archive.Joe Lamantia.com

We rely on many ways of rec­og­niz­ing peo­ple, near at hand or from afar; faces, voices, walks, and even the scents from favorite colognes or per­fumes help us greet friends, engage col­leagues, and iden­tify strangers.
I was in high school when I first noticed that everyone’s key chain made a dis­tinct sound, one that served as a kind of audi­ble call­ing card that could help rec­og­nize peo­ple. I started to try to guess who was walk­ing to the front door by learn­ing the unique com­bi­na­tions of sounds — clink­ing and tin­kling from metal keys, rat­tling and rub­bing from ceramic and plas­tic tokens, and a myr­iad of other noises from the incred­i­ble mis­cel­lany peo­ple attach to their key rings and carry around with them through life — that announced each of my vis­i­tors friends. With a lit­tle prac­tice, I could pick out the ten or fif­teen peo­ple I spent the most time with based on lis­ten­ing to the sounds of key chains. Every­one else was some­one I didn’t see often, which was a fine dis­tinc­tion to draw between when gaug­ing how to answer the door.
There are many other audi­ble cues to iden­tity — from the clos­ing of a car door, to the sound of foot steps, or cell phone ring tones — but the key chain is unique because it includes so many dif­fer­ent ele­ments: the num­ber and size and mate­ri­als of the keys, or the lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent key rings and sou­ve­niers peo­ple attach to them. A key chain is a sort of impromptu ensem­ble of found instru­ments play­ing lit­tle bursts of free jazz like per­son­al­ized fan­fares for mod­ern liv­ing.
The sound of someone’s key chain also changes over time, as they add or remove things, or rearrange them. That sound can even change in step with the way your rela­tion­ship to that per­son changes. For exam­ple, if they buy a sou­ve­nier with you and put it on their key­chain; or if you give them keys to your apart­ment. Each of these changes reflects shared expe­ri­ences, and you can hear the dif­fer­ence in sound from one day to the next if you lis­ten care­fully.
And like those other ways of rec­og­niz­ing peo­ple I men­tioned ear­lier, which all reach the level of being called sig­na­tures when they become truly dis­tinc­tive, the sound of someone’s key chain serves a sort of audi­ble sig­na­ture.
Until now, the sound of a key­chain was per­haps the only truly unique audi­ble sig­na­ture that was not part of our per­son to begin with (like the voice). Now that Jason Free­man has cre­ated the iTunes Sig­na­ture Maker, we may have an audi­ble sig­naure suit­able for the dig­i­tal realm. The iTunes Sig­na­ture Maker scans your iTunes library, tak­ing one or two sec­ond snip­pets of many files, and mix­ing these found bits of sound together into a short audio sig­na­ture. You choose from a few para­me­ters such as play count, total num­ber of songs, and whether to include videos, and the sig­na­ture maker pro­duces a .WAV file.
I made an iTunes sig­na­ture using Jason’s tool a few days ago. I’ve lis­tened to it a few times. It cer­tainly includes quite a few songs I’ve lis­tened to often and can rec­og­nize from just a one-second snip­pet. Cal­lig­ra­phers and graphol­o­gists make much of a few hand­writ­ten let­ters on a page: music can say a great deal about someone’s moods, out­look, tastes, or even what moves their soul. I lis­ten to a lot of music via radio, CD’s and even live that isn’t included in this. I’m not sure it rep­re­sents me. I think it’s up to every­one else to decide that.
But what can you do with one? It’s not prac­ti­cal yet to attach it to email mes­sages, like a con­ven­tional .sig. It might be a good way to book­end the mixes I make for friends and fam­ily. I can see hav­ing a lot of fun lis­ten­ing to a bunch of anony­mous iTunes sig­na­tures from your friends to try and guess which one belongs to whom. There’s real poten­tial for a use­ful but non-exhaustive answer to the inevitable ques­tion, “What kind of music do you like?” when you meet some­one new. Along those lines, Jason may have kicked off a new fad in Inter­net dat­ing; this is the per­fect exam­ple of a unique token that can com­press a great deal of mean­ing into a small (dig­i­tal) pack­age that doesn’t require meet­ing or talk­ing to exchange. I can see the iTunes sig­na­ture becom­ing a speed-dating req­ui­site; bring your iTunes sig­na­ture file with you on a flash drive or iPod shuf­fle, and lis­ten or exchange as nec­es­sary.
At least the name is easy: what else would you call this besides a “musig”. Maybe an “iSig” or a “tune­sig”.
Unique ring tones, door chimes, and start-up sounds are only the begin­ning. Com­bine musigs with the music genome project, and you could upload your sig­na­ture to a clear­ing­house online, and have it auto­mat­i­cally com­pared for matches against other people’s musigs based on pat­terns and pref­er­ences. Have it find some­one who likes reggae-influenced waltzes, or fado, or who lis­tens to at least ten of the same artists you enjoy. Build a cat­a­log of one musig every month for a year, and ask the engine to describe the change in your tastes. Add a musig to your Ama­zon wish­lists for gift-giving, or even ask it to pre­dict what you might like based on the songs in the file.
You can down­load my musig / iSig / tune­sig / iTunes sig­na­ture here; note that it’s nearly 8mb.
I’ll think I’ll try it again in a few months, to see how it changes.

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Katrina’s ill winds are bring­ing some good, in the form of increased aware­ness of and will­ing­ness to con­sider New Urban archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning options for the rebuild­ing Gulf Coast towns.
I first encoun­tered New Urban­ism while read­ing William Kunstler’s The Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere. Kun­stler has writ­ten sev­eral addi­tional books explor­ing the cre­ation and evo­lu­tion of the mod­ern Amer­i­can sub­ur­ban­scape since The Geog­ra­phy of Nowhere, all of them mak­ing ref­er­ence to New Urban­ism. It’s recently popped up in two arti­cles the NY Times. The first, Out of the Muddy Rub­ble, a Vision for Gulf Coast Towns, by Brad­ford McKee, recounts the efforts of archi­tects and plan­ners from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives, includ­ing mem­bers of the Con­gress for the New Urban­ism, to put forth a viable plan for the healthy rede­vel­op­ment of dam­aged Gulf Coast towns.
If you’ve not heard yet, New Urban­ism advo­cates the cre­ation of walk­a­ble, human scale com­mu­ni­ties empha­siz­ing mixed use envion­ments with pat­terns and struc­ture that allow peo­ple to meet daily needs with­out reliance on auto­mo­biles. In short, New Urban­ism is an archi­tec­ture and plan­ning frame­work that actively opposes sprawl.
Sprawl ben­e­fits the short term at the expense of the long term. Crit­ics of New Urban­ism often choose to inter­peret it as a school that restricts the rights of indi­vid­ual prop­erty own­ers, rather than as a series of pos­i­tive guide­lines for how to design com­mu­ni­ties that are healthy in the long run. But of course that’s always been the short-term view of the long-term greater good…
The dra­mat­icly dif­fer­ing points of view in favor of and opposed to New Urban­ist approaches come through very clearly in this exchange:
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The Miami archi­tect Andres Duany, a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in the New Urban­ism move­ment, urged the casino own­ers to inte­grate the casi­nos more seam­lessly among new clus­ters of retail stores and restau­rants rather than as iso­lated estab­lish­ments.
Describ­ing his vision, Mr. Duany said, “You step out onto a beau­ti­ful avenue, where you can get a chance to look at the water and the mar­velous sun­sets and the shops, and walk up and down to restau­rants and eas­ily find taxis to other places.“
But Mr. Duany’s design sharply clashed with the casino own­ers’ main pri­or­ity.
“A casino owner wants peo­ple to stay on the prop­erty,” said Bernie Burk­holder, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of the Trea­sure Bay Casino, in Biloxi.
“As running-dog cap­i­tal­ist casino own­ers, we need to under­stand that the com­mu­nity fits together,” he added, “but we need an eco­nomic unit that will hold the cus­tomer.“
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The sec­ond: Gulf Plan­ning Roils Res­i­dents also by Brad­ford McKee, pub­lished a few days after the first on Decem­ber 8, 2005, cap­tures some of the reac­tions to the plans from Gulf Coast res­i­dents. Nat­u­rally, the reac­tions are mixed.
But it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that sprawl is a very tem­po­rary and sur­real sta­tus quo, one that cre­ated the utterly improb­a­bly eco­log­i­cal niche of the per­sonal rid­ing mower. If that’s not a hot-house flower, then what is?
Some links to resources about New Urban­ism:
Newurbanism.org
transitorienteddevelopment.org
Con­scious Choice
New Urban Time­lines
New Urban News
Con­gress For the New Urbanism

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Update: Version 1.1 of the Intranet Review Toolkit is available as of 03/20/2006, and now includes a summary spreadsheet.
Thanks go to James Robertson for very gently reminding me that the licensing arrangements for the Intranet Review Toolkit preclude republishing it as a summarized form, such as the spreadsheet I posted earlier today. In my enthusiasm to share a tool with the rest of the community, I didn’t work through the full licensing implications…
Accordingly, I’ll be removing the spreadsheet from harms way immediately, while hoping it’s possible to make it available in a more legally acceptable form.
Apologies to James and the rest of the Toolkit team for any unintended harm from my oversight.

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In the overview of the new “results oriented” UI planned for MS Office 12, our friends in Redmond offer:
“The overriding design goal for the new UI is to deliver a user interface that enables users to be more successful finding and using the advanced features of Microsoft Office. An additional important design goal was to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so that they can spend more time and energy focused on their work.”
Let me get that straight. Your first goal is to make it easier for me to find and use advanced features that the vast majority of people employ rarely if ever, and didn’t need in the first place?
And something else that was also important – but not as important as access to all those shiny advanced features – was to make the workspace uncluttered and allow me to focus on my work?
Isn’t that… backwards?

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I got caught in an on-line opinion survey trap last week. The setup: In exchange for 10% off my next purchase, a Banana Republic cashier told me, I had to answer a few questions about my shopping experience. Retailers often solicit opinions from customers in return for a variety of rewards. It’s common enough that there’s an understanding on the amount of information requested, in exchange for the expected reward. So I thought I was safe…
Twenty screens later, after answering more than fifty questions and with no end in sight, I was feeling a little cranky. Even my wife was irritated; I was holding up grocery shopping for dinner guests. Very quickly, the reward for my time shifted from a coupon, to using Banana Republic as an example of an on-line survey experience that undermines your brand.
The full survey ran more than thirty five screens, and ended with an error message. Very professional.
Thumbnails of the whole survey:

For kicks, I posted the screenshots to Flickr. If you run the slideshow, you can see where I became frustrated and started to give spoiler answers – like wearing a size 98, or spending $10 / year on clothing.
Why was the survey experience bad?
1. They didn’t make clear how much time they were asking for. The opening screen said 10 minutes, this is misleading for a 100 question survey. If you’re asking for my time, respect me enough to be honest about what’s required.
2. They didn’t make the real purpose of the survey clear. From the shopping experience itself, the questions quickly shifted to my age, income, marital status, and education level. This is a transparent attempt to feed data mining and demographic needs that relied on an amateur segue to turn the conversation around and ask for personal information.
3. They contradicted the experience I had in their store. The store staff were nice enough to keep track of the umbrella I left in a fitting room, and return it before I left, which was thoughtful. Consistency is the core of a successful brand, but the survey experience was inconsistent.
How does this damage Banana Republic’s brand?
1. Banana Republic left me with a series of negative impressions that work against their brand values: I now feel I was chosen to participate in a survey under false pretenses, a survey that offers me little value in return for important personal information that is inappropriate to ask for in the first place.
2. Banana Republic closed a growing channel for conducting business with a customer. I may purchase more from their stores — if I have no other retailer at hand, and I need business clothes to meet with a client CEO the next morning once again — but I’m certainly not willing to engage with them online.
Merchants in all areas of retailing work very hard to encourage customers to form positive associations with their brands. Fashion retailers work especially hard at encouraging customers to associate values, such as trust and respect, with a brand because these values serve as the foundation for longer term and more lucrative relationships with customers than single purchases. Every experience a customer has with your brand — every touch point — influences this network of associations, reinforcing or weakening the link between a brand and the feelings that customers have about the products and the company behind it. A simple test any retailer should use when considering bringing an experience to customers is wether the experience will reinforce the right brand associations.
Loyalty programs, and their offspring the online opinion survey, are good examples of the intersections of customer interests and retailer interests in an experience that can reinforce a customer’s perceptions of the brand and the values associated with it. Many retailers manage these kinds of programs well.
Just not Banana Republic.
The error message at the end.
Error Message:

I wear size 98:
Size 98:

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At least accord­ing to the Boston Globe arti­cle titled Don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of social skills, in which Pene­lope Trunk quotes an HBS fac­ulty mem­ber as fol­lows:
’In fact, across the board, in a wide vari­ety of busi­nesses, peo­ple would rather work with some­one who is lik­able and incom­pe­tent than with some­one who is skilled and obnox­ious, said Tiziana Cas­ciaro, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Busi­ness School. “How we value com­pe­tence changes depend­ing on whether we like some­one or not,” she says.‘
I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President…

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A few months ago, I put up a posting on Mental Models Lotus Notes, and Resililence. It focused on my chronic inability to learn how not to send email with Lous Notes. I posted about Notes, but what led me to explore resilience in the context of mental models was the surprising lack of acknowledgement of the scale of hurricane Katrina I came across at the time. For example, the day the levees failed, the front page of the New York Times digital edition carried a gigantic headline saying ‘Levees Fail! New Orleans floods!’. And yet no one in the office at the time even mentioned what happened.
My conclusion was that people were simply unable to accept the idea that a major metropolitan area in the U.S. could possibly be the setting for such a tragedy, and so they refused to absorb it – because it didn’t fit in with their mental models for how the world works. Today, I came across a Resilience Science posting titled New Orleans and Disaster Sociology that supports this line of thinking, while it discusses some of the interesting ways that semantics and mental models come into play in relation to disasters.
Quoting extensively from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled Disaster Sociologists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hurricanes, but Will Policy Makers Listen? the posting calls out how narrow slices of media coverage driven by blurred semantic and contextual understandings, inaccurately frame social responses to disaster situations in terms of group panic and the implied breakdown of order and society.
“The false idea of postdisaster panic grows partly from simple semantic confusion, said Michael K. Lindell, a psychologist who directs the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University at College Station. ‘A reporter will stick a microphone in someone’s face and ask, ‘Well, what did you do when the explosion went off?’ And the person will answer, ‘I panicked.’ And then they’ll proceed to describe a very logical, rational action in which they protected themselves and looked out for people around them. What they mean by ‘panic’ is just ‘I got very frightened.’ But when you say ‘I panicked,’ it reinforces this idea that there’s a thin veneer of civilization, which vanishes after a disaster, and that you need outside authorities and the military to restore order. But really, people usually do very well for themselves, thank you.’
Mental models come into play when the article goes on to talk about the ways that the emergency management agencies are organized and structured, and how they approach and understand situations by default. With the new Homeland Security paradigm, all incidents require command and control approaches that assume a dedicated and intelligent enemy – obviously not the way to manage a hurricane response.
“Mr. Lindell, of Texas A&M, agreed, saying he feared that policy makers in Washington had taken the wrong lessons from Katrina. The employees of the Department of Homeland Security, he said, ‘are mostly drawn from the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and from police departments. They’re firmly committed to a command-and-control model.’ (Just a few days ago, President Bush may have pushed the process one step further: He suggested that the Department of Defense take control of relief efforts after major natural disasters.)
“The habits of mind cultivated by military and law-enforcement personnel have their virtues, Mr. Lindell said, but they don’t always fit disaster situations. ‘They come from organizations where they’re dealing with an intelligent adversary. So they want to keep information secret; ‘it’s only shared on a need-to-know basis. But emergency managers and medical personnel want information shared as widely as possible because they have to rely on persuasion to get people to cooperate. The problem with putting FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s like an organ transplant. What we’ve seen over the past four years is basically organ rejection.’
If I read this correctly, misaligned organizational cultures lie at the bottom of the whole problem. I’m still curious about the connections between an organization’s culture, and the mental models that individuals use. Can a group have a collective mental model?
Accoridng to Collective Mental State and Individual Agency: Qualitative Factors in Social Science Explanation it’s possible, and in fact the whole idea of this collective mental state is a black hole as far as qualitative social research and understanding are concerned.

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Apparently, if you wait long enough, all circles close themselves. Case in point: I’ve always thought Golding’s Lord of the Flies nicely captures several of the less appetizing aspects of the typical american junior high school experience.
And I’ve always thought that much of the reality television programming that was all the rage for a while and now seems to be passing like a Japanese fad, is simply a chance for people on all sides of the screen to revisit their own junior high school experiences once again — albeit with a full complement of adult secondary sexual characteristics. When I do channel surf past the latest incarnation of the primal vote-the-jerk-off-the-island epic, Golding’s book always comes to mind.
Then a friend recommended Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale as recreational reading. Battle Royale is, as Tom Waits says, ‘big in Japan’ – it being a Japanese treatment of some of the same themes that drive Lord of the Flies.
The editorial review from Amazon reads:
“As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one “winner” remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television.”
And so the circle closes…

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I can’t take credit for writ­ing this para­ble about the rela­tion­ship of infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and inter­ac­tion design — that goes to another mem­ber of the IAI — but I can help share it.
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A scor­pion who was an Infor­ma­tion Archi­tect and a frog who was an Inter­ac­tion Designer were stand­ing on the bank of a rag­ing river of infor­ma­tion.
“Let’s define the prob­lem” said the IA. “I can’t swim, but I need to get across that river.“
“Well — I can swim” said the ID “I could take you across, but I’m afraid that when we get halfway, you might pull out a Venn Dia­gram and hit me over the head with it.“
“Never!” cried the IA. “Let us brave the river of infor­ma­tion together!“
And so they dived in.
When they were halfway across the river, the IA took a out a wire­frame and stabbed the ID in the back with it.
As they both slowly sank beneath the waves, the ID cried “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown!“
Replied the Infor­ma­tion Archi­tect: “Because I was defined that way.“
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I think the mes­sage is clear: What truly mat­ters is get­ting across the river. But that can be very hard to see, if your per­spec­tive doesn’t allow it.
Case in point: Spring of 2001, lit­er­ally a week after the bub­ble burst, I was in Vegas with the rest of the Expe­ri­ence Design Group from Zefer. We were in the mid­dle of one of those impos­si­ble to imag­ine now but com­pletely sen­si­ble at the time 150 per­son design group sum­mit meet­ings about the company’s design method­ol­ogy, prac­tice, group struc­ture, etc.
Our IPO had just gone south, very per­ma­nently, but that wouldn’t by clear for sev­eral months. After a mini-rebellion at which we the assem­bled design con­sul­tants voted to skip the summit’s offi­cially sanc­tioned train­ing and dis­cus­sion activ­i­ties in favor of lots of self-organized cross-practice some­thing or other ses­sions, I ended up sit­ting in a room with the rest of the Usabil­ity and IA folks from the other offices.
Who promptly decided to define all the other design spe­cial­i­ties in detail, because doing so was the key to under­stand­ing our own roles. From here we were to move on to item­ize all the tasks and design doc­u­men­ta­tion asso­ci­ated with each dis­ci­pline, and then define the implicit and explicit con­nec­tions to the spe­cific IA deliv­er­ables. In alpha­bet­i­cal order. Using flip charts, white boards, stick­ies, and notepads.
After five min­utes, I went and to see what the Visual Design­ers were doing. They were sit­ting in a cir­cle in a large and quiet room, dis­cussing their favorite exam­ples of good design in prod­ucts, expe­ri­ences, typog­ra­phy, inter­faces; their goal was to help show the value of design prac­tices to clients. Some of them were also prac­tic­ing yoga, though I’m not sure that was related. The over­all expe­ri­ence was quite a bit more — engag­ing. And use­ful / effec­tive / rel­e­vant, espe­cially out­side the bound­aries of the group. The visual design­ers wanted to get across the river, while the IA’s were taken over by the com­plu­sion to be dili­gent infor­ma­tion archi­tects.
Maybe it’s a per­spec­tive difference?

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Getting coffee this afternoon, I saw several packages of tasy looking madeleines sitting in front of the register at Starbucks. For the not small number of people who don’t know that shell shaped pastries made with butter are called madeleines – not everyone has seen The Transporter yet – the package was helpfully labeled “Madeleines”.

Proving that tagging as a practice has gone too far, right below the word madeleines, the label offered the words “tasty French pastry”.

Just in case the customers looking at the clear plastic package aren’t capable of correctly identifying a pastry?
Or to support the large population who can’t decide for themselves what qualifies as tasty?