Image source: cultureby.com

On Saturday, I got to hear Grant McCracken speak at the AIGA GAIN conference in New York.
I documented that I was going to the talk in my usual way of writing a quick note in twitter, which gets dumped into my facebook status.

“At AIGA, just heard Grant McCracken say smart things on design & culture, and the role of the anthropologist”

I got two quick responses from friends of mine who are working on their dissertations in anthropology, who basically asked what is the role of the anthropologist?

Of course, their requests had a bit of tongue and cheek, who am I to tell anthropologist what is their role? And I hope that they understood, that the talk was about the role of the anthropology within the context of design and culture. Nevertheless, the question is worth a response, because it is an interesting one, and perhaps the answer is not so obvious, although it is after hearing the talk.

During his talk, in a conference room mostly full of designers, McCracken refers two kinds of practitioners of anthropology. Anthropologists with an upper case A, and anthropologists with a lower case a. McCracken is an Anthropologist (PhD U Chicago) just as my friends are training to be Anthropologists. As well, there are many anthropologists (I would count myself in that group) who have the opportunity to practice anthropology in their work.  For designers, that practice is decoding culture and explaining it back to the design or marketing client. Although many in the Field (uppercase F) might have a problem with that, McCracken does not, and in fact encourages it. Although, it must be done in a smart way.

Decoding culture is crucial to the designer, because “culture provides infrastructure” to how we understand the world.  McCracken divides culture into the “above” (Malcolm Gladwell, Coolhunters, trendsetters) and the “below” which is all the rest.  Culture below is more hidden, and is made up of the assumptions people make in their construction of their worlds. The culture below is so obvious to the individual that they don’t even realize it exists. It remains in the domain of the unknown, until the anthropologist enters and maps out assumptions that. He cites the example of what makes a Harley more than “just” a motorcycle.

What does this have to do with design?

The designer must consider more than the cultural relevance of her creative output.  She must also consider the people who will see, hear, try, and her designs.  The successful designer will have an intimate knowledge of her end-user/audience/market and the culture surround the products and services that use in their daily lives. She will then use that knowledge to create a relationship with that person.

McCracken began with the question, “who owns culture in the corporation?” His claim is that designs probably don’t, but they should.  And today, the answer is probably nobody, which makes that there is an opportunity for the designer to lay claim to that corporate group.

What does this have to do with the Anthropologist overall or in training? McCracken often talks about the missed opportunities of Anthropologists because, they could provide insight in a post-modern world of flatten hierarchies (high-low, East-West) where known cultural structures are eroding.  In their place is an ad-hoc, but quite real, infrastructure of culture that is ripe for mining. Although they may not be the traditional domain of Anthropology, these cultural norms have a huge influence on the every day lives people in a post-industrial, consumerist culture. There is a great need for these changes to be explained back to the corporations that are creating that culture.  Whether for the corporation or academia, there is an opportunity for both Anthropologists and anthropologists to weigh in on the issues of the bagginess or skinniness of jeans, the identities of our vehicles, or personalities of our beverages.

Perhaps, there are Anthropologists in training who are already tackling these issues. If that is true, that would be great. For those who are designer or marketers who are (aspiring) anthropologists, there are also many opportunities as well. For both parties, McCracken has just created a blog conpendium on how to be an anthropologist for hire.

Image source: flickr

1. If you are waiting for a train, and the incoming train cars go, packed, empty, packed… do NOT enter the empty car. The *best* case scenario is that the AC is broken.

2. The subway trains run in the same direction as that cars run on the street above the tracks.

Image source: backspace.com

3. The compass roses that the MTA is placing in front of subway entrances, started out as an intervention by riders, and is what I would call ethical graffiti.

4. The A and D trains run express from 59th Street to 125th Street, which is great if you want get to Harlem, but not so great, if you are trying to visit the American Museum of Natural History.

5. The subways do, in fact, run on a schedule.

6. Google Transit combines subway schedules (see point 5) and Google Maps to provide directions using public transportation in New York, and many other cities around the world.

7. The displays with real time updates of the next train that the MTA have been introducing on the L line has been in other systems, such as DC’s Metro and the London Underground for years and even decades.

Blogs on Subways:

Second Avenue Sagas

Subway Blogger

AMNY Subway Tracker

Going Underground’s Blog

Something has been confusing and annoying me basically since I started reading blogs. It’s one of those slight annoying things, where a little design considering would make the issue irrelevant. When reading or searching blogs, the bottom of the screen usually offers you two choices, of which, the following combination is quite common:

<< Older Entries          Newer Entries>>

<< Previous Entries     Next Entries >>

Am I the only person who is confused by this interface? Both examples are slightly ambiguous. What does “previous” or “next” mean?

Blogs are generally organized by descending chronological order, that is, newest post on top of the screen or webpage. Books are generally ascending chronologically, if they have a time-based narrative, and start at a point in time and move forward.

Because English is read left to right, the “next” page of a book and navigation pointing to the right refers to pages dates in the future. However, in a blog, “Next” and “arrows pointing to the right” could either refer to blog web pages with posts that you haven’t read yet or a page with blog posts written in the past, ie older then the posts you are currently reading. To further add to the confusion, some blogs use Google as their search engine, which serves results in order of relevance.

To reiterate the two main points of ambiguity:

#1: Blogs and books don’t chronologically map in the same way. Books based on chronology are usually presented oldest information first. Blogs are generally displayed with the newest post first.

#2: Pages in blogs and print don’t map in the same way. The subsequent unread (I’m trying to avoid saying next) page on a blog is going backwards in time. Going forwards in a history book, toward the right, is moving forward in time.

In these two examples, left arrows link to older posts by date and right arrows link to newer posts by date.

Here is the interface of weatherapattern.com, so I write:

Notice the subtle different in terminology in designnotes (composite image):

As mentioned before, the questions arise:

What does “next” mean? That is, does it refer to unread posts or posts dates in the future?

In both cases, when I see “<< Previous Entries,” do the arrow mean the past in time or unread posts?

Why are the older post to the right? If I were to print out a blog and bind it, the older posts would exist towards the right.

Is there a better solution?

I think Gigaom, has a very good solution, part of the time. Instead of using the interfaces of many blogs, they both map to the closest to the print experience as well as have clearer wording.

With this interface, Gigaom both avoids the ambiguity of “previous” and “next.” Using “newer” and “older”  clearly refers to date of the posts. Also, the arrow points in a direction that map to the printed out and bound blog. Unfortunately, that interface is only used for the main pages, and not when you search. Sigh.

So, the remaining point is, why should blogs map to the convention of English (or any language read left to right) books? My only response is that most English speakers read books before blogs. It is important for a designer to build upon the obvious reference points and mental models of their users. For blogs in languages the read right to left, such as Chinese or Hebrew, I was have Older Posts pointing to the right.

Now, I have to go try to tweak this site’s navigation.

Image source: flickr

Well, the internet is buzzing with the discussions and reviews of Google’s recently release browser, Chrome. Nick Carr has some good thoughts on the subject, his key take aways:

“To Google, the browser has become a weak link in the cloud system… Google can’t wait for Microsoft or Apple or the Mozilla Foundation to make the changes.”

“…winning a “browser war” is not its real goal. Its real goal, embedded in Chrome’s open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications.”

I agree with this basic idea of needing to move browser technology forward, and having a few competing products motivates people to innovate. I recently heard an explanation that Google’s “Don’t be evil” credo really meaning “Don’t be Microsoft.” However, they were often criticized for releasing non-standard products, including features in Internet Explorers but also C# and Active X (more on that later.) In order to give browsers more speed and capabilities, Google had to move away from web standards.

Just to be clear, web standards are basically a really good idea, even if adoption of new ones is a slow process. Leaping frogging the standards process brings us back to web development in the mid-90s. In those days, after creating a website, we had to test the web pages on all the browsers across all the platforms. More likely than not, the site never worked on the first try, which gave the process a Groundhog Day feel. (Of course, we still have to do that today, but it is thankfully not has bad as the days of Netscape 4 and IE 5.)

Google’s decision to go open source is clever, but there is an implied statement to the other browsers of “join us, or be left behind.” I suppose, at least the other browsers are given the option of having access to the code, unlike other proprietary browsers. I’ll admit that an optimal outcome would be the other browsers would adopt only the best features, and those features would eventually be accepted as web standards. However, the problem with this scenario is that it will take a while for time for the best features to emerge, as web developers create new kinds of content for them. In the meanwhile, developers will have to play the user percentages game, and make trade offs to maximize what the number of people who can see their work. More importantly, users will have to have multiple browsers to access different kinds of content.

The fundamental problem is that the moving away from standard and interoperability is going to fracture the internet. If you want a glimpse of the implications of this idea, an interesting place to look is Korea where a large percentage of sites use Active X, which I learned about first hand trying to plan a trip to Seoul last year. Blogger and friend, Danny Kim gives a interesting account of the use of Active X in Korea. He also sent me a parody of Google’s Chrome comic book, which is worth a look as well.

I’ve been to the Home Delivery show at MOMA twice on sunny weekends this summer. The show on prefabricated architecture is overall well curated. However, the true brilliance of the show is that they have full scale models of six homes. The all steel Lustron house is in the indoor portion of the exhibit. The others five are constructed in the parking lot next store to the museum. Architecture exhibits rarely show full scale buildings for obvious reasons, which relegates museum shows to drawings and models. Normally, to see architecture you have to go to the actual sites, which makes comparing structures challenging. But here, you get to experience multiple examples at full scale.

Of all the architects that were invited to show, the most remarkable was Housing for New Orleans, designed by Larry Sass of MIT. He researches new fabrication techniques using CAD and digital laser cutting. His houses are constructed from numbered jigsaw-like pieces which can be assembled with a rubber mallet, hot glue, and the occasional crow bar. The first prototype took five students to build over two days, however this example was erected with three people over two weeks. The individual pieces are small as compared to the normal two-by-fours that are normally associated with building houses, as seen in the details images. This iteration of his research 196-square-foot one-room shotgun house for post-Katrina New Orleans . The application of his techniques to the housing crisis caused by Katrina is also noteworthy, especially as related to my interesting in ethical design and prefab architecture.

Sass’ impressive approach to architecture comes from a completely new starting point, that is born digital. The designs are created using fabrication and cutting techniques which utilize the strengths of computation for something greater idea. Despite this use of technology, I was reminded of Japanese Shinto Temples, which use a centuries old technique of interconnecting wooden joints that do not require nails.

Unlike much of the work of say, Gehry, computation is not used to build once impossible complex structures. Rather, Sass’ research seems to be more about rethinking how to one goes about building a house (Housing for New Orleans, could be build without the use of computers.)  In his House for Katrina, there is a balance between shelter and ornament. The structure provides protection from the elements, while the flourishes still invoke local styles and nod to the human need of aesthetics and having their home relate to an surrounding architectural context. Although, I’m sure many people feel the ornamentation (and the structure itself) is a poor substitute to the grand architectural styles of New Orleans, there are limits to the not only his construction methods, but also what can be reasonable built during disaster relief.

Weeks later, I’m still thinking about the relationship between computation and architecture, and how Sass both makes architecture more abstract and more concrete. The abstraction comes from the reliance of the computer to design and cut the material. However, in the actually physical act of building, the methods allow a few people (instead of a team of builders and suppliers) to construct a house with a minimal set of skills and tools. Computation’s ability to make something simultaneously abstract and concrete is not all that new, but I’ve never seen the idea applied to architecture, which makes the discovery all the more exciting.

Image source: LifeStraw

Even though I haven’t posted much recently (sorry for that, especially when I got some nice links, Thanks Noah. Frontstudio.) I have been thinking a lot about the ethics of design. One post from Rob Walker’s murketing blog that has kept with me, which I’m finally able to post. Walker mentions luggage companies trying to design an airport security friendly laptop bag. Anyone who travels with a laptop knows the pain of having to take out the computer to be x-rayed. What was most interesting was an aside he made:

“(Okay, okay, it’s not the LifeStraw — it’s an annoyance problem instead of a mortal one, but still.)”

The LifeStraw is a hand held, point-of-use water filter, which is an amazing product. So, yes, Walker is correct is asserting that a laptop which makes it easier to get through airport security may not save lives (but it does help everyone in line.)

The question then is, how ethical is ethical? In defining an ethic of design does a product or service have to be life saving for it to be ethical? Be made of ompletely sustainable materials? Have a zero carbon footprint?

The answer, I believe, is no. However, what this implies is that there is a spectrum of ethics in a design. The big question is what are the metrics of that spectrum of the ethical.

“Bow down before the one you serve, you’re going to get what you deserve.” – Trent Renzor, Nine Inch Nails

I recently went to a conference on location-based services hosted by Columbia University’s Business School. The conference panels had some very good speakers, but before I get to that, I am more interested in putting down some of thoughts on the architecture of the b-school’s Uris Hall. In Bill Moyer’s now classic series with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Campbell speaks on identifying a period of a civilization through its grandest architecture. At one time in civilization, the biggest and boldest architecture were religious, (Notre Dame, Angkor Wat, Borobodur.) Later, government buildings were the most monumental (Pentagon, Reichstag, UK Parliament.) Today, corporations inhabit a society’s feats of soaring architecture (Sears Tower, Tapei 101, World Trade Center.)

The hierarchy of buildings is a direct reflection of the society’s focus and emphasis. A similar phenomenon can be seen on university campuses. These reasons for this hierarchy is fairly obvious, schools that will produce the richest alumni and procure the largest private industry and government funding can afford to erect new buildings. Especially in the recent building craze, we often find that business school have the newest and shiniest facilities. Law and engineering schools also tend to the fair rather well in this regard as well. Humanities tend to be housed in older, albeit more charming, buildings which smell of learning. To be fair, one of the newest buildings on the Columbia campus is for the School of Social Work, and while not business, law, or engineering, it is still an applied discipline. Although, Uris is not the newest building on the campus, the Columbia Business has announced that they will one of the first to be relocated to their new Manhattenville (read: Harlem) campus. The use architecture as a litmus test of the focus of a society is a simple but compelling one.

Image source: flickr

Image source: flickr

On the way out to Provincetown from Boston, a few weeks ago, I noticed a sole windmill on the shore, largely ignored by the passengers on the ferry. However, on the other side I saw people rush over with digital cameras to snap at a lighthouse on the other side. I made a mental note to get some pictures on the way back. Sure enough on my return, the lighthouse drew out the cameras, even in misty and slightly choppy waters.

In a time of soaring energy and fuel costs, plans to build modern windmills are decried as wrecking the “natural” landscape of the Jersey Shore as well as Nantucket Sound. T Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas oil business man, is placing bets on wind, investing millions into wind farms in Texas. In an interview in Fast Company magazine, he has an interesting quote:

And you’ll do all this on your beautiful 68,000-acre ranch?

“I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They’re ugly. The hub of each turbine is up 280 feet, and then you have a 120-foot radius on the blade. It’s the size of a 40-story building.”

I appreciate Picken’s overall strategy that this country needs to shift away from dependence on oil and carbon-based fuel and towards sustainable and clean energy sources. But it’s too bad that he has such a distasteful view of the aesthetics windmill.

On the other hand, the lighthouse is an interesting piece of architecture. Once a crucial aid in navigating the waters at night or in storms, they usefulness is challenged by advances in GPS, telecommunications, and mapping. However, they remain camera worthy icons of the sea and coasts. Preservation societies have been formed to assist in their upkeep and some lighthouses have been designated as history buildings. I wonder if the original construction of lighthouses were challenged for corrupting the natural landscape. Or if they were largely ignored at telephone poles are.

I do not think that there is something inherent to the lighthouse that makes it more palatable to the mainstream cultural aesthetics, because the traditional wooden windmill have the same elevated sense of historic and aesthetic value.The funny thing is that I find windmills really beautiful, especially many of them in row. Without any post-modern irony, these structures conjure allusions from Boeing to Walter de Maria to Don Quixote.

How can the modern wind farm reach the same level of good will that lighthouses and wooden windmills are afforded? Is it just that they icons of another time, having lasted long enough to achieve a romantic cultural status? Are the protests even worth arguing? New proposes are suggesting that windmills can be moved further off-shore and out of sight. This sounds more expensive to operate and build that ones closer or on the shore. I do know that a high percentage of power is lost in transport. Aesthetics have an economic and social cost.

The relationship between the windmill and the lighthouse is emblematic of a larger question that been occupying brain space for over the past year, which has to do with building an ethic of design. Many people and groups including Buckminster Fuller (more on him soon) and designers in the Bauhaus movement have approached this idea, or least defined an intention for design to improve lives. However, we are at at turning point, where the stakes seem much higher and the need for ethical design seems more relevant.

Can a framework exist for an ethical approach to design that would balance aesthetics, sustainability, equality, and empowerment? If it doesn’t yet exist, what kind of structures would it entail? What can we provide that goes beyond a suggested philosophy? Can the advancement of technological tools and computational metrics can be utilized to guide the ethical designer?

Images source: flickr.com

The objects and tools around us are losing their physicality. Our cars, watches, music, phones, adding computers, and now light sources are less analogue and mechanical, as they become more digital and quantum / nano scale. Although these new innovations perform better, faster, and more efficiently, we lose the ability to see and understand how these technology work. Everything operates in a conceptual black box, as we pray that things work when we need them, because we cannot fix them by ourselves even if we were so inclined. Although we can learn conceptually how an digital watch works, we have lost the ability to use physical cues of how things work. This loss may not be earth shattering, but it does eliminate the ability of us to fix things when they break down as well as adapt their inter-workings to conform to our own needs. We are encouraged to throw away and conform.

Light from oil-based lamps and candles once provided the standard way of seeing at night. Even if you didn’t understand the physics of combustion, you could still built a mental model of how it works through experience working with its physical cues. Fire burned fuel to make heat and light. If a lamp wasn’t working, the problem could only be a few possibilities, most likely having to do with fuel and oxygen.

The introduction of the incandescent bulb worked by sending an electric current though a filament in a bulb. Here, the electric charge flowing through the filament also created heat and light. Electricity was a much safer and convenient energy source for lighting the home, an important advance. However, it was a step away from the physicality of our source for light. Even without precise knowledge of the basic science behind the light bulb, if a light bulb wasn’t working, you could still try to figure out the problem, by checking to see if it was the bulb or the power. We know that when bulbs burn out, the filament breaks. Therefore, we shake the bulb to hear if the filament is broken, albeit gently in case it is not broken. The sound of the broken filament is still an excellent feedback mechanism for testing a bulb. The kind of natural feedback that Don Norma discusses in “The Design of Future Things.”

This simple, yet effective method of testing a working bulb is eliminated when we move to the compact fluorescent bulbs and Light Emitting Diodes. On a physics level, light from CFBs and LEDs work on a nano or quantum scale from the macro or classical physics scale. Similarly, the CFBs and LEDs also take us another step away from the physicality of light. Although we still have bulbs or diodes, respectively, the objects themselves give us less natural feedback to what is going on. How do you tell what is happening when a CFB or LED is dead? I have no idea. CFBs and LEDs are cheaper, more energy efficient and last much longer than incandescent bulbs, which makes the gains in trade off preferred to the status quo.

In the end, I’m left wondering what is the value of this physicality? How important is it for people to have physical models of how their objects work? Am I just being nostalgic for the past or is there something greater at stake?

Image source: murketing,eventbrite

I’m a little behind in the blogging, but I heard Rob Walker for a Q&A with Danielle Sacks from Fast Company, on his book on murketing called Buying In. The event was at the ADC and hosted by the fine folks at psfk. As a speaker, Walker is likable and tells a good story. The questions were designed to give a run down of a book, which was good because it seems like most of the audience hadn’t read it yet. However, there were some nice tidbits that where not in the book. I especially appreciated his condor in stating that coining and branding “murketing” had originated in semi-seriousness; however, the realities of being a writer, (even one who has a weekly column in the New York Times Magazine) means that he needs to be known for his ideas and words.

Money take-aways (which I will paraphrase) :

- Apple iPod users went for fringe pioneers to a tribe of fans. Do you know of any Zune fanatics? Please contact him if you do, because the Zune is basically the ultimate anti-iPod.

- Obama has “projectability,” not unlike Hello Kitty, which allows people to project their ideals and images upon him. Where as, Hilary Clinton was working with a predefined concept in people’s minds, which she had to pivot against.

- American Apparel dropped their sweatshop free branding in order to move from niche to mass. However, they didn’t drop their ethical labor ideals. To them, ethical business practice IS business practice.

- Marketing formulas don’t work because “most formulas ignore culture and culture changes.” What made one campaign or strategy work in a certain time and place may not translation to another implementation because “culture marches on.”

- And probably my favorite idea of the night: saying “I’m down with that,” and clicking a Save Darfur Facebook group isn’t activism.