Archives / May 2006

Speaking of simpler cell phones...

Springwise: Phone for boomers & their parents:

While most cell phones tout an abundance of bells and whistles, two companies are focusing on the substantial market for simpler phones...

From CNN - carriers and manufacturers are finding that making cell phones simple is hard:

Industry experts say the companies understand the stakes involved in making sure their designs attract customers and keep them loyal... none of the major carriers impresses [one analyst]. He says most of them are trying to replicate how people use personal computers instead of coming up with a new approach.

"What do (customers) do best on the phone? They talk. What do they do worst? Type. Why is every user interface based on typing?" Entner said. "Right now, the software developers take advantage of every weakness a device has and none of the strengths."

To become bit literate you have to let the bits go.

The New York Times today includes an essay from someone who gave up their Blackberry. From Feeling All Thumbed Out - New York Times:

But you gave me something to do in idle moments, while I was standing in line or waiting for a train. With you, there was no dead time. It seemed great for a while.

Living without you, though, there's more time to think.

Daydreaming is an underappreciated pastime, and I've been doing more of it since we broke up, often to good effect. The idea percolator works better with fewer distractions.

I realize that not everyone can let go like I did.

Marc Salem :'06: is performing in New York for several weeks starting Monday, June 5.

From Marc Salem's Mind Games Extra - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY:

Celebrated mentalist Marc Salem, profiled on 60 Minutes, has performed his mind-bending feats on Broadway and in venues around the world [including Gel :'06:, of course! -mh].

Recommended reading. Last Sunday's NYTimes magazine had a terrific piece on the conflicting interests at work in a major redesign - of Biloxi, Mississippi.

The New Urbanists drew up thoughtful plans, FEMA listed requirements, the mayor wants more casinos, and many residents express skepticism (and who can blame them, after what they've been through):

From Battle for Biloxi:

There were two women at Tyrone's, Renee Scott and Bernice Catchings. Before Katrina wrecked it, they had both worked at the Boomtown Casino, Scott as a wardrobe clerk and Catchings as a cook; each had been making $8.75 an hour and taking home about $6 after taxes - $12,000 a year for a full-time job and the jobs had disappeared six months previously. I flipped to the part of the plan that covered affordable housing, and they looked at it skeptically. "Affordable to who?" Scott said. "It won't be me, I can assure you of that."

Interesting visual treatment of website structure.

Check it out at Aharef: Websites as graphs:

Today, google is everywhere, but if somebody had asked me 5 years ago why I was using google, and wanted a visual answer, here it is...

You may agree or disagree with the editors, but here's a provocative list... the conservative interpretations of dozens of rock classics. (Compiled by National Review, covered by the NYT). From Conservative Top 50 - New York Times:

7. "Revolution," by The Beatles.

"You say you want a revolution / Well you know / We all want to change the world . . . Don't you know you can count me out?" What's more, Communism isn't even cool: "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." (Someone tell the Che Guevara crowd.)

By the way, finding the article was no easy feat, thanks to NYT.com's broken search engine.

Scott Berkun, writes a very good summary of the Gel :'06: Sacred Spaces tour that he designed and ran a couple of weeks ago.

From Berkun blog: Sacred places: NYC architecture tour report:

Since the goal of the tour was to explore these powerful places as designers, I wanted a wide definition for what a sacred place is.

Questions we asked: What feelings did the architects want people to have when inside? When entering? When leaving?...

My friend and founder of Meetup.com Scott Heiferman Gel '04 wrote a nice response to Coral and Community. From Scott's blog:

...Meetup Inc must help people not just form community but make them sustainable. That's a big theme inside the company, and I'm really excited about the progress we'll make. Getting a Meetup everywhere about most everything requires those Meetups to stay real, strange, and colorful.

Read the full post

Al Gore is making the rounds...

Here's the trailer to An Inconvenient Truth, his new documentary on climate crisis.

And here he is giving his presidential address on Saturday Night Live.

I took a few days off last week to float above some Caribbean coral - snorkel on face, flippers on feet - and unwind after my big week. And while it was a relaxing trip, I couldn't help but think about the community we're building - and what the process really means.

At this particular beach, on this particular island, the coral was dying. Vast sections of the underwater landscape were covered with sand where an entire ecosystem used to live. There were healthier areas where a few fish still swam, perhaps working to revive the coral, but the overall vibe was a little sad. (Of course these are all uninformed observations; someone who knows marine biology might tell me that the coral was actually recovering.) But the experience said something to me about community.

I've seen healthy coral before, and it's striking in its diversity. The very range of differences makes it stronger to withstand threats to the system, and (of course) more interesting to view and be a part of. The healthier the coral, the more colorful the fish.

It's also fragile. This is no armadillo, with a thick shell protecting the vitals from the dangerous outside world. The reef lives only if it can be open and accessible... and vulnerable.

I returned to Manhattan after the trip and saw the city, this home town of good experience (and Good Experience), in a different light: This is my reef. This landscape of the wild, the serene, the colorful, the unexpected, the bursting-alive: just take a cab on any avenue for a mile and you'll see that there are some truly colorful fish making their way here - some big, some small, in every way, each adding something different to keep the place strong.

I'd say the same about the Gel community. We're a young little reef, but something about the vibe at our last event in New York, and what I'm getting from the people coming to euroGel in a few months, tells me that we're creating something real, something strange and colorful.

Wherever you work, whatever you do, be on the lookout for this kind of good experience: a community of coral and fish, constantly building.

Big congratulations to my friend David Bodanis Gel '04 for winning the prestigious Aventis science book prize. From The Guardian:

Dr Bodanis' book, Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World beat off competition from Collapse, a rare scientific take on the history of fallen societies, by Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer prize winner and evolutionary biologist, as well as Vivienne Parry's book The Truth About Hormones, and Parallel Worlds, by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist.

And about the prize money...

In an unprecedented politicisation of the most prestigious prize for popular science books, the winning author pledged to donate his £10,000 prize to the family of the late government scientist David Kelly.

David Bodanis, who was awarded the Aventis science book prize last night, said he hoped his gesture would, "tell some people in England something about the importance of truth."

P.S. Also see The Economist's review of David's latest, Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair:

David Bodanis's new biography of Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet, is a belated treatment of a startlingly neglected story. ... Mr Bodanis, a former academic whose previous book, “Electric Universe” has just won the 2006 Aventis prize for science writing, is well placed to appreciate the extraordinary scope and scale of her work, and leaves the reader in no doubt of it.

See the full review.

From Scott Berkun's Gel 2006 re-cap:

Gel is my favorite design conference - this year did not disapoint.

Four really smart things GEL does:

1. Short presentation slots (20 & 5 minutes).

2. Single track of speakers.

3. Notable people who (appear to) enjoy public speaking.

Uses location (NYC) as an advantage by empowering locals to share with attendies through Day 1 "experiences".

All contribute to making the event itself an experience...

Thanks again to Scott for running the Sacred Spaces tour on Day 1... highly recommended by the participants who went on it. (No surprise, I guess, given that Scott wrote the book on project management.)

My friend Shannon Salameh, also the wife of Mostafa Salameh euroGel '06, made the front page of a Jordan newspaper. From Shannon's Flickr stream:

We made the front page. It reads something like "Hero Mostafa Salameh's wife looks at his photo".

Geoffrey Canada :'06: was on 60 Minutes this past Sunday. From the 60 Minutes summary:

As correspondent Ed Bradley reports, [Geoffrey Canada's] vision, quite simply, is to save children, and he has amassed a staggering amount of private money — more than $100,000,000 — to realize his goal. His testing ground is a 60-block area in central Harlem that he calls "The Harlem Children's Zone."

There's also video on the 60 Minutes page. Take a look.

Also see hcz.org.

I'm just beginning to catch up post-Gel, but several attendees have already posted their reports of the event:

- Khoi Vinh, NYT.com design chief, on Friday in the theater...
http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0508_on_the_secon.php

...and on Thursday's "Day 1" events:
http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0504_a_gel_of_a_c.php

- Scott Berkun ("Gel is my favorite design conference"):
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/?p=268

- Steve Hoffman:
http://hoffman.blogs.com/tales/2006/05/gel_again.html

- Christopher Herot:
http://herot.typepad.com/cherot

- Annette Kramer's notes on several sessions:
http://learninglaboratory.blogspot.com

- Kareem Mayan, who made our Day 1 slideshow:
http://tinyurl.com/rztzu

- Lisa Sulgit:
http://tinyurl.com/k4srb

- Sarah Endline, founder of sweetriot:
http://blog.sweetriot.com/blog/2006/05/gel_great_think.html

- Steve Sherlock:
http://p4tgce.blogspot.com/2006/05/gel-2006-summary.html and http://hgttb.blogspot.com

- Martin Hardee describes Erin McKean:
http://tinyurl.com/ohpae

I'm also compiling feedback I've gotten in e-mail from several hundred attendees and will post a compilation on the Gel site soon... and I hope to have the DVD done within a few weeks.

As I wrote the attendees already, I felt like I was speaking to friends from the stage. Thanks to everyone for being there.

Finally, one more quick recollection from the end of the event.

Just after the final speaker at Gel 2006, one attendee approached me to give his (positive) feedback on the event. "I feel a little guilty about being here at Gel," he said. "I should be at work, but instead I find that I'm have a very personally fulfilling experience here." I pointed out that that was an interesting distinction.

For the same reason, I was happy to hear Ji Lee get a cheer from the Gel audience when he said he started the Bubble Project because he was tired of being unfulfilled at work. There really is something to this "good experience" idea, and it's a lot bigger than marketing or "eyeballs" or usability... after all, it shouldn't have to be lifeless or dull to be a "real job". To the contrary - learning about good experience, by having a good experience, is the best professional development I can think of.

(P.S. Read more about Ji Lee in my recent interview with him here:)
http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/000594.php

(P.P.S. Geoffrey Canada and Harlem Children's Zone are scheduled to
be featured on 60 Minutes this Sunday, May 14.)

NYT's David Pogue discovers the calendar we've been using for years at Creative Good. Good choice!

From Seeking Calendar Nirvana:

Thank goodness I've found Now Up-to-Date. It's an extremely full-fledged calendar program, complete with reminder alarms; syncing to the Palm, PocketPC and even the iPod; little graphics to liven up the calendar squares; Web publishing; stretchy banners that indicate when, for example, you're away on a five-day trip; an elaborate meeting scheduler that searches for times when all participants, rooms and resources are free; and so on.

Of course, if you need a meeting maker for people who are not all on the same calendar program, I'd still recommend my (free) Goovite Meeting Maker.

We start today!

Great time at the Copernican awards ceremony last night. Thanks to the Customer Experience Council members for creating such a vibrant community.

And congrats to the winners (Google, TiVo, del.icio.us, Heifer Intl)!

From Creative Good - 2006 Copernican Award Winners:

The Copernican Awards are awarded annually (2005 was the inaugural year) to companies and organizations that succeed by putting customers at the center of their "business universe." Forbes is the media sponsor of the Copernican Awards.

Also see: Who's doing it better? - a recap of the 2005 awards.

Seth Godin :'06: (speaking later this week at Gel 2006) got it exactly right on Nintendo's new game system. From Nintendo forgot to read my post:

Their new multi-billion dollar entry into the hyper-competitive gaming market is called Wii.

Pronounced "we."

Oh.