At the gas station this morning: a man on a motorcycle pulled up, stopped in front of one of the pumps, picked up the windshield-washing squeegee, washed the visor of his full-face helmet without removing it from his head, and took off again. I walked past an elderly man in a straw hat, carrying a single [...]

Steve will be teaching a seminar about user research to visiting designers from the Taiwan Design Center on June 13th in San Francisco.

My third interactions column, The Journey Is The Reward, has just been published. I offer some thoughts about the experience of the outsider, especially when we travel to other countries, and how that outsider experience can be so generative in understanding other frames of reference and cultural models. As the interactions website only has a teaser, [...]

interactions magazine: The Journey Is The Reward Teaser for my next column about toilets, transactions, and going global. Against T-shaped people Consider this my plea for the design community to stop using the term “T-shaped people”. It’s demeaning, over-simplistic, misleading, and dangerously-influential, which combined with the prior three traits makes for trouble—that starts with T

Back in January I posted my sad story about the loss of my Flickr account. The next issue of Ambidextrous Magazine features my Object Obituary (PDF link) for My Flickr Meta-Content.

Ex-Boyfriend Jewelry - You Don’t Want It. He Can’t Have It Back Nice niche marketplace.

Gladwell in The New Yorker issue on Innovation Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures

Biodiesel-fueled coupe made from old semi truck, Half Moon Bay, California Lawnmower Races, Half Moon Bay, California I went to a huge auto and machine show recently at a small airfield down the coast from San Francisco. I really love this kind of stuff, but my machine lust was battling thoughts of carbon footprints, sustainability and global [...]

Job of the future: Cultural Attaché Could bloggers ultimately staff an individualized concierge service to provide interesting or edgy perspectives on stuff in the world? Where do coolhunters meet Xeni meet futurists meet ethnographers meet butlers? Your Mom Is Not A Valid Test Market Finally a hipster-sloganed t-shirt I can get into!

Totalizator!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The first tote boards were manufactured for the horse racing industry by the American Totalizator Company. totalizator history The history of the automatic totalizator Obituary Straus made a fortune in royalties out of his invention, the American totalizator, a complicated (1,500,000 moving parts) electrical device which automatically calculates the odds in pari-mutuel betting. UNIVAC, Sperry, Rand and the American Totalizator [...]

Boarding Pass Design Imitates Fix by Users This is so great. Boarding pass with the agent circles already printed on ‘em. As Jasper points out, wouldn’t be it better to design the boarding pass so it’s readable rather than reuse a workaround?

Ben and Jerry’s, San Jose, California, 8:45 pm

The Next Speaker » Steve Portigal is de oprichter van Portigal Consulting I’m excited to be represented by a Speakers Bureau in the Netherlands. Now I need to find representation in North America. (If you can make the referral for me, please do so!)

Without donuts being part of the plan when I travel, they seem to show up with some regularity. While Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts seek to provide a consistent experience across geographies, there are also very unique experiences available in the very same category. The notion of donut is rather broad and is reinterpreted in [...]

IxDA SF Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones. Last night we attended an IxDA-SF presentation of Matt Jones on “Playfulness in Design”. No full summary to share (although maybe Matt will post the slides eventually) but one great line was the statement that “Mundane is the new fun” which refers to the little interventions of joy that are being [...]

Ode To A Burrito is a Fast Company profile of Chipotle Mexican Grill and iconoclastic founder and CEO Steve Ells. Chipotle has achieved these impressive stats by spurning fast-food orthodoxy….Chipotle also avoids the frills that pad other chains’ bottom lines. “Desserts and other sides are all profit for these chains,” says industry analyst Clark Wolf. “The [...]

Psych experiments on the role of language in decision making (and other tasks) “By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us.” Interesting examples that look at different languages around the world and how those do or don’t frame problem solving.

Recently I was invited to ASU in Tempe, AZ, to participate in a Design Research Symposium called From Here To There, a reference (I think) to moving from questions to answers (or, perhaps, more questions). I was pleased to be part of such a great lineup of speakers: Dennis Doordan, Editor, Design Issues Laura DeWitt, Research Director, laga [...]

1994 Silicon Graphics employee recruiting brochure Picked up at the CHI conference that year.

Ice Cream Cone Holder, Ben & Jerry’s, San Jose, CA Plates on Bumper, Taco Truck, San Francisco, CA Toilet and Sapporo Can, Bar, location unknown