Viewing Category: Patterns
One of my side projects involves the crafting of a custom binder, preferably one with more then three rings. Usually, my search strategy is to use Google to learn about the subject on-the-fly, further refining my keywords as I go until I get what I want. However, with esoteric specialty items like this, it's a little more difficult to get past the cloud of "me too!" sites and get to sites of real substance.
Getting around the cloud has been this weekend's adventure. Notes follow!
Why Google Isn't Working For Me
To recap, this search strategy applies to the case where I am unfamiliar with the field I am searching and therefore need to build some expertise to help refine the search keywords.
My goal is to find the best sources. The challenge is to become more of an expert so I know what I should be searching for, by searching for content that will make me an expert...the situation is something of a Catch-22.
When the topic is not one that attracts passionate writers, finding the "expert" sites becomes much more difficult. By comparison, it's easy to find top digital camera sites, because there are lots of them and they all tend to point to the same place. However, try to find who makes the best bare CMOS digital camera single-chip sensors...you're sunk unless popular hobbyist sources like Make have already covered this field. And "best" is a hard term to quantify, unless you know more about the problems people face. Catch-22, again.
Why does this fail? It's because the Google PageRank Algorithm is basically a popularity contest: when a particular site has a lot of "good" links to it, it is voted "more popular" and will show up near the top of search results. Google's algorithm is a lot more complex than that, of course, but that's the general idea. The ranking works better when there are a lot of participants. For example, the huge number of digital camera and gadget sites create a fertile field for Google's PageRank algorithm to work its wonders.
However, I'm interested in Business-to-Business (B2B) sites that hardly anyone links to. I want to find out about manufacturers, processes, raw material suppliers, and experts in rapid prototyping...stuff like that! The GoogleBrain doesn't have enough link mass to make a good recommendation without very specific keywording...which again, requires expertise in the domain you are searching.
Compounding the problem is that B2B companies tend to have awful websites. There tends to be little information about the company, the writing is unclear, and the product offerings (if any are there) are hopelessly incomplete. The only sites that link to them are private intranets (unsearchable) or B2B directories, which themselves are so eye-scorchingly bad that that only industry people look at them out of necessity. [update: Seuss points out asiannet and thomasnet as the good resources...thanks dude!]
Do the industry guys have time to blog about these resources to put the word out? Hell no...they're too busy making actual money. Which leaves me up the proverbial creek, informationally speaking.
The standard Google search, using noob keywords like "binder 5-ring" and "custom binder" returned hundreds of results of little apparent authority. The first two-dozen hits didn't give me a good sense for who ran a quality shop; I really want to know who's on top of the industry, and my impression was that most of these places were just using pre-built ring mechanisms with some in-shop tooling.
Pondering this problem for a while, I figured I could grow old looking at all the sites and form a tentative opinion, or I could look for another authority on the web. As it turns out, the U.S. Government had what I needed all along: the enormous patent database!
Going to the Patents!
I did a patent search at the United States Patent and Trade Office(aka USPTO) on "ring binder". If you didn't know this before, the entire patent portfolio from 1790 onwards is searchable online. You can type in a few keywords, and get matching search results in a few seconds. This includes scans of the original application, complete with diagrams, at a resolution high enough for printing, like the 1847 patent for this Machine for Exercising Children (left).
Now, how are patent results good for me? First of all, a patent application includes information like the name of the inventor, the company sponsoring the invention, and a description of how the invention works: this is exactly what I need to re-feed back into Google! In about 30 minutes, I quickly found that there was one company in Hong Kong (World Wide Stationery and Manufacturing LTD) that seemed to be a leading "innovation in ring metal binding equipment" manufacturer. They had a web site with some information about their products, and lists of retailers and other suppliers. The Patent results also included related inventions by other companies. One was "Specialty Looseleaf" who took great pride in their ability to actually manufacturer rings in-house (they say 99% of other companies have to outsource to Asia). Another outfit in London had patented a very cool high-end presentation system, and they had some really interesting products.
So the gist of what I'm saying is this: if a company is motivated enough to file a patent, they're probably serious about maintaining their competive edge through innovation. And that's a company worth looking at first.
Secondly, when you read the patent applications themselves, you get some insight into what the problems are, from at least the inventor's perspective. That's part of becoming an expert, and problems are exactly what I want to avoid :-)
Also cool: Every application also has a list of related patents. This creates a historical record of the invention, which can be used to further research key people and companies through Google. If you know the name of a company or the name of a key inventor, Google might reveal to you what industry that company is in, and that will lead you to trade journals and other specialized sources of information. Plus, it's cool to see how everyday objects have evolved: if you've got Donald Norman's writings on your shelf, you also should have some Henry Petroski; his history of the lowly paper clip, for example, is a fascinating anecdote.
Anyway, I'm happy again! The patent database gave me a quick shortcut to an online "authority", and that gave me a new jump on Google search terms. I've updated my Oblique Searching Strategies article too, so I don't forget.
It's been about a month since I made my Concrete Goals Tracking worksheet, aka The Printable CEO. In that month, about 8000 people have visited the original page, and about 1700 have actually downloaded it. Another 500 enterprising folks have downloaded the editable Excel version. Cool!
But does it work? I've been using it for the past four weeks; here's my report.
What was The Printable CEO Again?
In case you missed it before, The Printable CEO is just a tracking form I made to keep my focused on growing my freelance business. It's a paper-based, using a carefully chosen list of of tasks coupled with a motivational point-based tracking grid. My past interest in game design and development--and acknowledgement of my slacker-perfectionist tendencies--led me to structure it as reward bonus system as opposed to a completion tracking system. In other words: it's good feedback when it has relevance in the game system; in my case, that's "making money", "maintaining connections that lead to opportunities" and "making assets that will make money later". Whenever I do something on the list, I know it's one of these things, and that those things contribute directly to the growth of my practice.
I think To Do lists are fine tools for managing tasks, but they're somewhat cumbersome when it comes to motivating personal or business development. If anything, they are demotivators, because things that aren't on the To Do List still have to get done. I am a company of one, and I have to deal with unexpected client interruptions, computer issues, fleeting business opportunities and other small fires every day. The Printable CEO is my reminder that yes, I must develop assets that pay off in the form of new creative business opportunities. And money--crass as that sounds, I need to make sure I'm making enough money so I maintain creative independence.
So How Has It Been?
I've been, as they say, eating my own dogfood by using the Printable CEO for the past four weeks. My personal experience has been pretty positive; observations follow:
Filling in the bubbles is still strangely satisfying, even after four weeks. The experience isn't as spiritual as it used to be, but I just like using the No. 2 pencil to fill in that bubble. There's a fun doodling feel to it; perhaps it triggers a similar reflective frame of mind, activating the right side of the brain?
I found the Notes Area quickly became a kind of pseudo-todo list, because the form was generally handy. Put important information where your eyeballs can find it easily!
I tended to list things that I wanted to do for the day, and then add the points with a "+5" or "+2" modifier as they got done. I also wrote some phone numbers on it. Developing this into a full task tracking system on the side is a new project I'm undertaking to extend the concepts.
If I didn't write down the tasks I did right away, I would forget them. So it was very important that I wrote down tasks as they happened.
The weighted list of goals was absolutely critical in making this work. I found that there were days that I looked over the list to find something to do that would bump up my point count for the week.
I also found myself looking at every task to see whether or not it was worth points. The beauty of this is that this is exactly the mentality I want to inculcate: thinking about business development activity all the time! Ordinarily, one might think of "spinning" every activities to be worth points as being a form of cheating, but in this case it's not. It's resourcefulness and adaptability instead.
Choosing the right goals, of course, is the tricky part. Your goals should all have concrete results; if the fruits of your labor can not be counted like money or shown to someone else, then your goals are not concrete.
Counting weekly points at the end of the week gave me a feel for what a "productive" week should be. A good week runs about 50 points, which includes talking with people and posting a few blog articles. That works out to about 7 points a day (including weekends). Add billable work to the mix, then the points double. I add +10 points for each project performed as billable work, so if I do two projects in a day, that's a +20. However, if the billable work was under an hour, I would score it as a +5. My best week was 107 points, which included about 3 days of billable work.
The original ten goals covered every situation except for one: measuring qualitative return on investment. Following the original list, I got points only when I made something, counted something, or did billable work. However, I realized I should also record when an asset pays off again without requiring further work on my part. I had forgotten to account for this in the system; proof of an asset bringing in revenue is cause for celebration, because it means it's out there working for me. For example, say that someone wants to hire me because they read an article on my blog. Although I had already earned +2 points for the article writing, I give myself another +2 points because someone actually noticed it. Likewise, if someone wants to hire me because of some artwork I did, I would give myself another +5 points. Every time that artwork works for me, it should give me another 5 points. This reinforces the importance of creating good assets; they are worth way more points in the long run, and I believe this is important to the long-term viability of my business.
Now what to do with these points. They're useful for getting a quick qualitative measure of how busy one is, but I also have the desire to redeem them somehow. Like, for every 1000 points, I get to do something fun or buy something cool. This could work well in a school setting. Choosing the reward, of course, should follow the principle of good asset purchasing; if you buy something, make sure it can help you make MORE assets. I think that's called a "capital investment".
Summing Up
So is it working? Yeah, it is.
I know I'm making progress because I can see the numbers every day. The overhead of tracking these tasks is very low because it's bubble-based, and the concrete goals list makes it easy to focus on something productive to do. What's really cool is that these forms help maintain continuity in my daily goal-directed actions; that's another prerequisite for good feedback in a game system.
For the past two weeks, I've been more busy with billable work, and have found I've had to go back and make some To Do lists after all; like I said, they're great for managing tasks. I found myself starting to use the Printable CEO Notes area for keeping a small To Do list since I was always looking at it. I will probably incorporate this into Version 2.0 of the Printable CEO in the weeks to come.
I was also talking to some friends over lunch, and it occured to me that The Printable CEO has a strange appeal to procrastinators. One of my friends is the Anti-Procrastinator. She just gets things done, and a To Do list is a great tool for her. Another friend is a procrastinator-perfectionist; he doesn't start those big personal projects because he doesn't have the time to do them right. I can identify with that myself; I have no trouble planning out a project in terms of hours, resources, and manpower, but I just would rather not do it for something I love to do. I want it to flow more naturally. As I type that out it seems a little silly, but that's the way things are for me. The Printable CEO is not a To Do list. It's an I DID list, rewarding productive behavior when it happens to happen. That's an important distinction to note. And because it only rewards the correct actions, it is also a kind of conditioning tool.
So that's how it's going for me. How's it going for you? You might find The Making Of The Printable CEO useful if you're adapting it to your own purposes.
Update: Task Tracking
Now that you have your task direction established, check out Part II of The Printable CEO for Task Progress Tracking!
I almost never do touristy things. When I lived near Orlando, Florida, I didn't go to Disneyworld once. But my cousin is in-town and we wanted to see uniquely East Coast things, so we did a day in Boston and Salem. I wasn't sure if I was going to have fun, but what doesn't kill ya...
I wish I'd done this before. It was very enlightening to experience two different tourist-based businesses; it's given me some insight in the mentality I need to have to generate recurring income.
We went to the Salem Witch Museum. I wasn't sure what to expect for our $12 bucks/person, as there were different "showings" every half hour and you couldn't see what was going on. We booked our spot and waited in the chintzy gift shop until it was time. When the moment of reckoning burst upon us, we were ushered into a large, dark room with a glowing red circle in it. The guide suggested we gather around the circle, but everyone opted to sit on the benches. One little girl got scared and left. When we were all settled, the guide welcomed us and then...left the room! She said something like "enjoy the show!" on the way out. My mind was already appending the word suckers when the show began.
An audio tape started to play, and a somewhat Vincent Price-ish voice began setting the tone for the story: The Witch Hysteria of 1692. The room, about the size of a small barn, was basically a kind of diorama; each wall had several life-sized scenes with mannikins depicting the story of how a bunch of little girls got 19 people hanged (and one was pressed to death). The sets, though only somewhat lifelike, were nicely lit by hidden lights that faded in and out in time to the soundtrack. ; I'm guessing it was controlled by some kind of ancient audio-tape control system. I couldn't help but think that this kind of presentation was very old...maybe this is what got Uncle Walt so hooked onto audio-animatronics? Multimedia before the dawn of computers!
After about 30 minutes, we were released into the second exhibit by a second tour guide, who walked us through the Witches: Perceptions portion of our visit. There were three main set pieces that showed different perceptions of witches, from the pre-Christian "Midwife" to "Green Skinned Devil Worshipper" to "Modern Wiccan". The tour guide could press a button on the wall that played an audio track that spoke from the witch's point of view.
I was not-quite disappointed by the whole experience. I later found out that this museum has remained essentially unchanged since the 70s. The takeaway: Some people built a big theatrically-lit diarama, wrote about 30 minutes of script, hired a few voice actors, synch'ed the up to a light and tape show, and have been charging people 12 bucks per head for the last 30 years. AND THEY HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT! My mind...reeling!
After the Witch Museum, we took a night walking tour of Salem with Hocus Pocus, an independent tour guide company. We had passed by their booth before, and I had been impressed by the front man's friendly and non-intrusive pitch. His pleasant demeanor made me think that the tour itself would actually be pretty good...he seemed seemed invested in the business, and wasn't just some flunky making beer money for the night. Anyway, for our 12 bucks, we got a 90 minute evening walking tour with about 25 other people, lead by a tall red-haired woman in a long black dress. It was quite enjoyable to walk the town, taking in the sights and listening to the stories. By the end of it, I felt I knew the town and its history better though I already been here several times before. My 12 bucks had been well spent.
This got me to thinking...
The tour guide had her original copyrighted program and a route (no videotaping allowed!).
She had delivered a good product that didn't require any capital or fixed location except for a tiny portable booth, albeit in a good location near the Peabody Essex Museum.
On the money side, they run both nighttime and daytime tours nearly every day of the year. Say they run 50 people a day at 12 bucks a head...for 2-3 people, that's not a bad income to do something that they clearly love and care about.
And so...I am wondering how I can make this happen for me. I have been thinking that getting out of services is the way to go, but until now I really didn't have a close-up look at how other people had done it outside of software. This is content generation at its most basic: people packaging and sharing their knowledge at a market-conscious price point**.
Is New Media so complicated that this approach would not work? Is the key element having a clear definition of what you are making instead of what you are doing?
Barry just forwarded this quiz to me:
The standard clinical test for psychopathy, Robert Hare's PCL-R, evaluates 20 personality traits overall, but a subset of eight traits defines what he calls the "corporate psychopath" -- the nonviolent person prone to the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others." Does your boss fit the profile?
He said that he hypothetically scored me as a "0", which on this metric is good. Just the sort of thing my inner-psychopath likes to hear...Yessss...the facade is working! Soon, the world will bow before me and tremble! Mua ha ha!
Happy Friday! :-)
The mysterious S. pointed me to Eyetrack III, a study that used eye tracking equipment to record exactly how people viewed a web page. When I was in grad school, I knew a couple of Cognitive Science guys who spent time in the labs programming eye trackers for their experiments. The machines capture the rapid eye movements both voluntary and involuntary, making it easier to see exactly what is being looked at for how long.
I'd thought then it would be useful for understanding Graphic Design, so it's cool to see that someone has done this. The study made use of EyeTools, a company out of San Francisco that uses eye tracking gear to provide viewing data on web pages. You can actually do your own study over the web for $100/person. A particularly neat feature is the heatmap, which shows what parts of your page are attracting more attention.
A word of caution: this data tells you what people are looking at and for how long, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what they're thinking. Mistaking observations for conclusions is dangerous, and I could see this kind of information in the wrong hands leading down a horrible path. I would read the article with that in mind before you go stripping out all your photos and put ugly headlines right in the middle of layout so eyes trip over them. I would get a design professional, knowledgable in the Ways of Gestalt, to help interpret that data. It wouldn't hurt to really study Understanding Comics too...it is a fantastic treatment of visual communication in a form we're familiar with.
I'm surfing instead of working, so to win back some productivity, I'll describe my basic searching strategy!
When Google doesn't find what you want, it's because you are probably using an overly-general search query, or one that has been polluted by e-commerce junk information. Argh!
To get to the real opinions on the Internet, you need to search for words that people use, as opposed to the lifeless copywriting you see in a lot of "professional business communication."
Look for reviews and opinions. For example, I've been looking for information on a particular computer peripheral, something called the DAC-100. So I do a search on DAC-100 review, DAC-100 opinion, and even DAC-100 compared. I'm using the words you're likely to see in a review, as opposed to marketing copy.
UN-search for marketing copy. I remember looking for reviews on a particular ricecooker (the Zojirushi NS-KCC05), and the entire search result space was saturated with Amazon and Amazon.com feeder microstores: basically, the exact same information over and over again. Use this against them! Find a unique phrase in the copy and ignore it in the research results by adding a - in front of it. For example, if the ad copy says something like, "re-heats rice to the perfect serving temperature", do this search: zojirushi NS-KCC05 -"re-heats rice to the perfect serving temperature". You'll not see any results that contain that phrase. Thank God.
Try Model Numbers or other ID. This sometimes helps to isolate a particular product. Use Amazon or Epinions to narrow down which model number you're interested in. However, as models are often quickly replaced, you might not have much luck finding the dirt on a specific generation of unit. Sometimes Shelf Keeping Units (SKUs) are helpful--those are the numbers on the barcodes you see on retail packaging, and eCommerce sites sometimes list them in their online catalogs.
The more specific you can make your search terms, the better your search results will be. There are also nifty advanced search options at Google that can filter your results by date range, file format, and so on.
When all that fails, it's time to go to the mattresses. Try other information sources on the Web to learn more about the topic, and search on the cues that point to expert commentary.
Search eBay. When you can't find information or photos on some object, you might actually find it on eBay, which is not indexed by Google. I spent days looking for a reference photo of a Hebrew keyboard, eventually cobbling one together out of scraps of information from programming reference articles. Just yesterday I searched eBay and a dozen photos of the keyboards were there. Sometimes the sellers write a great deal of personal history about the items in general. Don't forget to search past auctions, and it may be worth looking at other specialized auction sites (gunbroker.com, for example) that cater to specialty markets. In either case, you might find a seller who is willing to tell you want you want to know about the item.
Search Wikipedia. Wikipedia entries don't often get ranked high in Google results, so go there first. Chances are, someone's written something about what you're looking for, and some high-quality links have been already researched for you.
Search The Top Specialty Information Sites. For nerd stuff, that means going to Slashdot. For digital photography, that's Digital Photo Review. And so on. You'll probably start to get a sense who's on top once you've visited a dozen sites, particularly smaller ones that have lists of links to other informational sites. They are usually the same, so eventually you will see who they all point to.
Search USENET. USENET was the primary Internet discussion system, a kind of global bulletin board system, until the World Wide Web balkanized the infosphere into millions of website-states. Prior to the mid 1990s, USENET was our primary community-driven information database covering thousands of topical interests. It still lives on at Google Groups. USENET will often deliver pieces of insight you will not have found on the Web.
Search The Blogosphere. Technorati, for example. [UPDATE] Google has added blog searching. Try that!
Search FAQs. One byproduct of the USENET era was the creation of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) post. Groups like comp.graphics were often inundated by newcomers to the group who asked the same questions over and over again. Over time, the FAQ postings have become quite comprehensive. While not all of them are actively maintained, they represent a trove of practical information on a broad range of topics. A lot of them are archived at faqs.org. You can do a full-text search.
Search Magazine Indexes. Sites like FindArticles.com index articles in magazines that may not always float to the top of a Google search. Worth a try.
Search Amazon. Type in your search subject, and see what books pop up. The titles alone, the people mentioned, and the commentary left by other amazon shoppers are immensely useful when mapping out a new information space. You can then use that information to narrow down your search on Google. Searching the Wishlists for a particular book title can also help narrow down the search field.
Find Secondary Information Sites. There is often useful commentary on the smaller personal websites. They don't rank high on Google, so use a blog indexer like Technorati and see who's linking to that major blog you like. Use Google to find sites that link to two or more other good sites you've found. Are there people out there who read both Dooce and Crossroad Dispatches, and feel strongly enough to provide a link? That might be an interesting person to read.
Look for Color Commentary. Sometimes you really just want to get some random guy's opinion. I like to search for terms like "really sucks", "I think", "I would", "technically speaking", and other phrases that someone giving your their opinion might say. The general principle here is to mix the topic of your search with some kind of "biased phrase." Slang that's in use by a particular generation can be useful too. For example, "friends with benefits" versus "casual sex" versus "free love"...all used by different generations (20-somethings, 30-somethings, hippies...) Likewise, if you are looking for negative opinions, try words like "stupid", "dumb" and "sucks". Use your imagination, and you'll be rewarded.
Look for Expert Cues. The relative obscurity of a word can help narrow down the results. So instead of searching for best plasma tv television, which will turn up crappy e-commerce websites, look for color balance reproduction fidelity plasma tv television...you're more likely to get an article that's written by someone who edits Audiophile magazine on the side. Or if you're looking for something more academic, use academic words or titles. "Ph.D.", "professor", "research", and "bibliography" might slant the results more in that direction.
Hunt by lineage, not by category. Sometimes, keywords fail to reveal useful search results because the keyword space is heavily saturated by another meaning or by common-place daily use. If you're looking for the rare and the exceptional, you need to search for topical anchors: key people, key philosophies and key innovations that shaped the field you're searching. You first may have to read a general history of the topic you're searching to get an idea of what those key anchors are. People who are learned in their field will often reference key principles as a statement of their belief; following these chains of beliefs and the sites that they link to will help you form an alternative search topology that Google is unable to provide through keyword techniques.
Search Patent Databases. When you're looking for a utilitarian or specialty item that isn't directly used by the average consumer, the trail often goes cold, or is polluted by unrelated commercial offerings. Find out who holds key patents by searching the US Patent Office Database. There are other patent registries online too, so just look around.
The wealth of information you can gain from patent applications can put you back on track: names of inventors, manufacturers, and related patents--not to mention the description of the apparatus itself--can give you more to Google. Or look for the patent number on an actual object you're interested in (if there is one) and look it up online. That can save you buckets of time.
Don't Neglect Your Local Research Librarian! If you are lucky enough to live near a university library, or even a decent public library, go check it out. The good libraries have people trained in navigating piles of information...librarians! The specialist ones know where everything is. You can also find out how to access the library's card catalog over the Internet, which might save you some legwork. In a pinch you might go to Barnes and Noble or Borders or a decent independent bookstore, and ask someone where the books on XYZ are.
Look for Accessibility / Required Policy Markers. I just read someone complaining about trying to find the "real" website for a hotel; there are so many two-bit hotel portal sites that they drown out the real sources. I noticed that most of the hotels include the phrase En Espanol, whereas the portal sites tend not to worry about that kind of accessibility because it's expensive to implement for relatively little gain. Likewise, including a phrase like Section 508 (a requirement for government sites) might narrow down search results. Try slogans associated with the company, if you know them...a portal site is unlikely to completely parrot the corporate line, but you can bet that the corporate web team had that requirement tattooed on their butts before they started the project :-)
Search Flickr. Those photo sharing websites, with their full keywording and text descriptions, provide a secondary image databank in addition to stock photo and Google Images. I've found some pictures of pretty obscure stuff much more quickly on Flickr than I have through Google. Try it!
Search 9rules. 9rules is a blog network of several hundred sites that emphasize quality of conent. They've recently added 9rules search, which is a quick way of seeing what some thoughtful writers have said about a topic of interest to you. It also searches through a new other services like YouTube, so this is an interesting alternative search you can try. Full disclosure: This site is a member of the 9rules Network.
Search Social Bookmarking Sites. Sites like Del.icio.us are filled with links to the web content that people find useful; they are therefore much more likely to be interesting than general search, and the collections of links may reflect a theme or approach to the topic that you hadn't considered. And even better: you may actually discover someone who has relevant interests that you can contact directly...you never know!
Of course, all these techniques can be mixed together. This will give you raw data to work with, from objective and subjective sources. Determining whats's useful and what's not is up to you. Have fun!
I don't know why this fascinates me so much, but Global Branding has been on my mind a lot. Today's diversion was this Wired article on Samsung's Transformation from cheap manufacturer of crappy TVs 10 years ago to design and technology leader, with twice the market capitalization of Sony.
Here's a list of the top global brands, as reported by Interbrand. The Brand Channel site that hosts the list has some pretty interesting articles, like how global companies successfully localize, such as the defunct Singer corporation, an American company:
By the early twentieth century the German public so widely accepted Singer sewing machines that they were purchased by the German army—to the embarrassment of Singer's German competitors. Later, during World War II, German aviators avoiding bombing Singer's European factories because the pilots thought the factories were German-owned.
Fascinating.
I think ultimately, the appeal of brands is that they mean something to people. I'm sure the study of brands is related to the study of semiotics in some way, and I bet that following brands on either the local or global scale will teach you something about human nature you didn't know.
Someone told me about Dr. Temple Grandin, an assistant professor at Colorado State University who is a high-functioning autistic. She recognized her strengths at an early age with the help of a mentor, and is now a designer of livestock handling systems. She's one of those bridge individuals that has provided insight into the autistic frame of mind, and by extension the mind of animals. Her latest book, Animals in Translation, describes the world from an animal's point of view. Her previous books, Thinking in Pictures and Emergence describes her experiences with autism. I've just added these to my Amazon wishlist :-)
I did, however, just listen to a fascinating Interview on NPR with Grandin and Terry Gross. Although I'm not autistic, I found a lot of relevance in her description of the autistic frame of mind and design process.
In an online article, she describes her design process, which is based on her mental thinking process:
Now, in my work, before I attempt any construction, I test-run the equipment in my imagination. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. Doing this enables me to correct mistakes prior to construction. Today, everyone is excited about the new virtual reality computer systems in which the user wears special goggles and is fully immersed in video game action. To me, these systems are like crude cartoons. My imagination works like the computer graphics programs that created the lifelike dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. When I do an equipment simulation in my imagination or work on an engineering problem, it is like seeing it on a videotape in my mind. I can view it from any angle, placing myself above or below the equipment and rotating it at the same time. I don't need a fancy graphics program that can produce three-dimensional design simulations. I can do it better and faster in my head.
It reminds me of how I run interactive simulations in my head; I don't generally need to prototype to know if something will work or will be awkward. It's a combination of running the sim and recalling the feeling of motion and convenience, though it doesn't happen as detailed structure as Grandin describes.
I'm also reminded of Cayce Pollard, the protagonist in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, who intuitively knows whether a marketing brand concept will work or not. It's not years of design experience that gives her that power; she's actually learned to control her fear of bad branding to harness it professionally; Grandin describes fear as a prime motivator in her early years in that NPR interview.
It's all interesting stuff, if you are the kind of person who likes diving deep and dark into the workings of human consciousness.
Brad forwarded me this link to Creating Passionate Users, a neat blog from the people who created the Head First series of computer books; I'd picked up one of them before. The blog itself covers a lot of issues relating to design and user experience: topics I am very interested in these days.
Specifically, Brad forwarded this post on The Difference Between Japan and US, which showed an ugly U.S. manhole cover versus a cool Japanese example:
Beauty and attention to design detail... everywhere I turned during my two week stay (Tokyo and Kyoto), I saw it. Every--and I mean every Japanese restaurant (including the fast-food sushi joints) had an architectural bent. A sense of style. An aesthetic sensibility you just don't see throughout the US!
Check it out.
I came across a newspaper article called Did You Catch That. The gist is that some of us are talking too fast for other people to understand. For many people, quickness of speech is associated with quick thinking. So those fast-talking New Yorkers tend to look at Midwesterners as plodding bumpkins instead of thoughtfully intelligent. Conversely, the Midwesterners don't think that highly of fast-talking either.
And internationally, it seems that slower-speaking people end up being the butt of jokes. From the article:
All over the world, speakers from some geographic regions tend to speak more slowly than those from others. And in every country that has been studied, people from the slower-speaking regions are stereotyped as stupid. This pattern was uncovered by Finnish linguists Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, who had reason to be interested because Finns are thought to be slow and dull by neighboring Swedes.
Lehtonen and Sajavaara suspected that the Finns' characteristically slower rate of speech -- and greater use of silence -- might have something to do with the stereotype. So they investigated and found similar attitudes where one ethnic or regional group tends to speak more slowly than others: in Germany with East Frisians, in French attitudes toward Belgians, among the Swiss toward residents of Berne or Zurich, and among Finns themselves toward their compatriots from a region called Häme (pronounced HAH-may).
I had always wondered why the Belgians got made fun of in Europe, having first become aware of this in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Finally I know why!
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