counternotions

On a gorgeous fall afternoon while visiting the old school, I stopped by the Yale Center for British Art. I had read about Jem Southam’s Upton Pyne exhibit last week in the New York Times: Capturing a Landscape That Won’t Stand Still.

Southam is a noted landscape photographer, in the tradition of Constable and Wordsorth. Here’s how the Upton Pyne project was described in Art Forum when earlier it was at the Robert Mann gallery:

Bicycling through the countryside northwest of Exeter one day in the summer of 1996, Southam happened upon a brackish pond choked with algae and trash located behind someone’s house–and knew he had found his next subject. After photographing it in this state, he returned that December to encounter an entirely different scene: a much larger body of clear water now surrounded by tufts of planted greenery. On the visits that ensued over the next few years, Southam captured the area’s various stages of development: Tall grasses appear, as well as a little boat; finally the pond is practically a lake, met and encircled by the sweeping lawn of the house. The final shot of the series unexpectedly shows a wide swath of muddy farmyard. Evidently the pond was plowed under. 

I had no idea just how powerful the work would prove to be in person.

There were 21 photographs. Large. Still. Disturbing. As the eyes move from one photograph to another, details are lost. Time moves on. Yet there’s hope…planted in newly emerging details.

Initially the volunteer restorer of the pond doesn’t come through. According to Southam: “the bloke up the road had run off with the pond-caretaker’s wife and he was using the fixing of the pond to try to fix up his life. It didn’t work. He was quite inept, and the pond was a mess, after three years.” All’s not lost, however. Miraculously, the pond comes back at the hands of a couple of different villagers. Herons and kingfishers return to what was once a mining dump.

Jem Southam: Upton Pyne is an invitation to “re-examine notions of meaning and beauty in the landscape.” In that it’s brilliant. Non-chronological presentation and lack of signage for each photo or overall guidance by the curator were seen by some as diminishing the impact of the exhibit. Perhaps. I was blown away by the sheer size, stillness and detail of the compositions.

The exhibit is open until the end of the year.

Fast Company says:

The Swedish retail giant [Ikea] encourages customers to use fewer bags by charging shoppers 5 cents for each disposable bag they take. (Ikea gives the nickel to American Forests, a nonprofit.) The policy, in effect since mid-March, has already cut bag consumption in the United States by more than 50%, far more than executives had expected… In the United Kingdom, the policy, which started in June 2006, cut bag use by 95%.

Customer behavior modulation through price changes, especially by adding a nominal fee for what used to be “free” is a well known retail strategy. The fee is really a vehicle for highlighting a specific usage pattern.

For example, travelers often leave behind hotel bathrooms in a mess: water splashes all over the place, dirty towels thrown about, toiletries scattered by the sink, toilet paper on the floor, etc. There’s no price incentive to keep it clean, and there’s no penalty for behaving badly. If hotels were to charge, say, a $5 fee for cleaning up the mess, I’m sure most customers would likely start behaving more like they do at home.

Out of sight, out of mind. The fee is the price of focus.

Therein lies a lesson for us designers.

I am one of those designers who gets physically ill when confronted with a particularly egregious design mistake or a complex problem that assaults my design sensibilities. My heart rate quickens. I get sweaty. Sometimes I get a red flush on my face and neck. Usually, followed by a headache, mild nausea and general malaise until I manage to solve the problem. I’ve lived with this for a long time and even publicly discussed it on the Internets on several occasions.

There are some advantages, though. Especially for my clients. I am highly motivated to solve their design problems, even if it’s just to make myself feel better.

Until the solution is at hand, I’m angry. Angry at the problem. Angry at the people who created it in the first place. Angry at others who didn’t try harder. Angry at technological barriers. Angry at our lack of understanding of cognitive processes. Angry at the tax it places on my enjoyment of life and the burden it dumps on users. Anger is often my motivator to slice through design problems.

The payoff is the heightened feeling one gets when the problem is solved…all the more sweeter as it comes after an anger-coated adrenaline rush.

Apparently, I’m not alone:

This is why most dorks and nerds fail to launch start-ups that last. The technology is good and the applications can be fun but they approach a problem the wrong way: to a nerd, a problem is fun. It just doesn’t make them angry enough.

Product managers worrying about adoption curves for their new application should stop concentrating on features and look to the emotions and the experiences of their customers. Consumers change behaviour through anger. Skype, for instance, tapped into a general feeling in the market of “I’m angry at my telco”.

Jeff Bonforte, a senior director at Yahoo!, talks about anger driving innovation in a podcast at ITConversations.

I’d love to know if anybody else feels the same way.

If you ever wondered why many of the IBM product designs in the last two decades looked like they came out of a design shop whose principal customers were Bulgarian shoe stores during the Cold War, Fast Company has an answer in an interview with Sam Lucente, formerly of IBM and currently HP’s first-ever vice president of design:

Fast Company: IBM basically defined the pinnacle of corporate design—what was it like when you were there during the 1980s and early ’90s?

Sam Lucente: IBM had a very regimented, Bauhaus approach to design. There were strict rules about the color of the boxes, the way you ventilated a product, the actual design of the louver. Just massive levels of detail, which came out of a book of standards that everyone had to adhere to. It made sense, because there were so many different products coming out of IBM; we needed a uniform look-and-feel. Besides, a design team could bring down an entire development effort if, say, it went off on its own and crafted a delicate hinge that’s beautiful but not reliable. Imagine the warranty costs that the company would incur. So I really saw the power of a unified group of design standards. But I also saw how limiting they could be, from a creative point of view.     

It’s a good thing then that IBM got out of its most visible consumer-facing business line by selling its PC unit to Lenovo. It was one of the most spectacular failures of drigiste systems design:

IBM, the first big organization to pioneer its own consistent style, had maintained during Lucente’s tenure a binder of design standards nearly as thick as the Manhattan phone book.     

I guess we can now add design by phone book to our lexicon, alongside design by committee.

What does this:

“Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster is estimating Apple sold half a million iPhones from 6 p.m. Friday through the close of business on Sunday. With the devices going for $500 to $600, that’s around $250 to $300 million in cash changing hands…”

and this:

“Sony Corp sold about 250,000 units of the new version of the PlayStation Portable in Japan in the four days since its launch…”

have to do with this?

“Cashing in on 18 years of pop cultural prominence, The Simpsons Movie drew a stellar $74 million on approximately 5,500 screens at 3,922 theaters over the weekend.”

The numbers (and the way they are now being reported) speak for themselves. Some likely consequences are:

• This is going to put enormous pressure on consumer electronics and media-focused PC companies to design for first impression.

• Trade press will likely penalize major products that don’t immediately garner “blockbuster” status with their opening week numbers.

• Fearing opening-week risk exposure, such companies may decide to fundamentally alter their product launch patterns in time and scale.

• Not fully-baked, version 1.0 products (like Microsoft Zune) where companies had grown accustomed to improving products over a long stretch of time may fare poorly.

• Hit factories like Apple may garner bigger market and mind share as they are able to design and showcase blockbuster products and take risks.

• A version of Variety Weekly Box Office may indeed become a routine part of high-tech reporting.

• For product designers, focus on opening-week success may become as important a strategic factor as focus groups, script doctors and last minutes movie re-cuts have been to Hollywwod.

• Since marketing costs will significantly rise for products vying for blockbuster status, resources will likely be siphoned off from other products not destined for the Hit Parade, thereby compressing the depth of product lines.

• Embarrassing kitchen-sink variety product introduction strategies like HP’s recent “Your Life is the Show” (buried under the avalanche of Apple’s new iPods) may be taught as case histories in business schools for what not to do.

Clearly, it’s a new ball game.

UPDATE: Here’s how Steve Jobs described the introduction of iPhone 3G into the marketplace: “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend.” Not unlike the description of a Pixar movie opening.