New Word	Components	Definition
1:	logicish	logic-ish	of, relating to, or being logic
2:	logicible	logic-ible	capable or worthy of logic
3:	overlogic	over-logic	excessive logic
4:	kilologicologist	kilo-logic-ologist	one who studies thousand logic
5:	superlogicary	super-logic-ary	of or relating to above or superior to logic
6:	logicmetric	logic-metric	relating to measurement of logic
7:	erythrologic	erythro-logic	red logic
8:	chromologicish	chromo-logic-ish	of, relating to, or being color logic
9:	antelogicism	ante-logic-ism	action, process or practice of before logic
10:	logicist	logic-ist	one that performs, produces or believes in logic

Blog Addiction Disorder (BAD)

Yesterday something terrible happened. I got home early thinking I might try this 'working from home' thing, which means you can sit in the garden, stroke the cat AND pretend to be thinking about work at the same time. A nice concept, but rudely thwarted when I tried to turn on my computer. It all started when trying to log into Messenger - no success, Wireless network is showing full reception so I start scratching my head and wonder whether Airport Base Station is having hiccups. Go downstairs, plug laptop straight into router, router blinking happily showing what is known in IT circles as 'activity', to me I just know the thing isn't bust yet - but no, nada, niente - plenty of blinking but NO INTERNET. Panic grabs hold of me - this can't be...surely. Reset Router, faff around with ports and cables, unplug from phone filter, replug, phone works, router still OK, but Internet? No way, Jose. What to do?

Want to ring Internet service provider, discover I don't know the number - no problemo, just look it up on their website - ah, forgot NO INTERNET. Panic second time, feel isolated, ring partner ask him to look up their number and then ring 'Broadband Service Update' hotline only to get recording of chirpy chap saying something about them experiencing problems with L. O. U. network, causing intermittent break in service connections... INTERMITTENT - how about being on the dark side of the moon and getting NO CONTACT WHATSOEVER for the whole NIGHT. What's wrong with saying - 'there is a problem, in these areas, we are working on it - and this is the time we expect to have fixed it?

Anyway, this all got me thinking. The Internet is such an all pervasive thing in my life and particularly after beginning to blog, I felt truly divorced from the world yesterday. A New York Times article called "Hooked on the Web" says some specialists believe 6 to 10% of Internet users have an unhealthy addiction to the Internet -- and they are ready to offer addiction recovery services. Some are even calling it Internet Addiction Disorder or IAD. And, of course, blogging is listed as one of the addictive Internet activies in the article. How long before some mental health professionals come up with BAD or Blog Addiction Disorder and offer recovery services to boot?" (excerpt from Bloggers Blog... see link below)

Having sat there in my communication void yesterday (tried to browse Internet with my new fancy mobile phone, but to be honest - it feels like reverting to dial-up after years of getting used to the instant access delivered by Broadband) it got me thinking though. I'm exhibiting symptoms of going 'cold turkey' - silly really, but that's the truth. Check news, weather, my favourite blogs, emails, visitor numbers to my own blog, new comments, write entries what-not, I have got so used to it I hardly notice how much time I spend every day in front of the computer, invariably with at least one window open to the Internet all day - a window into the world.

"The growth of a hardly satisfied and very innovative population has created an environment where the saturated use of the computer, and its additional benefits is an orthodox. It no longer matters where one travels or how much room for luggage one has, a computer can be brought regardless of the inconveniences. This availability opens a door to the Internet that can be accessed from almost anywhere a person whishes to render its services. Just like any other hobby however some of its users start to spend an extended amount of time in it, which can lead to an addiction of the pastime. These people who cross the line are said to be suffering from a newfound diagnosis termed by researchers as Internet Addiction Disorder or (IAD) (Dr. Grohol, 2003, par.1).

Dr. Grohol has made a model where the individual is said to go through phases in their discovery of the Internet and its resources. The first stage occurs when the individual is new to the environment, a newcomer, or is an existing user that finds a new activity, it is referred to as the stage of enchantment or obsession (Dr. Grohol, 2003, par. 20). This is the phase that is highly “addictive” to the individual until of course they reaches stage two, disillusionment (Dr. Grohol, 2003, par. 20). In this stage the individual has to become uninterested in the activity they engage in so often, once that is accomplished the individual can safely reach the third stage, Balance (Dr. Grohol, 2003, par. 20). This balance symbolized a normalized usage of the internet, it is reached at a different period by everyone and the phases can still be recycled if the individual finds another interesting new activity (Dr. Grohol, 2003, par. 20).

....Researchers who concur that the Internet is addictive have already established that the disorder develops into a dependency for the person; they experience tolerance and withdrawal affects (Ferris, par. 1). Similar to what an addict of any other substance goes through, and becomes just as isolated as them. Rejecting the real world and adopting the Internet as a route of escape to a mood altering experience (DeAngelis, 2000, par. 8). (excerpt from AIIPsyc Journal)

So there we are - I think I might be an addict? Not sure, I do have a tendency to be obsessive about things I take on.. reading, writing, music, design.. maybe I'm just an obsessive-compulsive sort of person? Perhaps it's time we bloggers started our own Blog.Addicts.Anonymous? BAA humbug I say! Hmm.. say no more - it's Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK, so perhaps I should impose a Blog Ban on myself over this weekend to see how much of an addict I really am.

Links:

Blogger's Blog

Internet Addiction Disorder 

Send the Blogging Bandwagon on its Way

NY Times: Hooked on the web?

You Know You are a Blog Addict When..

How to be Hip With Kids

There we are, as you may have gathered I am over the hill - rapidly approaching my 31st birthday which, according to the EU legislation, means I have been officially classified as 'middle-aged' since I was 28. Depressing thought, but as my job is to design toys for kids I have a great excuse never to grow up - which makes it all the harder to think about becoming 'mum' one day. Somebody calling you that sure puts things in perspective, so post-poning that life changing experience at least for now.

What's funny is the way we get progressively more unable to understand how kids speak, (or abbreviate words when txting - l8er allig8or)... the older we get and furthermore if we try to do it ourselves (to appear with the times and less embarrassing to the kids we are speaking/txting to) we ourselves feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. Similar feeling as when being under-aged and trying to sneak into a pub, fearing detection all the time..

Tricky situation, and sooner or later you will receive a nifty teen word texted to your phone, which will have you showing it around in the office in an effort to decipher what it may be an abbreviation of. So I don't try anymore, just need to refer to the great AOLer Translator to turn any comprehensible text I write into hip net-savvy txtspeak and appear cool with the kids. To be entirely honest - I don't, they can put up with dinosaur me who doesn't GET IT, but tries anyway - nevertheless, this site is still excellent.

Here's an excerpt of what I wrote in the translator:

My text (hey I had to think of something!): Hello dear Digital Digressions reader from sunny (for once!) England. It is Thursday, before a nice bank holiday weekend (bank holidays mean you can have Monday off without feeling guilty because the whole country does it!) and I can't wait. Planning to do very little, put in some decent rounds on the road bike, do little else and hopefully sit in the garden armed with several alcoholic beverages to keep me company..

The Translator: H3LO D3AR DIGITAL DIGRASIONS R3AEDR FROM SUNY (FOR ONC3)1!111! OMG LOL ANGLAND1!!!!111 OMG WTF IT IS THURSDAY BFORE A NIEC BANK HOLIDAY WEK3ND (BANK HOLIDAYS M3AN U CAN HAEV MONDAY OF WITHOUT FELNG GUILTY B/C TEH WHOLE COUNTRY DO3S IT)!1!!!!1 OMG WTF AND I CANT WATE1!111 OMG PLANNG 2 DO V3RY LITLE PUT IN SOME D3CENT ROUNDS ON TEH ROAD BIEK DO LITL3 3LSE AND HOPAFULY SIT IN DA GARDAN ARMAD WIT SAV3RAL O BVARAEGS 2 KEP ME COMPANY.!!!!!!!!1!1

Needless to say, I'm not sure the above 'hip' language is anything to aspire to... makes for some tedious reading in the long run...

Death by Powerpoint

It's nearing presentation time again at work and one is faced with the inevitable question: how should I communicate the message this time? Actually this is an excellent question to ask, because the way business and organisations have developed - I don't think we actually regularly ask ourselves this question anymore - we just automatically turn to PowerPoint, whether it is the correct medium or not.

PowerPoint, not only frustrating to use - trivialises any message, creates some truly awful looking graphics and has a wonderful ability of making your message absolutely transient - as soon as the lights go up again, people will have forgotten every single thing mentioned in the presentation. Yet, we persist with it, almost religiously although it does us no favours. Some things to bear in mind:

Rethinking the purpose of a presentation

What is it you want to get out of the presentation? Do you want decisions, feedback, pointers where to go next, agreement - what? It is useful to start by thinking of what you want the outcome to be and plan backwards. The rule for good board meetings is that you should not surprise any of the members with news on the day of the meeting that they have not had a chance to aquaint themselves with in advance.

If translated into a presentation setting, this means you should send the in-depth report to the participants in advance and go over the main points and conclusions in the presentation - hence allowing for a meaningful conversation to take place, rather than creating a lecture. This means people will have had time to reflect on any issues you raise and come with meaningful, useful comments on the day and moreover - if there are any problematic findings, the members concerned will have had time to prepare and do not feel threatened when you present the same findings in front of everybody.

Smallest font-size used is the age of the oldest audience member divided by two.

If relying on assumptions, presentations increase exponentially the higher you go in an organisation and invariably those up in the higher echelons of any organisation are at least in their forties, if not older - so a conservative estimate means your minimum font size should be no smaller than 30 point. That means you can only cram about 40 words (if you are lucky) on to a single slide - which equates to about 8 seconds of silent reading. If you have any depth and insight to your message you will find that your slides start multiplying like rabbits, again counterproductive - as the more slides you have the less likely people are to pay attention to what you are saying. See point above.

Have Something to Say - not Animate!

"Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience." (Edward Tufte - PowerPoint is Evil... see link below)

Your Slides Are Not the Ones Listening

Simple: Don't Talk to Your Slides. This makes for some extremely boring presentations - the presenter is so paranoid they will forget to say something they not only say it once, they turn to the slide and read it out too. This is a surefire way to convince the audience that you don't actually know or have any confidence in what you are on about, if you need to keep turning to check it all the time. This tendence is usually followed by slides, which not only contain the bulletpoint summaries of the message but little transcripts of the stories to remind the presenter when to break into a 'case study' to support the message. That makes everything seem much staged, artificial and thin. If you need something to help you remember what to say - use que cards (IN BIG WRITING) so you can read it easily. Don't write entire sentences on these cards, just put down key words - this will help you speak more naturally and stops you looking like you are reading a script.

Some great links to help you:

• Everything You Wanted to Know About Presenting but Were Afraid to Ask
• Stop Your Presentation Before it Kills Again!
• PowerPoint is Evil
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Decoding Apple's Success: Why Only Great Leaders Know the True Power of Design

Remember when the candy-coloured iMacs were rolled out? These little jelly baby-looking computers came to signify the revival of Apple, the taste of things to come and a poignant example of how great product design could help differentiate a product in an otherwise entirely crowded, feature-driven market, which to consumers is more confusing than probably any other.

Within six months of the launch of the iMacs, computer manufacturers everywhere were trying to pick apart the success formula of these computers, they kept appearing on TV shows, adverts, in films - in fact where ever you turned for a while - you would be greeted by translucent coloured plastic. Invariably nobody did it so tastefully as Apple and hence the addition of translucent plastic to printers, other computer cases, consumer durables etc. failed to translate into the escalated sales figures everyone was hoping for.

How could it be? Obviously there was more to the success of the iMacs than just the candy-coloured exterior. It was about the design, definitely, - it was also about the more invisible things - the change in leadership at Apple that allowed such a product range to emerge from nearly a decade of beige me-too boxes. Consumers voted with their wallets and industry pundits speculated whether Apple would be able to create another winner. Years later we can truly say that the iPod has changed the way we listen to music, much like the original Walkman revolutionised music listening in the early eighties.

In this context I would like to expand on the Design Maturity model mentioned in an earlier post - this model talks at length about the role design plays in an organisation and more importantly how management views the contribution design can make in creating so called 'Blue Ocean' opportunities of radically strong, differentiated products. Austin Govella has drawn some intriguing parallels between this model, innovation and leadership maturity. Or has he puts it:

Jess McMullin's design maturity continuum, reminded me of "The seven transformations of leadership", David Rooke and William Torbert's article about leadership maturity in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review.

Similarities appear between how thinking evolves as someone explores either design (systems communication) or management (systems organization). I prefer more maturity than less, but one level isn't necessarily better, just different.

Here is his diagram:

Or Download design_maturity.pdf

Rooke and Torbert's leadership maturity continuum stretches across the bottom from Alchemist to Opportunist. They call these Action Logics and refer to the logic one uses when choosing your actions. The leadership continuum describes how managers and executives think at each level of their leadership maturity. Steve Jobs is an Alchemist. My brother is an Opportunist.

The green bar suggests the more mature your design or leadership thinking is, the more equity your thinking generates for your organization.

There we are - great design alone doesn't fix things, you need innovative leaders to understand the role design can play in positioning a company and to understand how to streamline the organisation to properly allow innovation to flow through the organisation and make it onto the market place.

Level of Design Maturity in an Organisation

A recent post discussing the value design can add to not just products, but to an organisation as a whole made me realise how hard it is actually to explain this subject to people who are not design professionals themselves. Partly because designers themselves are also a mixed bunch, some understand design thinking in a wider organisational context and others are quite happy just solving the problem they have been given. That means that a non-design person, coming into contact with designers, may encounter one who has plenty of ideas in terms of developing the business and another one who simply cares about the look of the latest product. This must be both infuriating and also highly unpredictable and ultimately I believe it makes life harder for us designers to communicate our value and potential in an organisation.

Another thing that gets to me regarding designers, is the widespread use of fluffy language that makes business people instantly switch off. Being a designer myself I find I make the greatest headway in communicating with people from different disciplines if I continuously make a conscious effort to avoid 'designease', the very specialist language and terminology we designers quite happily bat around with our colleagues and behind which we sometimes hide in order to sound more self-important. Whatever the reason for using 'designease' - drop it, it doesn't do you any favours and moreover, words like 'dichotomy, synergistic, contextual' and whatnot makes it even harder to follow the point you are going to make so people switch off, and don't listen a word you are saying.

Back to the maturity of design in an organisation - Jess McMullin has created a brilliantly simple diagram, which to me encapsulates the various degrees of maturity of the use of design in an organisation. Companies like Procter & Gamble have put design thinking at centre stage of their business innovation, and that means that design is not only used to solve specific problems, but also to help frame a wider strategic framework. This can of course only happen if there are design professionals in the organisation who have this degree of maturity themselves and are quite willing and able to contribute on this level. The other enabling factor, as mentioned before, is an organisation where the value of design thinking as capable of framing strategy and innovation on a company-wide scale is understood, and appreciated and thus a space at the negotiating table is reserved for the design professional with this capability.

Generating Value Through Design-Driven Innovation

According to a recent Conference Board survey of CEO's and board chairmen, executives' number one concern is 'sustained and steady top line growth. While internally focused and left-brain heavy R&D departments are reaching their limits in sustaining this growth, design is coming to the rescue.
Design is gaining popularity among business managers, who recognise the power of so-called 'design thinking' for its holistic problem-solving ability. By virtue of its integral, non-linear, forward-looking and iterative nature, design thinking has taken the centre stage at such corporate giants as General Electric (GE) and Procter & Gamble.

So what does design thinking do? Below are a rough list of the design thinking approach to solving any problem. This is a very useful process as it can be applied to any subject, it integrates both analytical and creative thinking and it emphasizes constructive thinking over factual retention.

• Intend (Intentional Thinking) - Establish needs, wants and goals
• Define (Referential Thinking) - Name, list and describe what is involved
• Explore (Relational Thinking) - Imagine, organise and analyse possibilities
• Suggest (Formative Thinking) - Decide, present and explain your proposal
• Innovate (Procedural Thinking) - Continually improve as you produce what is proposed through an iterative process
• Collecting (Evaluative Thinking) - - Judge, measure and evaluate your success
• Knowing - Remember, integrate and apply what you learn

What can design-driven innovation deliver? Design-driven innovation cannot be measured through traditional company-centric metrics such as return on investment (ROI) and earnings per share (EPS). It needs to be complemented by a 'return on user experience' (ROX) and/or other metrics that measure user value (the value which the user receives or can expect to receive). Following this, the ROE (or ROX) of an individual experience equates to ‘benefits’ - ‘burdens’, and if you pick these apart even further, ‘benefits’ can be functional as well as emotional (being either mechanic or humanic in nature), and ‘burdens’ can be divided into financial and non-financial (such as the annoyance of waiting in a check-out line for too long). The sum of all individual experiences then would give you the total ROE/ROX.

I am not implying that all the contributing factors to ROE/ROX can be easily identified and/or quantified, but there is plenty of headway being made. The point is not necessarily to quantify, but to list and evaluate all contributors and inhibitors. By the same token, ROI has just as many parameters, flaws and uncertainties, except one always end up with a (seemingly) straightforward monetary value for it since it is only one-dimensional: it doesn’t involve behavioural and emotional dimensions - which, in turn, makes up the bulk of ROE/ROX.

That's were design-driven innovation can help, because what design really can do for a company is to generate value. This it can do on three levels: aesthetic is the most commonly appreciated and easily perceived value, but it also delivers two additional dimensions, that remain less well recognised: economic value for business (e.g return on investment and profitability) and social value for people (products and services being responsive to user needs and having to possess social qualities that are positive and reinforcing). This sum of value dimensions can be powerful: beyond looks, and even economics, design-driven innovation has the power to enhance life.

American authors like Joe Pine and Dan Pink have clearly documented the rise of The Experience Economy and the Conceptual Age, in which the conceptualisation and design of nearly everything will need re-thinking in the light of the fact that it is no longer only the effect on the outside world, but the effect on our inner selves, our experience that is driving our decisions and therefore shaping our consumption patterns.

How to be an English Bloke

As we are on the topic of gender issues today, and if you have read the post on the new book, Self Made Man below, you might need some humorous interlude to remind yourself that life as a man really isn't as bad as Norah Vincent makes it sound. More precisely, life as an English bloke is even better. Here's why:

1. CALLING SOMEONE 'SON' - Especially policeman but even saying it to kids makes you the man.
2. DRINKING UP - Specifically, rising from the table, slinging your coat on and downing two thirds of a pint in one fluid movement. Then nodding towards the door, saying, "Let's go" and striding out while everyone else struggles to catch up with you. God, you're hard.
3. NODDING AT COPPERS - A moments eye contact is all it takes for you to share the unspoken bond. "We've not seen eye to eye in the past", it says, "but someone's got to keep the little scrotes in line".
4. ARRIVING IN A PUB LATE... and everyone cheers you. It doesn't mean you're popular, it just means your mates are pissed. However, the rest of the pub doesn't know that.
5. NOT WATCHING YOUR WEIGHT - fat is a feminist issue, apparently. Brilliant. Pass the pork scratchings.
6. CARVING THE ROAST - and saying "are you a leg or breast man" to the blokes and "do you want stuffing" to the women. Congratulations, you are now your dad.
7. TEST SWINGING HAMMERS - ideally, B&Q would have little changing rooms with mirrors so you could see how rugged you look with any DIY item. Until then, we'll make do with the aisles.
8. PHONE CALLS THAT LAST LESS THAN A MINUTE - unlike birds, we get straight to the point. "alright? Yep. Drink? Red lion? George, it is then. Seven. Seeya."
9. HAVING EARNED THAT PINT - Since the dawn of time, men have toiled in the fields in blistering heat. Why? So, when it's over we can stand there in silence, surveying our work with one hand resting on the beer gut while the other nurses a foaming jug of ale. Aaaah.
10. HAVING SOMETHING PROPERLY WRONG WITH YOU - especially if you didn't make a fuss. "Why was I off, nothing much, just a brain haemorrhage".
11. CALLING YOUR MATE A C_*T - and punching him on the shoulder. Just a man's way of saying "you're a good mate; I missed you while you were in hospital".
12. FARTING in public - you are a man, right? Better out than in then..

             

New Book: A Self Made Man

Recent weeks have seen the publication of Self Made Man by Norah Vincent, a fascinating look into what life is like for the opposite sex. As a woman I find this extremely interesting, and as a tomboy myself (not lesbian though) I've always had men as close friends. To me some of the issues raised by Norah are ones I've come across too, but are topics men are mostly quiet about, as the preconception is that men are the stoics society expects them to be.

More about the book though - Norah Vincent has lived as a man, but didn't undergo a sex change or radical hormone treatments. She simply went undercover. In an extraordinary feat of acting, disguise and guts, Vincent lived among men — as a man — for 18 months to see what life was like on the other side of the gender divide.

At 5 feet, 10 inches and 155 pounds, Vincent passed as a medium-build man she called Ned. Her transformation began with a buzz cut, baggy men's clothes, and a too-small sports bra to flatten her breasts. She even wore a little padding in a jock strap. For the rest, she enlisted the help of makeup artist Ryan McWilliams, who created Ned's five-o'-clock shadow. Then there was the theatrical component. Vincent underwent months of training with Juilliard voice teacher Kate Maré to learn how to sound like a man. "Women have much stronger nasal resonances as a rule," Maré explained. When all the pieces were put together — hair, makeup, voice, posture and style — the transformation was complete, and Norah Vincent became Ned Vincent.

Vincent, a journalist, didn't take the project lightly. She estimates she put on Ned's whiskers and clothes about 150 times during her 18-month experiment. "I wanted to enter males' spheres of interest and … see how men are with each other. I wanted to make friends with men. I wanted to know how male friendships work from the inside out," she told ABC's "20/20."

Cracking the mystery of a "boys' night out" is one thing, but understanding the explicit world of a man's sexuality is quite another. To gain an understanding of what some might consider the quintessential male experience, Vincent went to several strip clubs with a male friend. She describes the experience as hellish — demeaning for the strippers and even worse for the men.

"I saw the men there. I saw the looks on their faces. This is not about appreciation of women, of course. It's not about appreciation of their own sexuality. It's about an urge and … that's not always that pleasurable, really," she said. Vincent said strip joints are about pure sex drive — completely empty of any meaningful interaction, even when a woman is gyrating on your lap.

Even though Vincent is attracted to women, she said she was never aroused during her visits to the clubs. "I really ran smack up against the difference between male and female sexuality. It's that female sexuality is mental. … For a man, it's an urge," she said.

She was quickly reminded that in this arena, it's women who have the power, she said. "In fact, we sit there and we just with one word, 'no,' will crush someone," she said. "We don't have to do the part where you cross the room and you go up to a stranger that you've never met in the middle of a room full of people and say the first words. And those first words are so hard to say without sounding like a cheeseball or sounding like a jerk."

Vincent encountered some pretty cold shoulders in her attempts at the bar, but she did manage to go on about 30 dates with women as "Ned," mostly arranging them on the Internet. Vincent said the dates were rarely fun and that the pressure of "Ned" having to prove himself was grueling. She was surprised that many women had no interest in a soft, vulnerable man.

"My prejudice was that the ideal man is a woman in a man's body. And I learned, no, that's really not. There are a lot of women out there who really want a manly man, and they want his stoicism," she said.

Vincent thought the perfect end to her 18-month saga would be to join a men-only therapy group, a place where guys tried to bond and show their emotions instead of hiding them. Again, Vincent saw the men struggle with vulnerability. "They don't get to show the weakness, they don't get to show the affection, especially with each other. And so often all their emotions are shown in rage," she said.

Instead, Vincent said, the men talked about rage, often their rage toward women, and what they would do physically and violently toward women. "A lot of this was blowing off steam. …They would talk about fantasizing about chopping up their wives or something. It's not that they would ever do that, but it was a way to get out the blackest thoughts," she said. Norah began to empathize with the fear and stress men feel for having to always be the strong provider.

Vincent says she's glad to be rid of Ned.  But her views about men have changed forever.

"Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better," she said. "They need our sympathy. They need our love, and maybe they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."

Ironically, Vincent said, it took experiencing life as a man for her to appreciate being a woman. "I really like being a woman. … I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege."

Cartoon Laws of Physics

A sign of growing old is the inability to appreciate cartoons. Cartoons are a way of thinking, a way of seeing the funny side in even the most mundane situations and also a way to take liberties with reality and make any story infinitely more amusing by adding some simple cartoon physics to the events. Of course school inevitably intervenes to try to educate us to forget Cartoon Laws of Physics, but if persistent effort is made, one may successfully keep Cartoon Laws of Physics in mind in addition to regular Physics and secure a happy outlook on life even into old age.

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Cartoon Law I

Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland.  He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down.  At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second takes over.

 

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Cartoon Law II

Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly.

Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely.  Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge's surcease.

 

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Cartoon Law III

Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter.

Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the speciality of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole.  The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.

 

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Cartoon Law IV

The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken.

Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful.

 

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Cartoon Law V

All principles of gravity are negated by fear.

Psychic forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the earth's surface.  A spooky noise or an adversary's signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole.  The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground, especially when in flight.

 

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Cartoon Law VI

As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once.

This is particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character's head may be glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously.  This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throttled.  A `wacky' character has the option of self- replication only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required.

 

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Cartoon Law VII

Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot.

This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall's surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space.  The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting.

This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science.

 

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Cartoon Law VIII

Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent.

Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford.  They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed.  After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify.

Corollary: A cat will assume the shape of its container.

 

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Cartoon Law IX

Everything falls faster than an anvil.

 

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Cartoon Law X

For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance.

This is the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large.  For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead.

 

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Cartoon Law Amendment A

A sharp object will always propel a character upward.

When poked (usually in the buttocks) with a sharp object (usually a pin), a character will defy gravity by shooting straight up, with great velocity.

 

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Cartoon Law Amendment B

The laws of object permanence are nullified for "cool" characters.

Characters who are intended to be "cool" can make previously nonexistent objects appear from behind their backs at will.  For instance, the Road Runner can materialize signs to express himself without speaking.

 

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Cartoon Law Amendment C

Explosive weapons cannot cause fatal injuries.

They merely turn characters temporarily black and smoky.

 

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Cartoon Law Amendment D

Gravity is transmitted by slow-moving waves of large wavelengths.

Their operation can be witnessed by observing the behavior of a canine suspended over a large vertical drop.  Its feet will begin to fall first, causing its legs to stretch.  As the wave reaches its torso, that part will begin to fall, causing the neck to stretch.  As the head begins to fall, tension is released and the canine will resume its regular proportions until such time as it strikes the ground.

 

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Cartoon Law Amendment E

Dynamite is spontaneously generated in "C-spaces" (spaces in which cartoon laws hold).

The process is analogous to steady-state theories of the universe which postulated that the tensions involved in maintaining a space would cause the creation of hydrogen from nothing.  Dynamite quanta are quite large (stick sized) and unstable (lit).  Such quanta are attracted to psychic forces generated by feelings of distress in "cool" characters (see Amendment B, which may be a special case of this law), who are able to use said quanta to their advantage.  One may imagine C-spaces where all matter and energy result from primal masses of dynamite exploding.  A big bang indeed.

How to Dress Like A Ninja

Forget fashion - inspire awe everywhere you go with a ninja outfit, see below!

Quote of the Day: Douglas Adams

Easter is here and thus there are legitimate reasons to do nothing, eat loads, spend time with friends and family and generally relax. To those more religious than me, this is an important holiday to be celebrated, but alas as I'm prepared to tolerate religion if it gives me time off work... :)

Wanted to share with you a great site for perusing when you have more time on your hands (like now) and that is the WikiQuote Project, a resource similar to Wikipedia, the web's free encyclopedia, but with the aim of collecting authentic quotes from as many sources as possible. Therefore my quote of the day comes from the WikiQuote project's entries for Douglas Adams and is on the subject of evolution:

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

• As quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams

Can the effect of word-of-mouth be measured?

Reading Guy Kawasaki's post on the Art of Customer Service part II and the comments in particular, made me think of the effect that word-of-mouth has in the context of customer service. Some comments highlight the frustrations of bad customer service and the very fact of these experiences being shared, the phenomenon of word-of-mouth.

Word-of-mouth is an elusive ally, but can have a potentially devastating effect on your company. The truth is that people are more likely to tell their friends they've had a bad experience than an OK, or acceptable one. No news it seems are good news. Frederick Reichheld, of the Harvard Business Review has ventured into trying to define or even calculate the effect of word-of-mouth using what he calls the 'Net Promoter Score" in an article published in 2003, titled  “The One Number You Need to Grow”. Reichheld argues that most of the effort survey research companies expend to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty is wasted because they ask the wrong questions. Instead, he boldly asserts that the only question that needs to be asked is: “Would you recommend this company to a friend?”

Reichheld argues that this response should be used to calculate the number of “net promoters”a firm has. Basically, he recommends asking the question on a scale of zero to ten, where ten means “extremely likely” and zero means “not at all likely.” He then calculates the proportion of brand users rating their likelihood of recommending it as a nine or ten (referred to as “promoters”) and subtracts from it the proportion rating their likelihood a zero through six (referred to as “detractors”). And presto, one now has all the information needed from customers to grow a business – the proportion of “net promoters.”

On the surface of it the simplicity of this idea is very appealing. It seems that all the complicated customer surveys are a waste of time, when all you need to know is the answer to this one question.
Ipsos Ideas Canada however, pose some very poignant questions contradicting this theory:

There are numerous problems with Reichheld’s proposed calculation. First, the implication that all customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement systems fail to correlate with profits or growth is ridiculous..For example, research has found that customer satisfaction has a measurable impact on purchase intentions, on customer retention, on financial performance, and on word-of-mouth (also known as the likelihood of recommending). Furthermore, researchers have found that companies that perform relatively better on the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) produce significantly more Market Value Added, a cumulative measure of corporate performance reflecting the difference between what investors have put in and what they can take out. This documented relationship between stock market performance and firm growth contradicts Reichheld’s assertions.

As a designer and a product developer, I'm actually far more interested in knowing what are the reasons behind a customer giving a company a grade 4 as opposed to say, grade 8 on the scale of 1(abysmal) to 10 (brilliant). As Ipsos puts it: "Instead of being a guide to action, it is simply a thermometer. Imagine a doctor taking your child’s temperature, announcing that he has a high fever, and saying, “He’s definitely ill, good luck.” Only by understanding what actually drives customer loyalty can managers effectively prioritize their improvement efforts, and this requires a great deal more diagnostic information from customers than simply their likelihood to recommend a firm to a friend."

What really confuses me in his article is that Reichheld claims that the “net promoter”score is independent of other measures (satisfaction and loyalty). Surely overall satisfaction levels + the likelihood to repurchase + the likelihood to recommend the firm should equal the final net promoter score? Moreover, in terms of improving something it may be vitally important to know that people rated the service they got, but found that the product was substandard and hence they would not recommend the company to others? If you only know the result, i.e they will not recommend the product to their friends, you will see the fact in a balance sheet and there is no need to ask customers about this. If, on the other hand, you did find out that it is the product's fault that they are not willing to recommend you to others, then you at least know that your customer service is in order and you need to sort your product out.

Going back to the original question, can word-of-mouth be measured - the crux is that loyal customers don’t always act as advocates for brands, services, and companies. So if the presence of word-of-mouth is actually more constrained than conventionally thought, how exactly does the “net promoter” concept work? Besides, recommending things to a friend you tend to mention those things in the right context, rather than bang on about them whenever and where ever, that is: if you want to have some friends left. Many companies and products we are entirely happy with, we trust them to deliver the product or service we expect, but we are not evangelical - in fact, I don't think you will ever catch me being evangelical about toilet paper, deodorant, washing powder, electricity and gas providers etc. but you will find me ranting on about computer interface design, product design on various consumer products, certain airlines, restaurants, and so on.

Why is that? I believe we are more likely to be evangelical or recommend something to a friend the better the experience it provided. Therefore I will return with a checklist for whether your company provides a commodity or an experience and if it does provide an experience, is it one people would recommend? More on that later.

Graffiti lends legitimacy to big brands

Graffiti and Street Art used to be the realm of the underground, yet recent years have seen a surge in major brands adopting street style and art in an effort to make their products appealing to a younger audience and gain credibility amongst teens. Once frowned upon, and exclusively found in poor beaten-down districts of bustling multicultural cities, graffiti is now on the high street as hip and cool and, ultimately mainstream. This post attempts to trace some of the background to graffiti and street art as well as outline some of the more outright blatant attempts by big brands at co-opting graffiti and the street art ethos as ways of signalling the coolness of their products.

The word "graffiti" derives from the Greek word graphein meaning: to write. This evolved into the Latin word graffito. Graffiti is the plural form of graffito. Simply put, graffiti is a drawing, scribbling or writing on a flat surface. Today, we equate graffiti with the "New   York" or "Hip Hop" style which emerged from New York City in the 1970's. However, graffiti and street art is much bigger than that, it is a feature of any major city in the world and increasingly inspiring toys, action figures, fashion, interior design, even town planning as it beginning to be seen not as a destructive element, but as an art form giving dynamism and expression to an otherwise dull city-scape.

Hip hop: Fueling the Fire
This change has escalated, mainly because of music and Hip Hop in particular. Hip Hop was originally an inner city concept. It evolved from the rap music made in Brooklyn and Harlem in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Donald Clarke, a music historian, has written that rap music was a reaction to the disco music of the period. Disco was centered in the rich, elitist clubs of Manhattan and rap emerged on street corners as an alternative. Using lyrical rhythms and 'beat boxing' the music was a way to express feelings about inner-city life. Hip hop emerged as turn tables began to be used to form part of the rhythm by `scratching' (the sound created by running the stylus over the grooves of an LP).   

Keith Haring and Taki 183 as catalysts
As Hip Hop music emerged so did a new outlet for artistic visibility. Keith Haring began using posters to place his uniquely drawn figures and characters in public places. Soon he began to draw directly on subway walls and transit posters. The uniqueness of his drawings eventually led to their being shown in galleries and published in books and his art became "legitimate".

At about the same time as Keith Haring, a delivery messenger began writing "Taki 183" whenever he delivered documents. Soon his name was all over the city. Newspapers and magazines wrote articles about him and Keith Haring. Both became celebrities. This claim to fame attracted many young people, especially those involved with rapping. They began to imitate "Taki 183".    

Graffiti culture
Graffiti was incorporated into the Hip Hop culture and became a sort of triad with rapping and break dancing . Breakdancing has since lost much of its initial popularity, while rapping has emerged as a major style in American music. New York City was inundated with graffiti during the late seventies and early eighties. But as media coverage faded so do did the graffiti. Then in the mid-eighties a national TV program did a graffiti story and set off a graffiti wildfire which has become world-wide.   

Graffiti quickly became a social scene. Friends often form crews of vandals. One early crew wrote TAG as their crew name, an acronym for Tuff Artists Group. Tag has since come to mean both     graffiti writing, 'tagging' and graffiti, a 'tag'. Crews often tag together, writing both the crew tag and their own personal tags. Graffiti has its own language with terms such as: piece, toy, wild-style, and racking.

The changing face of graffiti
As graffiti has grown, so too has its character. What began as an urban lower-income protest, nationally, graffiti now spans all racial and economic groups. While many inner-city kids are still heavily involved in the graffiti culture, one tagger recently caught in Philadelphia was a 27 year old stockbroker who drove to tagging sites in his BMW. Styles have dramatically evolved from the simple cursory style, which is still the most prevalent, to intricate interlocking letter graphic designs with multiple colors called pieces (from masterpieces).    

Graffiti gone commercial
Street Campaign Graffiti shops, both retail and on-line, sell a wide variety of items to taggers. Caps, markers, magazines, T-shirts, backpacks, shorts with hidden pockets, even drawing books with templates of different railroad cars can be purchased. Over 25,000 graffiti sites exist on the world wide web, the majority of these are pro-graffiti. Moreover, the character designs emerging from graffiti have spawned their very own culture around adult collectable vinyl figures, some fetching many hundreds of pounds. Now graffiti and street culture are the must-have items of viral campaigns, the stamp of guaranteed coolness, the way to rejuvenate brands.

The Hummer (above)campaign, where traditional poster prints have been replaced by graffiti works, has been seen as a sell-out by many in the graffiti community and subject to defacing attacks, where tags like 'Scam', 'get a bicycle' and more profane language is sprayed over the works.

Adidas did their spin on using graffiti by providing blank posters with minimal branding, inviting graffiti artists to paint on the billboards. See article at Concept Bakery.

Also check out How to Plan a Viral Marketing Campaign at the Wooster Collective. A tongue-in-cheek account of how to use street art to add credibility to your brand or exploit the art to create your own popular vinylfigures and make a fortune.

LINK LOG:

Obey Giant AKA Andre the Giant. A street art project and an experiment in phenomenology by artist and skateboarder Shepard Fairey. Stickers, posters, links and simply a must-read

KidRobot What's all the fuss about vinyl figures? Check out the coolest on-line shop for more info.

Worst Analogies Ever

Below are a collection of my personal favourites in the category: worst analogies ever. Analogies can be useful in describing how something appears, feels, looks like or generally is perceived - but then again our experiences are very personal so what can appear as a perfectly good analogy to one person is a subject of much laughter to someone else. Say no more, you make your minds up:

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and "Jeopardy" comes on at 7pm instead of 7:30.

Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:\flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaak/ch@ng by mistake.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like "Second Tall Man.

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36pm travelling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19pm at a speed of 35 mph.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr. Pepper can.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a drier without "Cling-Free."

Apparently the above are winning entries in a high-school contest...? Where is education coming to..? Link

Making Meaning through Creativity

Kids have a wonderful asset: to them the world is new, it's a place that demands discovery, trying things out, working things out. It's OK to fail, because everyone's in the same boat - we've all had to fall over before we learnt to ride a bicycle, have arguments with our friends to work out how to best get what we want, that dogs can be friendly but also scary, that there are two types of adults: those who get embarrassed when we wanted to play with them and those who see it as a great excuse to abandon the stuffy dinner table and come join us with our toys.

What kids are excellent at is making meaning: the world is a confusing place and the best thing to do is to approach it with reckless abandon and try your best to make sense of it. Toys are extensions of this desire, and building with construction toys is an effort to organise ideas. To me, the essence of LEGO is enacting ideas through construction, the more we build the more ideas we have. It is a wonderful way to get comfortable with creative thinking, how to play around with concepts without losing track of your trail of thought. A recent article by Time Magazine on Google, explains how Sergei Brin and Larry Page frequently play with LEGO to help brainstorm new products and concepts for this brilliantly successful search engine.

The recently launched LEGO Builders of Tomorrow site showcases a range of different initiatives where LEGO is used to foster creativity and help children learn, very inspirational stuff. What is sad is that the older we get, the further removed we get from this child-like approach to life and learning. We convince ourselves that there things we simply 'can't do' - that we are too old for, or can't be seen to be doing because it is childish etc. etc. We relegate ourselves into a prison of our own making and our mindsets change from being open and welcoming to the world, into being suspicious and scared of change. This is a sad fact of growing up, hence my determination to grow old but never to fully grow up.

Why? Because creativity demands curiosity. The enemy of creativity is fear. The best way to blot out fear is through curiosity, so rather than think of consequences we have to be willing to tear things down so we can build them up again - this is called 'creative destruction' if you want to be all grown up about it. There are no rules, so never tell your children what they should do, or do it for them. Let them learn and explore to do what they imagine. This goes for adults too, we get very stroppy when we talked to as if we couldn't think for ourselves. It's about allowing youself to be a dreamer. Someone who thought of how things could be. That is the quest of making meaning. And meaning is why we want to get up in the morning.

Who Invented the Paperclip?

The product design industry is full of people who want to be 'designer popstars' - people who dream about having their name instantly recognised, their face peering out of trendy magazines, their products coveted by millions of consumers and ultimately, all of this resulting in having an extra-ordinary amount of personal wealth, the license to wear whatever one likes (after all, I'm a famous designer so I SET TRENDS, not follow them!) and an entourage of admiring girls (yes, most of these people are still men!) following in their wake. As you guessed, the annual prostitution fest is about to begin as the third-year design students are preparing their portfolios, finishing their final major projects and beginning to eye-up IDEO as the desired place to work, en route to starting their own design companies. The competition is extremely tough, every year around 5000 hopefuls graduate here in London at the same time and all start bombarding prospective consultancies with their CVs and portfolios.

Thus there is a complete over-supply of designers in relation to design consultancies (at least here in London) and many of these hopefuls will end up disappointed and the road to designer pop-stardom will have to take the detour of working in a shop somewhere to pay the rent. Those hopefuls from about 20 years ago, who 'made it', are now running their own consultancies and equally, still on a quest to become the pop stars of design in their own right.

Interestingly, all designers are on a quest to invent the holy grail of products, the one thing that the world simply can't live without and of course hoping that their name will become synonymous with the invention (and millions will roll in). Ironically, the famous designer that people may have heard of, Philippe Starck, is actually best known for a product that doesn't even work properly: his lemon squeezer, which looks fantastic, but is a nightmare to use. The product, which is truly all-pervasive in all of our lives (a success-story from a design point-of-view), the paperclip, is the opposite: it is everywhere, but the man who invented it remains virtually unknown and we can only guess whether his fortunes were in any way improved by it. As the story goes when Johann Vaaler patented his paper clip in 1901, there already were similar designs on the books. William Middlebrook of Waterbury, Connecticut patented his design in 1899. Cornelius Brosnan of Springfield, Massachusetts patented his Konaclip in 1900.

Who was first? Well, it is thought to be Johann Vaaler. Drawings of his design date to early 1899, but since Norway had no patent law at the time, he had to seek patent rights in Germany and the US in the following years. Johann Vaaler was born on 15 March 1866 in Aurskog, Norway. Known as an innovator in his youth, he graduated in electronics, science and mathematics (note this is before the time of design being singled out as a profession in its own right). He was employed by the owner of a invention office when he invented the paperclip. Several designs followed the original. Only a few remain, such as the Ideal, Non-Skid, Owl and Gem. The first double-oval clip, the Gem, was launched in early-1900 by Gem Manufacturing Ltd of England.

So there we are, as irony will have it many of the most successful or useful designs in our lives have been invented by people who remain unknown and in many cases, even poor and those who gain success and fame are the people whose designs or inventions are not exclusive or even ground-breaking and in some cases don't even work (sorry Philippe!). Therefore the point surely has to be that our goal as designers should be to make meaning or make a difference in people's lives, rather than make money? More on that later.

Book Review: Things That Make Us Smart

Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine

This book, by Donald Norman, was originally published in 1993, and I came across it four years later when writing my thesis on user experiences bridging the virtual and digital realms. It has stuck with me ever since as it provides a profound and timeless insight into how technology then, as now still doesn't make the best use of our abilities.

The good news is that technology can make us smart. The human mind is limited in capability. There is only so much we can remember, only so much we can learn. But among our abilities is that of devising artificial devices – artifacts – that expand our capabilities. We invent things that make us smart. Through technology we can think better and more clearly. We have access to accurate information. We can work effectively with others, whether together in the same place or separate in space or time.

The bad news is that technology can make us stupid. The technology for creating things has far outstripped our understanding of them. Things that can make us smart can also make us dumb. Technology has not been planned, it just happened and what this book focuses on is what is wrong with the design of technology that requires people to behave in machine-centred ways for which people are not well suited. What does that mean? When technology is not designed from a human-centred point of view, it doesn't reduce the incidence of human error nor minimise the impact when errors do occur. Yes, people do indeed err. Therefore the technology should be designed to take this well-known fact into account. Instead the tendency is to blame the person who errs, even though the fault might lie with the technology, even though to err is indeed very human.

We are in the middle of what some people call “the information explosion”, but there is too much information for anyone to assimilate, the information is of doubtful quality, and perhaps most important, the things we collect statistics about are primarily those things that are easiest to identify and count or measure – which may have little or no connection with those factors of greatest importance. It is easy to collect statistics on number of hours worked, on cost of equipment, and on such statistical indexes as “productivity of labour”. It is much more difficult to collect statistics on the quality of a product or its effect on the quality of life.

We humans are thinking, interpreting creatures. The mind tends to seek explanations, to interpret, to make suggestions. We are active, creative social beings. We seek interaction with others. Unlike machines, we change our behaviour as we attempt to understand what others expect from us. All of these natural tendencies are thwarted by the engineering approach to efficiency. The machine-centred view is concerned primarily with operations per second.

The Procrastinator's Guide to Writing a Blog

1. Place computer on desk in a well-lit room
2. Pull up a chair of appropriate height in relation to the table, with a straight back - optimal for typing
3. Turn on computer
4. Get up and go make some coffee
5. While making cup of coffee, think about subject to write blog entry about
6. Bring back coffee mug to computer
7. Sit back down in front of computer
8. Open email, check if there any new messages
9. Turn on messenger, check if any friends are on-line
10. Realise fridge needs filling, scribble down shopping list
11. Open blog software, check visitor numbers and the most popular page
12. Realise you don't feel like writing anything on the most popular topic, feel depressed
13. Open blog entry page
14. Open another window, browse hot topics on popurls.com
15. Discover coffee has got cold, get up and go to kitchen to warm up coffee in microwave
16. Return to computer, sit down
17. Open emails again to see if any new messages have arrived
18. Scratch head, regret starting a blog and the demands placed on you in the form of expectations of blog readers
19. Send quick IM to friend to see what they are up to in the weekend
20. Open blog entry page again, stare at empty field - hopefully at this point something will have materialised in your mind that you feel like sharing with the world, if not return to point 4.

Joking aside, writing consistently interesting blog entries is a challenge. The above is a description of some of the turmoil I undergo on a regular basis and as you gathered from the description, it does get pretty tedious after a while so I have developed some strategies to be able to come up with topics at least semi-frequently.  Here are a few approaches:

• Start writing a collection of posts, which allows you to plan entries in advance. Now this sounds like a remarkably well thought-out strategy, but to confess to you I haven't managed to do that. Life is too random and I do have a full-time job that distracts me on occasion quite a lot. Great if it works, but not for me
• Have a notebook for jotting down blog entry ideas as they occur to you. This is something I do do, as I don't have a nifty blackberry or feel comfortable standing in a train my face in someone's armpit, writing lyrical prose at the same time. I also write the gist of the post down by hand, as I find it helps me think better than just typing it straight.
• Read everything and anything. This I certainly do - creative minds need feeding, constantly! So I read magazines, newspapers, books (lots of them!), blogs, news-feeds - anything and everything that grabs my interest, my rationale being that all that information will eventually mature to insightful entries on my blog (here's hoping anyway ;-) )
• Refuse to commit to one specific subject area. Blog guides frequently advise against this, as their thinking is that if you stick to one topic alone, it is easier for the audience to work out whether they like your blog or not. Well, good point - but life's too short, at least in my opinion, so forgive me, dear readers, for the vastly eclectic mix of subjects on this blog - why? because I actually believe that you, much like me, are curious folk, interested in many a diverse topic and that part of the joy of reading blogs is the surprise and amusement provided when they aren't entirely predictable in their content. Maybe a misconception, so let me know.
• Remain curious about most things and keep continuously learning - this approach allows for observation and comment, both important elements of blog entries and what makes it interesting to read individual blogs as opposed to just news-feeds. I like blogs not just for the topics they cover, but for the people behind them who are gradually revealed between the lines of the blog posts.
• Don't worry about it - I have a tendency to worry about the long-term implication of things, which often stops me doing things, before I even started. So I have a strategy of dealing with this tendency of mine: for instance, when I moved over to the UK, I never thought I was moving over - simply that I was 'visiting'. Had I thought about all the sad things involved when moving to another country (leaving your pet, family, friends etc. behind - I would have probably never done it!). Now 12 years later I realise that life didn't quite work out that way, but I never worried. Also when starting the blog, some clever people asked me why I'm not daunted at the prospect of having to write frequently for many years to come? To this my response is, I will do it for as long as I feel like it. Simple and straight forward, but ultimately it is a dialogue with readers and so far I have had some great feedback and input from you, dear readers, and that keeps my spirit up and inspires me to continue. Hopefully I will improve too!

Collaborative Blog Writing: Manager Tools

Just had a great comment to one of my posts, The Art of Leadership, by Gavin of KrazyBoyz and was so inspired by his input I wanted to share it with you all:

Hey

Check out Manager Tools. Their pod casts are really, really smart. Those guys just lay out the management thing in an obvious, caring way. Obvious: great concepts tend to be obvious (we just don't do them). Caring: it's not about control but empowerment.

Couldn't agree more! So I went and had a listen, and must say I'm impressed. Lots of good stuff there so go on, have a listen! And big thanks to you Gavin for sharing the link!