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Way, way back in in 1989 (the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the other subway series, Tiannanmen, release of Mandela), I worked at a foundation that funded environmental, community development, and some cultural groups. While there, I heard a great story about a simple solution. It involved Lester Brown, head of Worldwatch.

Brown was presenting at an event sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (a foundation created by later, more progressive Rockefeller cousins) and someone asked the question: “if you could get people to do one thing, what would it be?” Brown is said to have thought a very long time about this question, uncomfortably long for some, when he finally answered: “get people to ride bikes.”

This was a simple solution to many, many, many problems: by using bikes instead of cars or public transit, carbon emissions would be reduced, by getting people to ride they would have fewer heart problems, live healthier. Bikes require less infrastructure and generally pose fewer delays in people’s live so they reduce stress. David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries makes the charming argument that biking around cities makes him “feel more connected” and provides insights into “the mind of my fellow man.” And bikes are just nifty.

Seems like another simple solution is emerging twenty years later: cook for yourself. For a variety of reasons, I’ve resumed cooking and a friend recommended The Flavor Bible. The introduction has a nice little closing:

Ultimately, cooking offers the opportunity to be immersed in one’s senses and in the moment like no other activity, uniting the inner and outer selves. At these times, cooking transcends drudgery and becomes a means of meditation and even healing. . . . It is little surprise to us, then, that when US Poet Laureate Charles simic was asked by New York Times’s Deborah Soloman earlier this year “What advice would you give people who are looking to be happy?” his response was “For starters, learn how to cook.”

Now, The Nation has an article titled “We Don’t Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook”. It begins with the line:

We need radical thinking, but we don’t need a revolution. We don’t need an overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not become spartans. We’re just going to have to learn how to cook.

Sadly, the rest of the article is mostly about Americans: 1) needing less protein than we think; 2) eating only choice cuts while leaving other interesting bits (kidney, tripe, liver, brisket) to our pets and the rest of the world; and 3) the protein paradox of feeding out protein sources (livestock) more food than we need to feed 4 billion people. It’s less about how a lifestyle change would work or connect to Simic’s line.

Still, my apophenic brain circuitry has latched onto this. I’m getting too many signals in a short period of time to ignore it: David Byrne’s bicycle book, the resurfacing of the Lester Brown story, the Simic quote, my own interest in cooking (and not spending obscene amounts of money for a salad at Pret a Manger), the Nation headline (if not the article in Google Reader).

Just started reading David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries this morning. The book, which has all the charm of David Byrne, has a great story to it. Byrne started riding his bike as a way to stop dealing with cabs, get a little exercise, and as a superior way of going to clubs to hear music.

Eventually, after discovering the folding bike, he began travelling and touring with a bike and riding around the cities that he visited. (He blogs about his biking now.) He found that, while on his bike, he was:

more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport: I could stop whenever I wanted to, it was often (very often) faster than a car . . . and I didn’t have to follow any set route.
…
This point of view — faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person — became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years — and it still is. It’s a big window and it looks out on a mainly urban landscape. … Through this window I catch glimpses of the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in. Cities, it occurred to, are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts

The other urban thing is a nifty sticker campaign, by graphic designer Mike Joyce. The sticker reads “More Jane Jacobs, Less Marc Jacobs”.

Sad little footnote. Lots of people started defending Marc Jacobs to him. Worse still, lots of people asked who Jane Jacobs is. We don’t have a contemporary urban critic who celebrates city life . . . Steven Johnson is doing some of that, but I think we lose that voice to his technology and science history writing.

I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):

Full lesson at Instructables

I don’t have key attributes.
There isn’t a four pillar architecture that adds up to me.
I don’t have primary or single emotional takeaways.
I don’t have a single, drumbeat voice.

People/me trying to be a brand. Waste of spirit.

As the Mad Farmer says:

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

That is all.

Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:

“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”

“power is the ability not only to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” - Chimamanda Adichie

This might be a top 5 TED talk, for its power, clarity of concept, and speaker presence. Nigerian novelist (and Booker shortlister) Chimamanda Adichie solves the riddle of the truth and incompleteness of stereotypes and biases, by exposing the “dangers of the single story.”

Listen to the talk, but here’s an example: Africa does have failed states, serious infrastructure problems, and the severest forms of economic hardship. That is a true story. But, for most people, it is either the only story they know, or they only know “different versions of [that] single story.” Since that story doesn’t include a thriving and growing African middle class (across many countries, of course), an African intelligentsia, and economic success stories, we remain stuck in our stereotypes. In addition to solving the riddle of stereotypes that are true (now they are stories that tell one truth and the charge is to learn the other stories), it also helps me personally get out of the prejudiced/non-prejudiced quandary. Too often conversations involving narrow cultural understandings (single story versions of a people or their lives) are polar: you have to confront the misconceiving as prejudice. While it is a prejudice, the cure is not solely about fixing a character flaw, it’s about expanding the story.

Adichie says single stories of Nigeria “flatten her experience” (around 13:11 in the video). Reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a huge revelation of how flat my understanding of Africa is. I have only known Africa from a policy perspective: the summary numbers and prose about famine, civil war, wasted aid, problems in education and information technologies. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells a range of stories in William KamKwamba’s life: two famines, going to school, playing as a boy, playing/hanging differently as a teenager, his experience of popular culture, the mixing of magic and science in his life, his curiosity and tinkering, simple family life. When I started reading the book, I was actually frustrated when the first several chapters had nothing to do with his windmills, but focused on his life. I wanted the other single story of his inspiring move against his economic condition.

The whole talk is fantastic, but one other great moment that lays it out when she illustrates the principle “if you want to dispossess a people, start the story with the word ’secondly’” and goes on to explain how you can tell the story of Native American starting with arrows (the secondly) rather than the arrival of Europeans, or start with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of those states. This line starts around 10:00.

I used to give interaction design candidates tests as part of the interview process. I would put a site on my computer screen, brief them against imaginary client requests and biases and then give them a half hour to analyze and respond to the brief.(*) Sometimes, I would pick a site that was related to their work or the client I was hiring for. But frequently, I would test them with the McMaster-Carr tool site.(**)

The virtue of the McMaster-Carr site was that is was almost perversely ASCII-Nielsen and, in many, many ways right to do so. The company has literally dozens and dozens of categories and subcategories of equipment and parts and the home page used to list them all in a spray of text with only titled line breaks to separate them into the highest level categories. And when I say sprayed, I mean that they weren’t even in table form. They were strings of links, like sentences without verbs.

It was right in many ways: it supported the CTRL-F behavior (which is faster than scanning any large list); the hierarchy and arrangement was familiar and unchanging; and it resembled the much more familiar tool catalog method of scanning. In short, text was efficient, and tables were unnecessary and even obstructive.

So yesterday, I’m talking to my boss about interaction design and described this test (as a way of illustrating taste and judgment in design). When I went to the site, I was shocked to find a new design!

Previously, the page would have had something like this:

Fastening & Joining Screws & Bolts, Threaded Rods & Studs, Eyebolts, U-Bolts, Nuts, Washers, Shims, Helical &Threaded Inserts, Spacers & Standoffs, Pins, Anchors, Nails, Nailers, Rivets, Rivet Tools, Staples, Staplers, Key Stock, Retaining Rings, Cable Ties, Lanyards, Magnets

But now they’ve added illustrations of the categories and pushed content lower. The illustrations still feel on-brand, as they have that grayscale line art feel of a big fat cheap paper catalog. But I’m not sure they’re adding any value. Does a seasoned contractor, craftsman, builder, etc. really need a picture of a lanyard? Isn’t he or she better served by that list that puts everything right in front of him and minimizes the need to scroll?

Part of the answer may come in a later, and very useful, screen:

Now when I say useful, I mean useful to me. Following my trip to MAKER Faire, I have gotten all middle-aged “Mister-Make-It-Fix-It-Tinker-I-Have-That-Tool-Guy” and am trying to fix anything that comes my way, including most recently, replacing a fastener on a new briefcase. During that repair effort, I got to use my Dremel(!) on a threaded rod(!!). I went to Home Depot with the fastener I needed to replace and the guy took me to a wall of drawers labeled threaded rod. I had no idea such things existed — a rod with threads! Not a screw, cuz that would have a cap. This was just a rod that was threaded. The picture above is a nifty guide for a reasonably intelligent, barely handy, person to solve problems, find products and get ideas.

So perhaps, this was a rebrand to help McMaster-Carr reach out to a new type of DIYer. That would make sense of the home page. Someone at my level or slightly higher might find it really useful to see a U-bolt labelled as such or the difference between an anchor, a pin, and a rivet.

Still, I’m sad to have lost my old test. It was great fun working at a hip shop like R/GA and asking people to evaluate a site so obstinately retro, yet well-designed. (Even more sadly, wayback doesn’t seem to have the old version.)

(*) Disclaimer: I’ve had plenty of interviews where I was the candidate and was asked to give comments on the current site and the interviewer would site back and reject every idea: “done that” “users didn’t like it” “breaks a part of the site that is no longer there” “tech can’t do it”. A fairly obnoxious dynamic to my mind — if someone can do better than you with a site that you’ve been managing for years, you must be incompetent or not paying attention. Anyway, I’m always very clear with the candidate that there are no right answers, but that I just want to have a discussion, see the thinking, and watch the organization of the case he or she makes.

(**) Not my idea originally, and not an original idea. I know several people who use the site as a benchmark of various ID philosophies and ideas.

An ignite talk by Mark Argo about the increasing open-sourcing and personalization of gadgets begins with a fun account of the way in which the word gadget has evolved and been depreciated. According the usual on-line sources (OED, dictionary.com, Wikipedia), the origin of gadget is not entirely clear, but there was a late-19th early-20th century sense that gadget was originally a good thing. An early appearance of the word occurs in the 1918 memoir of a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (”Above the Clouds”): “our ennui was occasionally relieved by new gadgets — “gadget” is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some gadgets were good, some comic, and some extraordinary.”

Argo highlights that gadget covered useful inventions back in the day and lightly laments its devolution. (Think how it is used today: “gadget” plays are gimmicks in football and seen most frequently in bad football movies; gadget freaks are unnaturally attached to their devices; gadget and gizmo are ways for normal people (either the hero or the villainous suit who doesn’t get it) to marginalize something as esoteric).) Argo kind of undermines his attempt to recover the word by highlighting some laughable, if useful (who knows), canes: one has a ruler for measuring horses at the racetrack, one has doctor supplies.

One of the things this sparked for me, was that we no longer have a word that covers the sense of invention in the “Above the Clouds” quote. Something that highlights the excitement and potential value of something. The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite movies and favorite books) has a great gadget scene in which Brother William (of Baskerville . . . get it?) is inspecting a book and whips out a crude pair of glasses.

This gets the other brothers all a-twitter:

Which prompts the best Sean Connery picture ever:

An earlier scene shows Brother William’s other ‘dangerous’ possessions:

In the scene, Brother William slowly unpacks the items (for our benefit) but, the moment he hears footsteps (of the approaching abbot), he throws a cloth over them and assumes a casual air. The gadgets are an hourglass and an astrolabe. (Brother William takes astronomical measurements at night.)

I love how these things have life-changing and even heretical potential. Sadly, my mind, now owned by marketing-speak, can only come up with tepid words: innovation, game-changing, category-creator, novelty, differentiator. Invention has potential, but it goes to sad cranks toiling in their workshop hoping to strike it rich with their invention (and the inevitable cliche of the inventor who actually does create something great, but never sees the rewards). Gadget’s not terribly exciting, but it has some of the energy of the word invention back in the day.

On his site, Argo lists the links he refers ton in a delightfully low-rent way:

Here’s a mini-version of the upcoming documentary about William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind:

Watching it today, William’s comment about needing electricity to get to the internet (at 5:21) struck me: “Most people want internet technology, but they can’t use internet technology without electricity.”

This reminds me of some of the smug criticisms of the OLPC project, where critics were piling on that it was inappropriate to provide web access, learning tools, and technology to these countries when there were other pressing needs. While I don’t disagree that there are other pressing needs, this blithe criticism seems ill-informed in light of what William has done for his village with access to a small number of (old) books and the way he has framed electricity as a path to economic development, prevention of famine, increased education, and more culture and enjoyment of life.