Archives / April 2005

Authenticity is an essential ingredient of good experience. It separates the superficial from the substantial; the soulless from the humane; the isolated from the integrated; the false from the true. It's a big idea worth exploring.

But I'll admit that authenticity can be a tricky thing to pin down. (Anyone want to take a crack at "What is truth?") In fact it's so elusive that I've heard some speakers on experience-design suggest that authenticity doesn't even exist, and so we should proceed (in customer experience, design, and other fields) without it.

But authenticity does exist, it is important, even essential, and we should struggle to place it in our work. We have a responsibility to explore. As always, the best way to dive in is not to create a complex abstract framework, but to look at examples.

I recently interviewed Ron Pompei, a designer well-known for his retail work (with Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, among others); he's speaking later this week at Gel 2005.

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Ron Pompei
Principal and CEO, Pompei A.D.

Q - How do you think about the retail customer experience?

Where would you rather shop, at a farmer's market or a supermarket? At a farmer's market you get good food, sold to you by the farmer who grew it. And she's not pretending to be Amish - that's not a costume. Everything there is authentic.

In a supermarket you get unidentifiable material, wrapped in plastic, with a bar code on it - you bring it to the front, swipe it with a laser, and then if you want to ask that person anything about that product, they have no idea. They only work the cash register.

Ever notice how a supermarket is a horrible experience? The lighting is atrocious. A fluorescent light actually operates like a strobe, so it tires your eyes, because you're constantly adjusting to the change in light. That's why people who work there are nuts. Like in department stores, they're crazy. They live their adult lives under fluorescent lights.

When shopping in a farmer's market, or a flea market, or at Anthropologie, you can see something and move toward it. You have freedom and can explore. You know you're kinesthetically free. There are more than five senses; there are many more. For example, kinesthetic, equilibrium, sense of temperature. You know if you're going toward life or away from life.

In a supermarket, the aisles are telling you, and you know it subconsciously, "we're going to show you everything before you leave the store, and we might sell you one more thing before you leave the store."

You tell me what's better: exploring with a sense of excitement, or someone shoving something in your facing and telling you how to walk through the space?

Retailers should take responsibility for what they sell, so that they aren't manipulated by the brands asking for so much shelf space. Instead, they should choose what's best for the customer. They should be merchant, not a conveyor belt. Think of where merchants came from: their ships were only so big; did they come back with every possible thing? No. "This is a good spice, a good carpet, a good wine." And with that same thinking, they brought back different mathematics, religion, art, artifacts, philosophies. Fibonacci brought the zero from the Middle East. Imagine a computer using Roman numerals.

Speaking of authenticity, Dee Breger creates art from an electron microscope. Like Ron Pompei, she's a speaker at Gel 2005.

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Dee Breger
Director of Microscopy, Drexel University

Q - You send an electron beam onto a specimen below, then look for art.

Yes. I like to extract the most aesthetic, pleasing, raw images that I can from a sample that tells an exciting story. Any microscopist can do the mechanics; it's the human response to what I do with it that's unusual.

I want to excite people both visually - the images have to stand on their own as art - and by the fact that they are exotic. These are photographs of real things taken by an exotic scientific technology, which presents us with a view of an otherwise invisible world. I first want my images to be beautiful. Some people say they see a spirituality in my work.

Q - What about the authenticity of the images?

Electron microscope images are always created in black and white. I post-process each image to make it even more beautiful, for instance by adding color.

Of course, in some cases, people just don't know how to see the structure in black and white, so color helps people interpret the images. Even scientists need help sometimes. There's the famous story of the scientist who was caught as he was walking to the post office to mail in his manuscript to a scholarly journal. Turns out that what he had identified as the bacteria he was studying were the pores of the filter paper. It's the bane of a lab manager's existence - you train someone on the technology, how to use the microscope on their samples, and they don't necessarily know how to interpret the resulting imagery.

Images are never colorized for scientific publication, unless they're being displayed on the cover of a journal or at a conference. Not all scientists are attuned to the artistic potential, or even agree with it. There are some purists who think that images from electron microscopes must not be manipulated in any form. So I used color not for hard-core science, but for translation.

Q - What is the artistic potential of these images?

Enormous. They are inherently aesthetic, if you can find them. It's just like the macro world we live in. Anyone who photographs or paints a scene is recording what's presented to us by nature. Nature has provided the same imagery on an invisible scale - that includes the galactic and the microscopic.

In my opinion, the new "MyPyramid" food pyramid is broken.

Great New York Times piece today on the new Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois:

What is being promised is not just a tourist attraction, but a full Lincoln Experience. As Richard Norton Smith, the museum's executive director, said, "If you want to see marble icons, go to Washington." BRC's founder, Bob Rogers (who once worked at Walt Disney Imagineering), said the goal was to overturn traditional expectations and create an "experience museum." "There is nothing we wouldn't do," he said in a conversation, "to get people in."

Of course, the tradeoff with the crowd-pleasing "experience" is that real, substantial history gets squeezed out. Lincoln is substantial, and authentic, in a way that a fictional character like Mickey Mouse isn't. What are designers' responsibilities when dealing with a meaningful subject?

Link to NYT story

The idea of being customer-centric is not new. "The customer is always right." "The customer is king." These are in the popular business parlance - Googling them yields almost 100,000 results - and for good reason: who in business would create a slogan to ignore customers, or pursue strategies that harmed the customer experience?

But, to state the obvious, there's often a big difference between what companies say and what they do. Lots and lots of companies say they're customer-centric but have no customer experience strategy; no way to measure customer-oriented metrics; no executive compensation tied to those metrics. There's a lot of "say" but no "do".

As I wrote in my Oct. 26, 2004 column:

My business partner, Phil Terry, likens it to the pre-Copernican view of the world. Like the misguided early notion that the universe revolves around the earth, many business executives today still think that business revolves around companies.

If that belief ever was true in the past, it certainly isn't true today... Whether online or offline, customers now have unparalleled power to research and transact with companies exactly when, where, and how they choose.

The trick is to find companies that actually do this work and not just promise to do it. Focusing on actual phenomena - actual behavior - actual results - is the important distinction. We take the same approach with customer research: we use open-ended listening labs to see what customers do, instead of using surveys, focus groups, or task-oriented usability tests. It's also our perspective about our own consulting work: measured business results are infinitely more important than whether our consultants came up with a nice-sounding theoretical framework.

Given the importance of this perspective, reconsider that idea of customer-centric business. Think about it: where are the companies that actually do focus on the customer? I mean companies that have taken action to work explicitly on this issue, and have the resulting metrics. If you had to find a list of these companies, where would you go? Well, we've found them - or at least a few of them - and they are the finalists for the 2005 Copernican Awards.

The 2005 Copernican Award finalists:

--- LARGE CATEGORY ($1B+ in annual revenue or budget) ---

* Amazon
* JetBlue
* Staples
* Westin Hotels

--- MEDIUM CATEGORY ($100M+ in annual revenue or budget) ---

* ING Direct
* New York State DMV - License Express
* Netflix
* Uline

--- SMALL CATEGORY (Less than $100M in annual revenue or budget) ---

* Blacksocks
* Chambers Street Wines
* Flickr (recently sold to Yahoo!)
* Sigalert.com

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This is my first time mentioning the awards, so here's the background. The Copernican Awards are awarded annually (2005 is the inaugural year) to top companies and organizations that succeed by putting customers at the center of their "business universe."

The awards are created and run by Creative Good, sponsored by Forbes Magazine, and ultimately determined by the Customer Experience Councils. These are forums, run by Creative Good, of over 80 senior executives dealing with marketing, product development, and customer experience across a range of industries. The Council members participate in a lot of different activities, meetings, and research throughout the year - but in this case are responsible for nominating companies for the Copernican Awards, and voting on the finalists to determine who wins in each of the three categories.

The award winners will be announced at a dinner in New York next week (the night before Gel 2005 starts) where the Council members, and other invited executives - about 240 people total - will be gathered to celebrate the awards, the finalists, and the winners.

There's a lot more to say about the finalist companies. We have assembled information, through our own research and from the companies themselves, on their specific customer-centric strategies, actions, and measured results. We really don't care what their slogan is, or how much they claim to focus on the customer; we wanted to learn what they actually do, and what they've measured as a result.

When I have more time and space after Gel, I'll talk more about these Copernican Award finalists and what you should learn from each of them. Meantime, congratulations to all the finalists.

And to other customer-centric companies that weren't yet nominated, or executives that aren't yet in the Customer Experience Councils, but want to be - please get in touch.

More info:

- Details on the Copernican Awards 2005

- Wikipedia's entry on Copernicus

- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will speak at Gel 2005. (Today is the last full day to sign up)

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist and creator of "beach creatures" - huge wind-powered walking machines made of little more than plastic tubing and glue.

Theo's site - strandbeest.com - contains movies of the creatures in action. Click on "film" (small link in the center column), then on any of the links on the next page.

It's hard to picture without seeing the movies, but there's a strange, miraculous beauty to the "strandbeests." Note the richness Theo is able to elicit from from such simple materials.

I recently interviewed Theo in preparation for his appearance at my upcoming Gel 2005 conference in New York.

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Q - How did you start creating your beach creatures?

15 years ago, after writing a newspaper column about the idea, I went to the store and bought some tubes. I was planning to spend one year on the project, but I got addicted.

Q - What's an average day?

Every day I work on function, just trying to make it work, and not that much on "art." Usually it doesn't function - nine out of ten times. But once in ten, it does function, and I build up enough optimism to continue.

Q - Do you consider it art in the end?

Yes, but it's also scientific project, though in a way other than how scientists usually work. I'm limited in material, and that forces me to search in a sort of jungle of ideas. The path isn't straight, goes very slowly, but I'm moving forward a bit. Usually scientists are more in a hurry.

Q - How do you "evolve" a new animal?

It goes in pieces. Often I take old parts and reanimate them. People ask me, how many animals have I made now? I don't know. A lot of them I started but then stopped because I saw that it wouldn't work. There are many parts, you could call them fossils, that are lying on the hill that I work on.

Q - How do you think about yourself as creator?

I see myself as a sort of Don Quixote, fighting to find explanations for life, and still knowing that it's impossible to explain everything. But still you can find some truth in things, without knowing everything. When you're playing God like I do, every day, and you come upon the same problems which the real Creator must have had while creating this all, you can feel more or less what he felt, if he is there, when making a creation.

Q - Will these creatures live on in some fashion?

They can do it in two ways. They might live on the beach; the guy who works for me, he's quite young, and he knows how to build them now. Maybe after I'm dead he can keep the beach animals alive, and he could get a pupil as well, and maybe it could go on for some generations.

But it would take several generations to make the beach animals truly independent from us. Today, every five minutes I have to do something to repair them again. But that's longer than it was before; it used to be a few seconds. Storms, especially, are terrible for these beasts, but they're surviving them better now. There must be a point where this period could go to weeks, or months even. They'll need a way to repair themselves, and to multiply. They do that already a bit, but I have to help them very much doing that.

It's a sort of symbiosis. I live on these beasts - they give me income - and they live on me, because they need me to make them. You could also say they make me make them. It's already a life form that lives in the media. Many people understand what I'm doing without my having told them; even children, they don't know anything about evolution, but when they look at a beach creature they seem to understand what I'm doing. It's strange. Even in nature - butterflies need flowers, and flowers can't work without worms - everything depends on each other. It's a big symbiosis of many creatures. So the beach animals fit in there.

I'm happy to announce that Academy Award winner Ross Kauffman, co-director of this year's Best Documentary Born Into Brothels, has confirmed that he will speak at Gel. He will talk about the phenomenal work he and Zana Briski did (and are doing) to spotlight the amazingly talented children of Calcutta's red light district, and the beautiful photography that the kids are creating.

Ross's co-director Zana Briski, who originated the project, may also speak at Gel - to be confirmed.

If you haven't yet seen "Born Into Brothels", go see it. I feel confident saying that it's the best movie you'll see all year.

More info about the documentary, and Kids With Cameras, which is helping to organize support around this important project: here's the website.

A big thanks to my friend Rick Smolan - at www.againstallodds.com - also a Gel 2005 speaker, for making the connection.

Sign up now for Gel 2005 (April 28-29 in NYC) to hear these unforgettable speakers.

Here's yet another Gel 2005 speaker I'm totally excited about: Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker. I have admired his work for years. We spoke recently about his new research project.

Q - What are you doing with the University of Michigan?

It’s a 3-year research project with their psychology department, using New Yorker cartoons to see how people process humor. My general idea is that humor shares its cognitive apparatus with 99% of other brain processes. The other 1% makes it look completely different.

We’ve started preliminary experiments. We watch with high-speed digital cameras to see where people focus their eyes while looking at a cartoon, how long it takes to understand the cartoon.

Most of our work as human beings is conceptual blending. One situation is another - that’s analogy, or even metaphor. “The moon was a ghostly galleon,” etc. Thinking that the moon is a ship - that’s blending. We do it all the time when we’re getting ideas. Let’s say I have an iPod in my hand. It’s the size of a phone. I might think, maybe it could be a phone. We do this all the time.

But in cartoons, in humor, the conceptual blends combine things most people wouldn’t think to blend. Say you imagine people getting into heaven, at Saint Peter’s Gate, but then think, what if there was a toll... a toll on a highway... maybe there’s EZPass in heaven. That’s a cartoon.

The experience of humor is similar to the “ah-ha” moment of two things coming together. For humor, two things have to come together to produce the experience of laughter. Normal and abnormal; these things reconciled in a moment, and usually it’s a normal situation violated in some way that we can tolerate. You have to have something normal that becomes abnormal, or something that looks abnormal and then become normal.

So, normal: there’s a guy on the phone, saying “No, Thursday’s out. How about never - is never good for you?” Everything is normal - the office, the syntax of politeness - and yet the message is rude. We have a violation where we have a normal situation.

Or, start with a violative situation - a guillotine, and there are two baskets in front, saying “paper or plastic” - bringing it back to normal.

Q - What’s your goal with the research?

I’m trying to build a model of how these things can work. Think about all the variables, both intrinsic - from your personality, for example - and extrinsic - like no one laughs at a cartoon sitting alone in their living room, but everyone laughs when they see it on Power Point in a big audience.

I’m trying to show that humor is a legitimate thing to study. A few things have been done by academics, but very little, and humor has a bad odor about it for research purposes, just like sex does. People at a humor conference think they’re going to have a good time, and they’re disappointed if they don’t laugh. It’s confusing as a topic.

For humorists itself, such research is a forbidden area. The actual process comes from the unconscious. If they know about it, they won’t be able to do it. It’s the forbidden fruit. The more you think about it in this way, the less you’re actually free to free associate.

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Bob will speak at Gel 2005 in NYC, April 29.

Bob's cartoons and books are all available at the Cartoon Bank.

Nice note from 37signals - their recommendation to come to Gel.

Bruce Shapiro is the Artist-in-Residence at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He'll speak at the upcoming Gel 2005 conference on Friday, April 29.

I originally met Bruce at an ArtBots show in New York, where he was displaying Sisyphus II, a brilliantly designed machine that creates rich designs in a kind of sandbox, with one moving arm.

Bruce told me that he bought all the mechanical parts for Sisyphus II at auction before they were to be melted down for scrap (!). He's passionate about his engineering, his art, and his educational efforts... in other words, about good experience.

Here's my follow up conversation with Bruce.

Q - What's your passion?

First, I consider myself a scientist. I believe in the scientific method and am keenly aware that my analytical powers are very useful for making these motors work. Still, analysis doesn't fully cover the big questions, and maybe not at all. I'm continually amazed by the artistic side of my work, because it's so clearly outside of the analytical realm. There's something immensely pleasurable about that side of what I do.

In addition to science and art, the third aspect of what I'm passionate about is education. Using science and art as educational tools brings everything together into this great mix. When I'm working for a science museum, or on a public exhibit or kinetic piece, I can use that directly to get kids into learning about making motors do what you want them to do.

Q - You work with motors.

It's a field called "motion control." Most people have heard of robotics, but not motion control, which is not as sexy. Robotics is a sexy idea - people love the notion that if you can get machines to move the way you want, the next goal is to make a mechanical human. I'm taking a different approach - maybe from my medical background - which appreciates that the human organism is way more complicated than most people realize. Past predictions about robotics expected robots to be much further along than they are today. That doesn't surprise me.

I'm most interested in doing experiments with the simplest machines possible, like with a single motor. I'm not sure anyone's done it, simply because people have assumed there's nothing that interesting to do, in that protozoan level of robotics. I'm continually amazed by the behaviors I see in very simple motion control systems. I go out of my way not to use the term robotics, because once you do, it's hard for people not to think of anthropic machines.

One of the goals in my art is to take my excitement and demonstrate it. If you look at my work, the robotic aspect of it is extremely elementary, simple, sub-MIT Robotics Lab level. But the behaviors it can exhibit are worthwhile and surprisingly interesting. That to me is an inexhaustible area to explore - and what makes it available for exploration is the availability of the hardware.

Q - What about the availability?

Very few people see the inside of modern factories, and consequently have little idea of how your keyboard is made, or how all the plastic stuff is made. But more and more, any factory making stuff is doing it with computer-controlled machines - that's the only way to compete economically. The stuff of these machines - motors, controls, valves - the parts of the motion-control industry, are made for an extremely rigorous environment. 24 hours a day, millions of hours of cycles, they're made to last. In fact, the parts far outlast the machines, which were created to make a single product.

3M, whose headquarters are in my home town, is a classic example. A few years ago, there were these beautiful machines that made 5 1/4-inch diskettes. 3M spent lots of money to create those machines, but now there's no market for the big floppy disks. So the machines are getting melted down, or sold as scrap, because they're metal. But the pieces of the machines were still functioning. Some of those parts find their way onto eBay, or various surplus stores, for low prices.

Just as a round number, a machine used to be about $1,000 per axis. One motor and the electronics to run it, without a computer, cost about $1,000. Now it can be bought for about ten dollars, if you know where to look. A 99% discount is not just a good deal; it really starts to make things possible that would have been truly impossible.

All the stuff that moves industry is available from the high-tech junkyard. That makes it possible for students and artists to play with it. I'm extremely passionate about the possibilities that that opens up - not just for kinetic art pieces, but for turning kids onto that sort of technology, kids who might not otherwise be turned on to analytical or engineering-related aspects of technology.

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Bruce Shapiro's website: www.taomc.com

Bruce will speak at Gel 2005 on Friday, April 29.