Archives / January 2006

Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder interviews Douglas Rushkoff '06 about his new comic book:

Interview of Douglas Rushkoff about his Testament comic book

I interviewed my friend Douglas Rushkoff about his new and terrific comic book called Testament, published by vertigo/DC. The story is set in the near future, in which people in the United States are required by the government to have an RFID tracking chip implanted in their are. At the same time, Rushkoff retells stories from the Old Testament that parallel the near-future story.

Charlie Todd '05 has posted the recap of his Improv Everywhere Mission: No Pants 2k6, which ended with dozens of cops arresting a few of the participants.

More on this soon... but I will be speaking at the Apple Store SoHo in New York on Wednesday, February 15, starting 6:30 p.m., to give attendees an intro to the Gel conference.

Free admission.

Wired magazine asked Katy Borner '06 to "coin a term for our new new reality." She wrote:

Global Brain: Human brains turn out to be rather limited when compared to the flood of information they attempt to process, manage, and use. There are diverse indicators that a 'global brain' is emerging on this planet. While mostly available in biological wetware today this global brain might very soon be dominated by digital implants that help to effectively merge biological creativity with digital resources and processing speed. Let's hope this global brain is ready for action before we destroy our planet.

Link

Several Gel speakers in the news recently...

Long piece on Craig Newmark '06 in New York Magazine, called, appropriately enough, "The Rise of Craigslist and How It's Killing Your Newspaper":

Rocked in a Bay Area cradle of left-wing values, Craigslist has built a huge national community by word of mouth... it gets more than 3 billion page views per month (10 million actual users a month), ranking it seventh on the Net, not so far behind Google and eBay.

Link

Geoffrey Canada '06, founder of Harlem Children's Zone, got an AP article for his work to combat inner-city obesity among schoolkids:

''Getting young people to just try things and keep an open mind about it I think is the challenge,'' he said. ''Because we don't allow outside food in, it allows young people to get naturally hungry. ... Kids don't want apples if they can have candy bars. But an apple when there is no other sweet thing around absolutely tastes good.''

Link

Charlie Todd '05 reports that his latest mission, a "no pants" subway ride in New York, ended with cops getting involved:

"[We were] halted by the cops about halfway through. One frustrated cop freaked out and called in 25 more. 8 [of us] were ticketed and summonsed to court, 6 of the 8 were handcuffed and traveled in a police van to a precinct. Everyone has been released and is fine. More info as it develops."

Link

Marissa Mayer '03 quoted on Google's new music search:

"This has been one of the longstanding unfilled user needs," Mayer said. "We saw a search need where we weren't providing users with the highest-quality results that we could."

Link

Want to stay current with ideas, technologies, trends, and newsmakers like these? Come to Gel.

The IVR Cheat Sheet by Paul English. (Thanks, kottke)

Also in the Times today, Weird Noises That Blossom Into Symphonies: a description of several new musical instruments with unusual user interfaces.

The tenori-on, a prototype from Yamaha's product design laboratory, produces computer music through a grid of 256 illuminating buttons on a brushed-aluminum tablet. By pressing buttons along rows and columns, users can program melodies like plotting notes on a scale. When the tunes are looped and layered, the machine creates a symphony of synthesis, musical blips and bleeps matched with light patterns that bounce and ripple across the device.

"It's a digital instrument in a new form," said Toshio Iwai, a 43-year-old interactive artist and University of Tokyo professor who created the device. "It plays light as well as sound."

I've been interested in Toshio Iwai's work for awhile. Anyone know him and willing to make an intro?

More on the tenori-on (annoying Flash site, sorry): click.

In the NYTimes today, My Week as a Waiter recounts the experiences of Frank Bruni, the Times' restaurant critic, as he works as a waiter for a week.

As always, studying the customer experience leads to some interesting observations.

I'm shadowing Tina, who has worked at the East Coast Grill for decades and seen it all. She offers a psychological profile of a woman sitting alone at L-3, who declared the chocolate torte too rich and announced, only after draining her margarita, that it had too much ice.

"Some people are interested in having the experience of being disappointed," Tina says.

If you had to choose one, would you create something because it would sell well, or because it was a good product?

Good Experience advocates the second way.

Of course,...

- many companies thrive on the first way

- many people are hailed as doing the second, while they actually mostly do the first

- in practice, you can do some of both, and most people do

- it happens that, especially online, you can make a lot of money by creating something good

But - this is perhaps the crucial point of this entire endeavor at Good Experience - you have to choose, first, what path you will follow. Making this choice determines everything that comes after. Selling well or creating good?

January is a good month to re-evaluate one's direction, and indeed each year around this time I try to give a summary of this newsletter and its worldview. (In fact, here is last year's: Introduction to this Newsletter, 2005)

Here's a thought to start us off. This past weekend, on MLK Day, I came across this wonderful quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

It reminded me of a recent cocktail I had with a friend from Los Angeles. Dave [names and details changed] is a high-powered marketing consultant, advising some of the world's largest and most respected brands on how to improve their images in the minds of consumers. Naturally he is interested in my work at Creative Good and Good Experience, he said, since his work is all about the customer experience.

For example, Dave told me, recently he finished a project for a leading kids' cereal, which although is packed with sugar, fat, and preservatives, is nonetheless respected - or at least bought - as one of the most popular breakfast items in households across America. Dave worked directly with the CEO, advising him on how to (in Dave's words) improve the customer's experience with the cereal: printing better games and puzzles on the box, and packaging it to include various product tie-ins.

Still, he said, he's intrigued with Good Experience - even, in a way, apart from all the professional work he's currently doing. Don't get him wrong, business is great, and he wouldn't trade it for anything - but even so, when he heard about the Gel conference and this newsletter, something about the words "good experience" triggered something in his mind. "I've been thinking recently," he said, "I also want to work on something that's more meaningful."

Thinking back on my cocktail with Dave, I know that my work takes no credit in whatever transformation Dave did, or will, go through as a result... he came to the meeting already prepared for some next step. On the other hand, I find it intriguing that the words "good experience" alone would trigger such a response in someone who is so accomplished in what he considers to be customer experience work.

In my opinion, Dave's cereal project was not entirely focused on the customer experience. True "good experience" work demands that one have an integrated, holistic worldview that works toward the long-term best interest of the customer (or user, or student, or patient, or citizen,...). And while there's nothing "bad" about making sugar cereal more fun to buy, it's perhaps not the most meaningful way to spend such a big chunk of one's professional life.

I guess what I'm saying is that good experience isn't so much a particular method, or set of heuristics to follow, as it is a process of continually becoming broader and deeper in our outlook. It's not a judgement of one particular project but a challenge of what direction to take as we continue to improve.

So this year, I challenge all of us - newsletter readers, Gel attendees, myself included - to work in a more integrated way; to think about "good experience" as a long-term, holistic challenge, not a short-term or shallow project; and to think about how we can describe this message better - both in words and in experiences that we create (in technology, at events, in day-to-day work).

Or, to put it in the words of Dr. King, we're challenged to work on things that matter.

- - -

Related recent columns:

Three strands of good experience (Nov. 29, 2005)

The overdetermined experience (Nov. 2, 2005)

A thought on selling good experience (May 18, 2005)

Introduction to this Newsletter, 2005 (Jan. 10, 2005)

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Is Broken mentioned on New York's hometown channel, NY1, last month...

[Sorry for the delay in posting all these - I was out for the holidays! -mh]

Erin McKean '06 quoted in a Dec. 12 AdWeek piece:

"Podcast" has been chosen word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. "Podcast was considered for inclusion last year, but we found that not enough people were using it, or were even familiar with the concept," said Erin McKean, dictionary editor in chief. "This year it's a completely different story. The word has caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon..."

Link

And David Bodanis '04 answers this year's Edge question, "what is your dangerous idea?" with this provocative statement:

I wonder sometimes if the hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force that is already on a downhill course might be true... What has transformed is the possibility of quick change. It's a lot, lot harder than it was before. Patents for vague, general ideas are much easier to get than they were before, which slows down the introduction of new technology...

Link

In the Google blog, Marissa Mayer '03 writes:

There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

Our service and our business works because of you - our users. You're important to us and something that we think about all the time -- as we build new products, negotiate deals, and think about what our future holds.

Full post

Related: Good Experience interview of Marissa Mayer (Oct. 15, 2002)

From today's NYTimes: Commentary: The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts, a defense (of sorts) of Jimmy Wales' ('05) Wikipedia.