A Sustainable Train of Thought

I’ve had the chance recently to see a lot of live music (or at least what constituted “a lot” for me) and on each occasion I’ve found myself really thinking hard about the experience. As the Music and Memory project demonstrated, music is more than just a sequence of noise. It can conjure emotions and memories and literally transport you to another place and time.

Most of my experience with music has been through records, tapes, CDs, and digital files (MP3, AAC, etc.). And the effect for me of conjuring the past through music has been that of a trigger: the same track brings back the same memories. In some ways it’s a very static effect, as if engaging one particular sense (hearing) in a particular way (a certain song) summons the bookmarked memory.

Live music is an entirely different experience.

The effect is that of the band creating a space outside of time, as though the music has imprinted in it some memory of its own, and for those five minutes the band can bring those memories back to life, can replace those five minutes in the present with five minutes from the past.

I suppose my fascination lies in the reality of simultaneous production and consumption and the effect that it produces. After the band is done with their set, you can’t point to anything in particular as being a result of their work. They work exclusively in the manipulation of time.

The effect is completely different from listening to canned music on a file. The band is there in front of you. There’s something to the immediacy and proximity that distinguishes it from recorded music, perhaps because it’s clearly other human beings who are creating it. It is more obviously being produced rather than replayed. It is more obviously a unique event rather than recorded.

You could say that musicians play music. But that’s like saying an architect draws. It misses the larger point and purpose of the event. That is to say, it’s not the event or the action itself, but the results it produces.

And of course I can’t help but see connections to service design. It’s the little things which construct the overall experience. But it’s also about creating a time out of place. It’s about creating memories and triggering those memories to produce a compounding effect: what one might call “the present plus”.

Like live music, services are produced and consumed simultaneously. Yet the experience is much more than the event itself. In some hokey way I suppose this is a reference to those “touches of home” which hotels and suchlike purport to provide. The fundamental flaw in such statements becomes clear: it’s about my home, not some generic home. As such, the experience tends to fall flat. If there were some way to tap into my reality, my experience, and my memories, services could produce effects which speak directly to me. They could draw upon my memories to augment their experiences, making them more personal and meaningful, and they could create experiences and produce memories from which they could draw upon in a future interaction. Successful service delivery is about making those connections.

Does a service need to tap into existing memories to successfully serve a customer? Not necessarily. A general archetype might be used at first, but the danger in those is that you can’t look too closely at them or they tend to fall apart. For example, walking into a hotel room at the Hyatt or the Hilton, thinking “now this is luxury” and then noticing the torn weather-stripping around the window and the scratches on the arm chair. The illusion is punctured.

Better is to create memories which reference that specific time and place. In other words: provide good service, create good memories. Those memories will be the foundation for future customer interactions. Clearly, the details need to be strong for the overall experience to prosper, but don’t get trapped by the thought that service exists only in objects, in the way the room looks or smells. Service is also the front-desk experience, the check-in at the airport, the smile in the voice of the customer-service representative.

Future experiences with that service will exist in the present plus: the current experience, plus the experiences of interactions past. How many times have you gone back to a store, to a restaurant, or to a hotel because the service was so good, the staff so friendly, or because the store-owner remembered your name?

People talk about “rich interactions”. I think of Present Plus as rich service, as a depth beyond the immediate interaction, that draws upon all past experiences in the process of fulfilling the present experience.

Memorable service. Memorable music.

I originally wrote this piece after watching Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and being struck by its positivity. In the course of the film, Dave Chappelle puts together a massive block party in Brooklyn. That’s the what. The why is unclear: perhaps because it sounded like a good idea. I tend to think it’s because he enjoys making other people happy, and because this was a way to give something back to people. I was particularly fascinated by the creation of something from nothing, that all this energy and hard work went into creating something so ephemeral, yet so lasting.

Then I got distracted by some other things and I forgot I’d written this. Forgotten, that is, until I read Fabio Sergio’s recent post The product (is the system) is the culture of use, in which he talks about time and its role in cultural change and impact on design.

I distinctly remember at the end of our Service Design course at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, we had a wrap-up session, in which I commented on how I saw Services as the overarching connector between interactions. That is, services provide the larger context in which interactions exist. I also remember that comment receiving a cool reception at the time.

I’ll be curious to see how the discussion unfolds this time.

I always forget this, so I’m recording it here for future reference and for the benefit of any other lost souls who are looking for this particular key combination. It’s too late for me, but hopefully it will save someone else from wasting several minutes of their life looking for this information….

To get a line break within a cell in Excel X for the Mac, use the following key combination:

Apple-Option-Enter

You’re welcome….

Straight from Wired (IPod [sic] Will Be the New CD – the “I” in iPod should never be capitalized, since it’s a trademark, but what do I know):

Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists’ catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40—the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Three major problems with this proposal:

1. Apple will never turn the iPod into a commodity. Period.

2. iPods have sex appeal. Taxes do not.

3. The ecological ramifications would be enormous.

Regardless of how “cheap” a “disposable iPod” might be in terms of manufacturing costs, we all know that prices in our current economic system fail to account for the true cost of products and services. For example, what about the e-waste generated by all these cheap, disposable iPods?

Here’s what would ideally happen in the H&R Block scenario painted above: you bring your existing iPod into the store and you get a discount on the software which accounts for the costs not associated with: packaging; transportation of physical materials, including tolls, fuel, pollution, etc.; licensing fees to Apple; materials to construct the CD or disposable iPod; storage of the CDs or disposable iPods; labor to manufacture, assemble, distribute, the CDs or disposable iPod, etc. etc. etc.

But of course I need to wake up and smell the….pragmatism? I thought the whole point of having things in a digital medium was to speed their distribution and reduce costs. Silly me. Marketing trumps reality.

I just ran across a company called Recordant.

They use microphones to capture conversations between salespeople and customers. Those conversations can later be analyzed to determine which specific words used at specific times in the course of a conversation led to a sale.

From their FAQ:

2. Do you have to tell your customers they are being recorded?

Recordant™ is a competitive advantage for your business. It tells customers that you are serious about giving them the best possible shopping and service experience. We require you to provide and post adequate signage to inform your customers that their conversation is being recorded for quality assurance purposes and employee training.

3. How do customers respond when they learn they are being recorded?

They respond very favorably. One survey showed they believed that when a transaction is being recorded the quality of “their” service is truly important to the retailer. Many customers also viewed it as assurance that they were being dealt with fairly and within the policies of the retailer. On a rare occasion a customer may not want to be recorded. In that instance, the employee can simply turn off the audio capture device.

I can see the analytical possibilities and benefits from the standpoint of running a company, but is anyone else bothered by this? Specifically, the false sense of “customer service” that’s being promoted: “quality assurance purposes” are in fact the “optimization of closing practices”, which really has nothing to do with “customer service” per se and everything to do with “convincing customers to buy”.

I suppose this is always the case whenever you’re on the phone with the bank and they’re recording your conversation for “quality assurance purposes” (which method of stonewalling is most efficient), but I never made the connection until now.

Noting the ambiguity inherent in the phrase “quality assurance,” I wonder if this is a benchmark by which to assess whether a company is interested in actual customer service or simply the mechanics of their sales mechanisms.

A flurry of comments attached to this image posted on Flickr caught my eye (via Macrumors).

The subject involves a forged Apple event invitation, and I found the depth of analysis contained within the comments to be fascinating, if slightly…well, let’s just leave it at fascinating.

Put it this way: when people start talking about the invitation’s kerning, or how the stars in the background are “ugly”, or even how the choice of words is “NOT Apple-like”, well, that shows just how deep “teh Design” runs over at Apple and how discerning some of its customers are. Talk about a brand!

Now all we need are NON-design types using that language and we’ll have a real revolution on our hands.

That would be billions of dollars. One amount is how much the United States of America has annually spent on programs or initiatives which address global warming (to be fair, they qualify the amount with “almost”). One amount is this year’s annual budget request from the Pentagon. Or maybe it does. Not that a couple of misplaced billions here or there makes that much of a difference I suppose¹.

Guess which story was on Page A1 of the New York Times today? Guess which story was on Page A11 of the New York Times today?

Pithy Bush Administration apologist quote:

Administration officials asserted Friday that the United States had played a leading role in studying and combating climate change, in part by an investment of an average of almost $5 billion a year for the past six years in research and tax incentives for new technologies.

At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. “We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution,” he said.

The United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other country.

I’m not even going to touch the Pentagon budget requests, which apparently include funding for such dubious projects as the so-called Missile Shield. I’d like to know how a missile shield is going to protect us from a 23-inch rise in sea levels, which, by the way, is considered a conservative estimate. Some estimates now put rising sea-levels at anywhere from 12 to 20 FEET.

Al Gore showed the effects of a 20 foot rise in sea levels in An Inconvenient Truth which, if you remember, depicted quite a bit of New York City underwater.

Thanks Missile Shield!

Ironically (if one can even use such a term when discussing these matters), the science upon which this latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is based may already be out of date:

Dr. Shindell, who emphasized that he was speaking as an individual, said, “The melting of Greenland has been accelerating so incredibly rapidly that the I.P.C.C. report will already be out of date in predicting sea level rise, which will probably be much worse than is predicted in the I.P.C.C. report.”

The big question now is whether we can afford to wait another two years until the Bush regime is over before taking action.

“Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high scientific confidence in this work — this is real, this is real, this is real,” said Richard B. Alley, one of the lead authors and a professor at Pennsylvania State University. “So now act, the ball’s back in your court.”

¹ (For the record, the Bush Administration is requesting $93 billion on top of the Pentagon request to support the war in Iraq.)

Via the Citizen Agency Blog (Choice words from Stewart Butterfield) I found the following quote from an interview by CNN of Stewart Butterfield, one of the founders of Flickr:

There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them too. [ emphasis mine ]

Think of the field as the internet and the farmers as Flickr (or any other Web 2.0 social-networking AdSense collecting site)...they can plow all they want, but without some kind of participation on the part of the early adopters (the seed), there would be no crops to harvest.

OK, so that was a horrible analogy.

Success is not an either/or proposition. Success is the result of both parties working together. It’s co-creation, it’s co-dependency. And at some point maybe one party needs to move on. I understand that, and I’m not blogging on and on about this simply to provoke my RSI.

Yes, I see a lot of whining. But underneath that whining I see some troubling aspects which I personally cannot dismiss as simply…well, whining.

ArsTechnica comments (Flickr’s shift to Yahoo ID requirement sparks (virtual) rioting) on the need to recognize the effort and contributions that early adopters make in support of fledgling social networking sites.

Those who run online (and offline) communities know that you can’t please everybody, and that old-school members are the most demanding and change-resistant. But when it comes to major community status markers you have to bend over backwards to accommodate the members who really value this sort of thing. In Flickr’s case, some kind of differentiating marker for legacy members would be nice, like a badge or a title, or some other visible signifier of the major investment that these senior users have made in the community.

Seniority perks and visible signifiers of in-group status are “Anthropology 101,” and no amount of Web 2.0 pixie dust can change that basic fact of human nature. Community sites that forget this in the midst of changes and genuine improvements do irreparable damage to the very social networks that they’re striving to build.

To be clear, I’m not questioning the business case for the Flickr and Yahoo merger, nor am I questioning the supposed benefits which await newly anointed Yahoo email address owners in the form of single-sign-on to all of Yahoo’s properties (or most of them, anyway).

Rather, as I’ve said before, I’m trying to point out that in the rush to make the business case I think people are overlooking some basic human needs, which the ArsTechnica article begins to highlight. Furthermore, in projecting this kind of reaction into the future, I feel that unless people pay attention to the underlying causes behind this reaction, rather than the reaction in and of itself (which could be passed off as whining or whatnot), this whole notion of a participatory internet may just hit a few roadblocks.

Just think about it. Without the uber-geeks falling all over themselves to make Flickr what it is today (a property of almighty Yahoo), would your (insert stereotypically computer-illiterate demographic here) be posting photos on Flickr? Do not vex/anger/enrage/put out/incense/annoy the uber-geeks.

Anyways, as one of the ArsTechnica members (Traddy) succinctly points out:

You could argue that the reason the site was valuable to be bought out is because of their [the Old Skool-ers] work; since the site is all about “community”.

Well put.

There are a couple of other interesting posts lying around the interwebs:

Slashdot
The Zooomr CEO

Oh, and if you’re wondering what “kthxbai” means, here’s your answer

CookCamp now has a venue! More details below, and I hope you’ll join us:

CookCamp
February 24, 2007
San Francisco, CA

Venue: CitizenSpace

CookCamp Wiki page – http://barcamp.org/CookCamp

Upcoming.org – http://upcoming.org/event/140558

Short Blah Blah:
The CookCamp un-conference will focus on food and health, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds (health, technology, design, food, politics, business, cooking, and more) to share, create, and learn from one another over the course of a day.

In true barcamp style, there is no set agenda prior to the event, so bring some enthusiasm, inspiration, and discussion topics around food and health. More information is on the wiki, which is editable, so please add demos, session ideas, discussion topics, etc.

If you have any questions, please let me know!

There’s been a lot of attention lately to power consumption on the part of Google (their data centers have huge power requirements) and something started to bother me about the new Nintendo Wii after reading this post over at Phicons. In short, the problem with having a device that constantly draws power—the Wii has low power consumption, but it’s intended to be left on 24 hours a day so that the latest updates and game data can be downloaded and ready for the next time that someone uses the console. Obviously this somewhat negates the energy saving features.

Consequently, there have been a lot of comments about the literal energy use and power consumption, but I’d like to pose a different question. Google worries about its power consumption because its computers are on-site and therefore Google has to foot the bill for its servers’ energy use. Nintendo doesn’t, because its units are sold to customers and the customer pays for the energy use. This perhaps makes sense in the case of an electric razor: my use of it is my own and I am responsible for its energy use. But although the Nintendo console is still “attached” to Nintendo through the always-on nature of the device, and it will actively suck down data on a nightly, as needed basis, the consumer is still personally paying for the power costs incurred by the console.

This isn’t a big deal on an individual level, where a couple of kWh of “lost” energy may add up to a couple of bucks. But multiply that minor amount by the several million consoles that any one company ships and the total energy and economic consequences soon become something entirely different. The problem is that by distributing the cost, that overall figure (the total energy cost of the Wii or XBox 360 or PS3) is a non-issue because nobody will ever see it.

So how do we make someone (person, business, etc.) care about a problem whose distributed nature means that nobody really cares about it? Good question, and I’d be interested in hearing some suggestions. My thought is that large companies care about millions of dollars. So somehow the total bill needs to be connected to the company that bears responsibility for creating the object, not unlike how car manufacturers face emissions regulations. I’m not suggesting regulation as a cure, but as a motivator to get companies to innovate. In this new age of green, companies will do well to tout their environmental accomplishments. And what better way to do so than to talk about energy efficiency in the grand scheme of things. It speaks well of the company’s intentions, their attention to detail, as well as their eye on the big picture. A good citizen, if you will. What company wouldn’t want that kind of publicity?

Setting aside that observation for a moment, where along the timeline of a product’s lifecycle should we draw the line where corporate responsibility ends and the individual’s responsibility begins? If a company continues to offer services through a product it’s sold, has its product really left the scope of that company’s responsibility? Put another way, if Nintendo had manufactured a device that required a lightbulb to be turned on 24 hours a day, people would notice and probably not be too happy about footing the bill. After all, Nintendo is the one stipulating that the device must remain on. It’s not a choice on the consumer’s part. As it stands, we will now have a cute little device in our living room that’s plugged into the wall and, combined with the several other million units sold across the country and around the world, will probably require at least one new power station just to meet its aggregate power demands.

For Google that would be a disaster (more money out of their pocket…yes, they have a lot of it, but humor me). But for Nintendo it’s a non-issue because the cost is passed along to the consumer. Something doesn’t seem right, but I don’t see the situation changing….yet.

Right now the tech industry is just waking up to the fact that energy costs related to computing are the critical path, so to speak. So there are already rumblings and developments which address the energy issues on a per-processor, per device basis.

At the same time, Nintendo seems to be entering a phase between products and services. You used to buy the console and that was it: you pay for the energy use because it’s directly tied to your use. Now you buy the console and it’s tethered to a company, which uploads content and updates information as needed throughout the lifetime of the device.

In a way, the Wii may be heading towards the model of thin clients. (The form factor of the Wii has an uncanny resemblance to that of thin clients.) Formalizing a relationship in those terms makes it easier to connect the device in the user’s home with the company that spawned the device, because the former is clearly dependent on the latter. Thus, services bring with them increased environmental sustainability because some of the intangible costs associated with devices are now brought back within the service infrastructure of the company. What had been previously ignored or shunted elsewhere has now been brought back under the company’s responsibility, making it in their interest to reduce these costs.

Clearly we have some ways to go before realizing such a situation. However, it’s only a matter of time before people start asking the question “who pays?” just as any business in their right mind would ask. And if the answer is “you, the customer, pays” it’s only a matter of time before those small costs aggregate to create an untenable situation, both on the household and the global scale.