THE IDEA BARRAGE

Single purpose as opposed to 'smart'

2010-06-14T06:21:12Z

Five years ago around the time Blue Jay Cafe first opened on Divisadero, I walked in and sat down on a counter seat. I took the garage door opener I carried in my motorcycle jacket pocket out and laid it on the table -- a bulky, cheap looking black plastic shell, mostly hollow, with one single large button. The size of the gadget is 2 to 3 times as large as a typical mobile phone. The young kid sitting next to me saw this and said "does that really just do one thing?"

I still carry the same garage door opener. The other device I typically carry in my pocket today is a smart phone. I also take that out of my pocket when I sit down in a restaurant. Looking at both devices next to each other I wonder about the huge gap in technology between them. And if this is why Radio Shack is still in business.

Three years ago The Onion ran this article which I still find really funny today: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business

Several weeks ago I stopped in at the local Radio Shack. I was looking into getting some LED strips. They didn't have exactly what I needed, but close. It was a sad scene. I like that they carry all these odd items that you wouldn't want to wait to order online and ship. But they also carry a lot of crap, as if that tiny section of Walgreens where you find the toaster, batteries, and answering machines expanded to an entire store. I must say though the customer service was good. I even gave them my email.

Smoking in the dark

2010-05-21T20:06:05Z

When I walked in I sensed the smell of milk. Odd. I kept the lights off and allowed my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I maneuvered across to the other end of the apartment, faintly remembering what might obstruct my way. I reached the curtain I had hung over the sliding balcony door and tucked it aside. I slid the door open to let the evening in. It's warm ...relatively. These aren't thoughts which were somehow magically translated, transcribed in these sparks of light currently beaming into your eyes. These are words being written right now. Tap tap tap, the sound you'd hear the keys make if you were here already. But you aren't here yet. Soon you will be. Soon as I let you in.

I chose to keep the lights off for a reason. And when I decide to think about why, I usually figure it out. But I am choosing to not question myself right now. Often there is no reason to question it. Often there is no one to explain to. But now you are obviously here. I should mention to you while you are here that you have been transported. You exist right now as I type, a presence where your body isn't yet. But soon it will. Like a sign requires you as an element before it can itself be a sign. In that sense you justify the situation I am in at this moment. Much later as your eyes scrub across this barcode of text I print on your screen. As you read, you are now existing in a time that has passed. Here along with me in this room. Hello, I should acknowledge your presence. I should say, the music in our background is Robyn belting a tune. It is dark. I have had some drinks. We are on the third floor looking west. The weather outside is the weather inside. Thank you for visiting. Thank you for being here right now.

Now that you are here I should tell you a story. Hmm, I can't promise a complete story, I should warn. I say this cause I am merely starting a conversation with you, if you can call it that. I am starting a story but I don't know yet if it will complete. I have no idea yet of an arc or an end. I am only beginning to tell you about this evening. A story I have never told before. I don't know if it will be interesting to you. Or how long it will go for. You have the advantage over me on that. You can glance down the page and see how l did by the length. I myself right now can not know. Perhaps if this was a true conversation you can tell me. Respond to me. But no. However, I should mention to you that I also have an advantage. I can travel in time as well. I can go back after I finish the story and edit this paragraph. I can change the sparks to where I am very aware of how the story I am about to tell you went, if it was interesting enough for you to keep on reading, if it is a story with an arc and an ending. But no, I didn't go back and edit this. Let's just go with it shall we?

A woman sat next to me at the local wine bar down the street. There were many open bar stool sand she chose the one directly to my right. After a while I heard a smile of some sort and then felt a poking on my shoulder. I looked over and she introduced herself. Everything else I can tell you after this is not worth reading. Her painful insecurity beamed through in every arrogant, self-righteous, platitude she'd rehearsed. Her unprompted ego oozed with weakness that attacked at mid sentences, hungry and deaf.

(deleted text here)

Infomania in the Great American Boulangerie

2010-03-13T04:51:13Z

Black as a dead brick. I tried pressing all its buttons (and combinations of) to see if anything would light up. Nothing. For some reason my phone as it rested on the cafe table had decided to shut down. It was unusual. I was just on it doing a number of things several minutes ago. The battery was not nearly empty. Looking... nor had the battery come loose. Hrm. Nothing.

So I decided to cut my cafe reading time short in order to do the next logical thing - plug my phone into the wall and see if it sparks up. I had only gotten past the third chapter in a fairly thick book loaned to me. I remember thinking how it was just that particular point in a book where it first takes grasp of you. Three chapters of setting up the temperatures of color in your head, then whoa, hey there, a fuzzy had felt its way into you. And you got your first spoon full of (something) from the author. Yum. Then it happened. I reached to check my phone and it was playing dead. Sigh.

Yes I decided to close the book and favor my infomania instead. The cafe wasn't very interesting tonight. Some familiar faces around, but mostly a strange crowd. It's a Friday night. I know cause someone at work commented on how the week is finally over. It has been "a bustling week". The sudden changes in weather has a way of stretching it further in hindsight. And now it's over. It's over in the sense that I can sit and read a book at a cafe. But who am I kidding, this won't last.

I got up. I didn't even bus the table like I usually do. Instead, I looked at my empty bowl of soup, the remaining peasant bread, some unfinished coffee (now cold), and thought to myself: I have sat in this cafe more times than anywhere else in the past few years. And each and every time I have bussed my own table. But I knew that this time I wasn't going to. I was two feet from the door, no one was looking, and my phone is a cold dead brick.

[ Reminded: I use to have a phone with suicidal tendencies. Beep. Whenever the battery ran low, it would beep every few seconds or so to let me know. In doing so it used up even more battery with every. Beep. Thus accelerating and ensuring its imminent death. How tragically cute. Beep. ]

Return to the simple?

2010-03-11T06:21:15Z

I had the strange good fortune to get my paws on one of Sony Ericcson's new phones, the "Pureness" last week. In addition to igniting some pretty serious reactions in all different directions form my more design-minded friends just from an industrial design perspective, I have to say it's been a little study in the value of simplicity for me.

It's MONOCHROME. I mean, the screen is frickin SEE THOUGH, but it's monochrome none the less. It's T-9, it's on edge for god's sake, it doesn't internet enough to matter, it doesn't even google map. It's just a phone. Which is honestly kind of fantastic. It rings, I answer. It's a cool looking, little tiny, phone.

T-9-ing again has caused me to reconsider the hidden advantages of basic and simple constraint. I can T-9 without looking, my brain remembers how to do it after years and years away. I'm not motivated to say or do too much with it, just keep it simple, say it simple. I write more on the laptop when I'm near it. I have a new little chunk of my life back.

When I first saw this thing I thought, "wait, why are they releasing a thousand-dollar phone from the 90's?" but here I am google voicing over to it so it doesn't matter what its number is T-9-ing just as fast as I can enter android text.... What's old is what's new?

On beginnings and endings

2010-02-14T00:04:54Z

The way I grew up watching movies at the cinema was kind of odd. At what time I arrived and entered the theater didn't matter to me. I would walk in and sit in the back. I started the movie wherever I happened to. Then stayed past the ending until it started over again and reached the part I had already seen. How the story begins and ends is not in the control of the filmmaker. It is left to chance as affected by any of the innumerable forces that led up to my off-schedule arrival. This has been my relationship with movies for as long as I can remember. And as such, it has never made a difference to me whether I knew about the story's twist or ending beforehand.

Are there feature film examples where the narrative does not rely on a beginning and ending -- the viewer may enter at any particular point? Or is it by definition that a narrative must have a start and end to tell a story? Even so, can an end lead into a start of a story seamlessly? Or do none of these questions really make any sense?

(Photo: Making crude flyers on recycled legal-sized sheets of paper.)

Why TEN?

2010-02-07T13:00:00Z

As with most great ideas the concept of TEN first revealed itself over a cocktail beverage at a bar while yelling across the table to a couple of friends. But let's not talk about my issues. TEN is a film festival that I personally would like to go and see -- and not just because of my involvement in it which requires me to attend. A team of filmmaker-types assembled around TEN to put it on, not because I know little of film making (again let's not focus on my issues) but because it is amazingly wonderful to see big ideas take their very first steps. To be there, present as it began. And to have its introduction be challenged by the constraints of time and resources, forcing it into even more creativity. How can this event possibly be anything but a spectacle? I hope to see you there.

The Toxicity of Bad Management

2010-02-04T17:48:47Z

I was just getting a coffee and a snack at La Boulange which is a small chain of French-style bakery and breakfast places here in SF. They have 4-5 of them in the city.

I paid with a crisp twenty I had just gotten from the ATM. When I handed over the bill, the woman at the counter glared at it, then held it up to the light to locate the all-important metal strip inside the bill, then swiped it with one of those pens who's ink turns dark only on a fake bill but remains transparent on a genuine note.

"What's with all the security?" I asked her.

"Well," she said, "there have been a lot of fake twenties getting passed in this neighborhood recently. They said if we take a fake twenty, it will get taken out of our tips!"

So, essentially, lazy and irresponsible management (and probably more accurately, middle management: this is going to be the kind of place which has a "store manager" who makes about 15% more than the counter people or gets a token revenue share if they "hit their targets for the quarter"), but management none the less at these stores has placed anti-counterfeiting responsibility on their counter staff! Think about this for a second.

Can you imagine a crazier thing to do? Should twelve or fifteen dollars per hour cover anti-counterfeiting efforts? Is there a commensurate bonus associated with rejecting a fake bill? Of course there isn't. There is only the fear of penalty and a refusal to take responsibility at the appropriate level in the company for a problem like this.

Now, endowing this woman at the counter with that kind of fear and responsibility passes directly and instantly to me, a sleepy customer who has already gotten over the hump and been impressed enough with them to want to pay six dollars for a coffee and croissant. A basic bad management decision created a bad experience for me first thing in the morning, and caused me to think about their brand as jerky corporate types rather than people capable of making a three dollar plain croissant. It was also the first story I told my co-workers and now La Boulange is banned for all of us.

I wonder, what happens when this woman does encounter a fake bill? She's very motivated to keep her tips and so refuses to take the bill and give the person whatever it is they have ordered. There may already be a coffee poured for the person, a morning bun in the warmer for them. What now? Would this situation potentially mean danger for the stalwart counter person? A scene in the restaurant? Food waste at the very least? Does possession of a fake twenty even imply knowledge of it? Might the person passing the fake just be a guy from the shoe store up the street who was handed it as change for the fifty dollar bill his Aunt gave him for his 23rd birthday? Has the person who handed down the "take a fake twenty and I'll take your tips" rule thought any of this though? You bet they haven't. My guess is that that person's manager handed down a similar decree of punishment that morning at a special magers meeting. How come the tip-stealing threat is a good motivator in the first place? My guess would be that the base wage is such that getting an extra twenty dollars per shift from the tip jar actually matters a lot. Again, this is indicative to me of bad management at several basic levels.

Okay, got it, enough! Why am I belaboring this? I'm not just having a grumpy morning. I think this is a living example of an attitude which has become the norm in big business in the U.S. and has started to infect small business more and more. This is a great example of the fundamental Toxicity of Bad Management. When a real and basic problem comes up for an organization, management hands responsibility for the fix down to the lowest level it can and in a lot of cases sets up an enforcement mechanism based on financial penalty. This is a kind of "anti-bonus" mentality and thinking about it now probably isn't even legal without a very permissive contract structure with your employees. Whatever the case, at the very least this is definitive Bad Business and has been a mounting problem in this country's business culture for decades now. This same attitude, writ much larger, is a core component of our current economic mess. Bad management is always toxic, and not just in the scope of a single transaction or the company at the mercy of it.

The picture at the top is from a former local of mine down in LA. It's a similar deal, but in this case they have taken the additionally insane step of making it their customer's responsibility to manage their employee's schedules. See if you can guess where the $15 will come from?

Why won't Dick fuck off?

2010-01-03T20:55:31Z

I'm visiting my parents for the holidays. They watch "real news" which is surreal enough as it is. The other night, in the wake of the underpants bomber stuff, Dick Cheney of all people was quoted as saying that "Obama isn't doing enough" which I think loosely translates to "isn't torturing enough brown people" or something roughly equivalent.

Now, for a second, I just had my normal "Gads, what a turbo-moron that guy is" reaction which I almost always have when confronted with quotes from members of that cult-of-an-administration. But then it occurred to me, I was thinking in terms of THAT administration! STILL!

By way of comparison, imagine hearing Dan Quayle quoted in foreign policy news, more than a year into the Clinton administration! NEVER HAPPEN. Dick's opinion should really not have mattered much during the long darkness of those eight years, and it sure as hell doesn't matter now. I referred to this conversationally as the "sticky residue" of the neocons and for the media it seems to be a little like that goo left on an SUV after the removal of a yellow ribbon sticker, it will take a while to scrub off.

Dualistic Advertising

2009-10-23T16:30:00Z

I despise advertising in so may ways (my philosophy on opposites applied) which is to say I love advertising in so many ways. And having watched this video of Rory Sutherland speaking at TED, it confirms that. You can't hate ads for being manipulative. Manipulation is not bad. I am a designer and design itself is manipulation. The part to dislike is the way advertising often fails to entertain, educate, beautify. Instead it often intrudes in the most irrelevant of contexts and unwelcome situations.

A couple of weeks ago an idea popped up in my head. Someone told a story about a couple of kids, siblings, who left school on a Friday after having written all over their bodies with markers and returned to school Monday still covered with the same marks.

The idea:

What if commercials, or other formats of advertising, always came with dual messages? One message would aim to satisfy the marketing need to sell a product. The other would aim to satisfy an altruistic goal.

Effectively this lessens the intrusiveness of an ad. It advertises a product, sure, but clearly serves to benefit the community at the same time. With regard to the kids scenario above, a television commercial for Sharpie would promote not only the strength of the ink within every fun, vibrant, colorful, permanent marker but remind parents as well about the downsides of child neglect.

To the audience, a message on the issues of child neglect doesn't come across as intrusive. In fact it should be spread. Viral plus karma?

The result:

Ads not only become more effective but become a public service as well.

Wanted: Reputation Farmer

2009-10-16T15:34:04Z

We are digitizing ourselves more and more in every which way we can. We will probably continue doing this until that one day when a Giant Flying Magnet visits the earth and accidentally erases all digital data. Or when that corporation controlling most power companies decide to hold electricity hostage and turns off the internet (topics for another post).

Unproven assumptions that are likely to be true:

In the future a good chunk of our lives will be virtual and we ourselves will have virtual representations online. Since we will do much of our activity online, our virtual selves (much like our real selves now) will develop reputations. Our reputation will be shaped by how well we participate, behave. Records of these will be collected, compiled, saved somewhere by someone where it is safe and permanent.

As the world completely digitizes, trust and privacy issues will be at the foreground. Honor filters will be put in place everywhere. Our reputation must be good to surpass honor filters which identify those who are trustworthy and those who are not. We will need to pass honor filters in order to participate in communities, commerce, conversations, everywhere people exchange and interact online.

A reputation is fragile, it is something to guard and protect. A good reputation will be something very valuable. A good reputation takes time to cultivate. You must start now. Today is not yet this future. You have time to establish yourself early by being a good digital citizen, a digizen?

Ahem, there is also time to build an entire farm of reputations. One could do this for good or for bad. I suggest doing things for good, but this can really only be done for bad. Unless it is intended as a way to protect identities as with a witness protection program. Other than that, it can really only be used for criminal profit.

Go get dirty like a good farmer. Till the soil and plant the seeds now. Come said future you will be ready for harvest. It's easy to start. Set up a fake set of users interacting with each other, helping build each other's reputation. Joe approves a Linkedin request that he and Jane worked together for years and he gives her a stunning testimonial. Jane purchases an eBay item from Joe and she gives him a super high rating. And so on. Might even be possible to automate this.

Well, this is just an idea for your information. Personally, I don't have time to be a criminal and do evil deeds. Which is why I am passing this on. But my advice is still what a friend use to always say in exit... "Don't be fraudulent!"

Cool is the new Popular

2009-07-14T05:50:28Z

It's been a huge disconnection around me lately, and I think it's important to point out that popular does not equal cool. Would you rather have 100 cool users or 1000 users? For me, the answer is always always always 100 cool users. Well duh, right? Not so! Turns out for *almost everyone* in america, they'd take the 1000 users, not matter who they were or what they were up to or what impact their use of your product had on its brand.

Let's call this "Coca-Cola Economics" (CCE for short). For me, this line of thinking ties directly back to the DNA of the Old Economy: the blockbuster, hit making, top 40, the superstar. I believe it's all but antithetical to the DNA of the New Economy: the conceptual age / long tail, deep and vertical, featureful, open source, economy of free.

Is popularity... bad? Certainly not, but cool should always trump popular and act as your guide though the inspirations toward mediocrity that popularity injects. In America at least, popular almost always equates to poor quality, bad taste, gratuitous execution. From McDonalds to the Joanas Brothers, this kind of CCE-based bullshit exists not because of organic demand or genuine cool factor, but because of a researched, manufactured, and carefully engineered demand, a primary tool of the Old Economy. CCE's ability to engineer demand depends, sadly, on an uneducated, undiscerning audience which is why Kentucky Friend Chicken can only garner an ironic appreciation in say, Japan, while it basks in genuine appreciation here in the states.

This is all to say that, in the New Economy, Cool has a better chance of success and longevity, and yes even making money than Popular does. On the Web, where communication is fast, knowledge easy, education and taste-making are effectively side effects of every blog entry and every twitter exchange. Bullshit can't survive, and critical mass means the beginning of the end. What happens to Facebook's cool factor when your mother and father have accounts? What happened to MySpace when Murdoch bought it? What happens when you try to apply Old Economy thinking to the New Economy?

Thankfully for all of us who love the Web, failure happens.

I (kinda) hate Virgin America

2009-07-07T04:52:59Z

I either love or not. I don't find a problem with hate because I don't see it as the opposite. For example, if you ever get to look at my Yelp reviews it's either max stars on one. The movies I'd run to go see are the ones with the best and worst review at the same time. Basically, I don't find the middle interesting.

So when I say I hate Virgin America I mean that in the best way. I do. I don't think they should stop doing business. I merely mean that I had an experience which I find frustrating. Which I will never forget.

Tap screens. Right behind my head. My head is what tries to sleep. Until last, I've only flown short distances. Last week I flew direct to New York City. I only fly direct flights. I looked forward to sleeping. Tap - tap - tap, on the way there. Tap - tap - tap, on the way back.

I have a theory on decibels. Have you known someone who gets really frustrated when trying to sleep and the neighbors next door are playing the television or stereo too loud? I try to tell them that it's not about decibels. That I've seen them fall asleep with their own television or stereo on, in noisier places. I explain that what really frustrates them in that scenario is the 'how dare they invade my space'. The decibel coming through the wall isn't nearly loud enough to keep anyone awake. But the 'how dare they' factor is. In truth, if they knew their neighbor, or if they were invited to that party coming through the wall, it wouldn't even cross their mind. And they would sleep like baby.

So what was it about Virgin America that made the tapping behind my head bother me so much? Well, it isn't decibels. Try it, even with the highest spirits it isn't as easy to ignore. Weren't there similar water tortures from wars to this effect? As a designer, I also saw right through it. Clearly it was bad design. The fact that the tap interface had a redundant remote hard button menu on the armrest tells me they realized this already. Yet, they've stuck with the touch screen. And people don't favor using the remote cause it is trapped in a hole inside the shared arm rest.

I tried, I really did. I closed my eyes and counted sheep - so to speak. Tap - tap - tap. I think the kid behind me was playing a game on the screen. It required a lot of tapping. And since the tap screen had to be cheap enough to have on every seat, I suspect it isn't as sensitive as it can be. So one has to tap harder. Harder if the first didn't go!

On the way to NYC I took the redeye. On the way back I took a day flight. I learned my lesson. And sure enough there it was again. Tap - tap - tap.

Why didn't I turn around and say anything? Because I knew that the kid wasn't tapping any harder than what was required of him. I tested it myself and I couldn't avoid poking at the seat in front of me. I knew that the designer was to blame for this. And as a designer, I had to eat it.

Image: The obligatory bathroom mirror camera phone shot.

Relive historical events in time accurate tweets

2009-07-06T01:42:50Z

I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's piece here in the New Yorker and got glassy eyed over to this idea instead.

Personally, I like having certain tweets sent directly to my phone as text messages. I pay for unlimited SMS cause I like this way of messaging. Now let's say I'm someone who's really into history. I see plays and read books about historical events, which is great, but how about a new way to consume in this new medium a lot of us find ourselves immersed in today?

I am imagining an experience where I can subscribe to the twitter feed of, let's say, Lawrence of Arabia during the time when he led the revolt against the Ottoman Army. In real-time accuracy, only decades back, I receive play by play tweets from T.E. himself as the days passed trekking across the desert.

Tweet example:

T.E.Lawrence We could not lightly draw water after dark, for OMG there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks!!

8 minutes ago from Camel API

This way of storytelling is only possible today, where wherever we go we carry a device which we don't mind interrupting us from time to time.

The next step past this is mixed media where the play by play comes at you beyond one single channel. But that's another idea and it's too early to get into that.

Image: Something not human trapped at the California Academy of Sciences basement in San Francisco.

Happily ever after doesn't cut it

2009-03-16T01:36:21Z

[So far a day without a single word spoken to anyone. Continuing on the topic of unfettering, thinking about story endings.]

Once upon a time in a land far away people went to the cinema in a way very unlike how we do here today. I was a kid then and I believe it has significantly affected the way I consume films and who knows what else. I remember, it wasn't too important to get to the cinema on time. I and a big person would walk into the theater quietly during the middle of a movie and would often have to stand in the back because the seats were over sold. After the film finished it would almost immediately start to play again from the beginning. We would stay until the part we started with, then leave. The end of the viewing experience happens to be where we started off - not the story ending.

If I were a filmmaker this would probably upset me. Because it seems that a lot of what makes story telling, especially on film, a challenging task is having to deal with a format required to have a story beginning and ending - in that order. Having to suspend our belief with realism shoved into this capsule is difficult enough. And for the viewer to completely disregard this is not so nice. I would argue though that my mis-use of the cinema is a way to escape the artificiality which often the filmmaker is unable to overcome.

In real life, we have no experiences of story endings. Life continues on after the break up, the make up, the rescue, the reunification, the winning the girl, etc. Happily ever after doesn't cut it. Quite often, the designed story ending abruptly pulls us into the disappointing reminder that box-office sales is what drives it (ex. Garden State). The belief is that the mainstream just don't tell their friends to go see a film if they feel all weird in the end. Sadly, most prefer a vanilla feel-good closure. I just don't and I am in the minority.

Not having a feel-good ending doesn't preclude success (ex. Lost in Translation). It helps us mature, move past the children's storybooks we were trained with. Perhaps one day we as the audience will be able to choose alternative story paths. Of course this must be handled carefully, as it could compromise the integrity of the film itself. For now, I'll continue to try and make it to the cinema on time. However, I will still make the effort to leave at least five minutes before the end in order to save the film.

[Note: secretly make a deal with directors to provide subtle signals on the good ending, warning us before it is followed up by the feel-good hollywood happy ending.]

Image: Two black plastic forks, one spoon, unwrapped chopsticks, a napkin, and no knife.

Toward unfettering

2009-03-08T22:38:24Z

Sunday, I decided to throw myself out of the apartment again. Headphones plugged in both ends, but trying to tuck hidden the dangling cables under my jacket. I suspect the apparentness of the white wires which Apple uses as a branding maneuver (see ipod commercials) is the evil reason behind not letting it play music via wireless/bluetooth headsets. I've tried the sharpie route and don't recommend it. Headed toward the Mission for a seafood salad and then a coffee at four boarlets - seeking that one clear thought:

What I realize to be the ultimate summary for the cause of (a word that describes the negative) in everything might be so simple that it has fallen into the realm of the unexplainable. Perhaps I can try to write about it in particular contexts - which in time might paint a cohesive picture. What I would refer to as the triangulation approach. Perhaps. Here is a quick stab at the thought.

It is in how we maneuver within situations where we introduce concepts that try to arrest the dynamic; It is when we seek to create or understand something in a way which fixes it in place, or tries to cap it with an end; It is when we observe things devoid of its time and place; it is at these when we begin to falter.

And so, for the morning the coffee has fulfilled, the mind has been reset, the direction of the path - determined.

Image: A glass of Fernet, pair of Bentley glasses, notebook, and sketch paper.