I live a multi-ethnic life every day, so why do I have to choose a single ethnicity for the convenience of this form’s creator? And it’s not about how I self-identify versus how others see me: even if I see myself as multi-ethnic, this form dictates that I can be only one.

I’m faced, effectively, with an impossible choice. It’s the same as if parents were asked to indicate their favorite child.

Sure, it’s got a cool UI and the touch screen doesn’t hurt either, but I wasn’t so sure there was really that much more to make it stand out from the competition. The ability to play music has made its way into a number of other phones, so that’s not a differentiator. And the Prada phone shows that others can quickly ape the same look-and-feel. The only real difference is that the iPhone is running Leopard, a computer operating system.

Then it occurred to me: the most valuable thing for people that exists on a mobile phone is their address book. And .Mac has had address book synching for years. Connect the dots and you no longer need an on-device address book.

Well, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. How does this sound: keep the address book local to the device, but synchronize it every so often with .Mac. Lose your phone and you’d still have your friends’ numbers (even if you’re out a couple of hundred dollars). I’d bet that kind of functionality would attract a lot of attention.

Like most ideas, this is not a new one (as a little research this evening revealed) but I think Apple has the opportunity to provide a level of integration between handset and software which really isn’t present in other phones.

I can synch my Sony Ericsson phone to my Powerbook with a couple of clicks and a bluetooth pairing, but what if all this was managed over the air, pushed from my iPhone and synched with my computer, all without me having to push any buttons? I personally think that would be pretty cool….

What other kinds of integration do you think .Mac might enable with the iPhone?

In May of 2001, the European Union (EU) Parliament adopted a directive that requires producers of electronics to take responsibility – financial and otherwise – for the recovery and recycling of E-waste.

Right now, EPR is aimed at E-waste, but one could imagine this extended to include all environmental consequences associated with a particular product, including energy use or perhaps even embodied energy. More to the point, it would be great to see some incentives for companies to adopt better alternatives, such as bioplastics.

The take-back initiatives are funded through “advance recovery fees” paid by everyone who purchases new products, similar to the bottle deposits in some US states.

Like most stuff in the environmental sphere, EPR isn’t all that new: Wired ran a story more than four years ago about E-waste and how both Japan and the European Union have adopted progressive e-waste recycling laws.

We really need to reduce the uptake time between identifying problems and resolving them. We need agility...

I’ve written about my experiences at CookCamp over at Tasty Thinking, but in brief: we pulled it off without a hitch, and more importantly there’s interest in taking CookCamp forward in a variety of directions. One possibility is a larger event in a few months. Another possibility is a model which integrates CookCamp into other barcamps.

As was the case for my last trip to San Francisco, where I attended both HealthCamp and the Internet Identity Workshop, I was able to combine multiple conferences into a single trip.

CookCamp’s been in the works for several months, but at the last minute Victor pointed out Calls for Change at ETel. As a nice side-effect, during the breaks I wandered around and chatted with some of the conference attendees. I ran into (the guy from) Jaiku Surj, one of the conference organizers with O’Reilly; and one of the guys who worked on Platial.com.

Perhaps most interestingly, we met the guy behind Open Moko. After telling him of the BarCamp experience with CookCamp, we kind of threw out the idea of an OpenMokoCamp, which he got rather excited about. I think it would be a great way to build buzz around the phone and develop a cadre of core users and proselytizers.

I don’t know how much I can talk about the trip to Switzerland at this point, save to say that it ended with this....

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.)