The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (the people who run the subways) have done a test installation of a new feature to help riders orient themselves as they exit our often-labyrinthine subway stations. They’re placing sidewalk-level signage to tell riders which way is north and indicating which direction the nearest streets and avenues can be found. The Times has the full story today, and I’ve copied their photo here.

I think these are great. Despite what many New Yorkers will claim, we all get disoriented when we exit subway stations in neighborhoods we are unfamiliar with, and often it takes a minute or two to figure out exactly which way is north. (This has, by the way, gotten a lot harder since we lost the World Trade Center as a landmark).

I like two things about these orientation medallions:

1. They make a relatively high estimation of people’s knowledge of New York City geography. I don’t have any data to back this up, but based on the truly abysmal performance by Americans in general at reading maps, I’m not confident that many people, even in New York, are cartographically literate enough to even know north from west. Such people would certainly find these medallions somewhat hard to use. Designers and urban planners commonly design for the lowest common denominator of their user base, or at best they aim for features that are understood by and useful for a solid majority of their users, and as a result they don’t build features for the slightly-more advanced users of their systems. So cheers to the MTA for trying something that will clearly help those riders who already have a good general understanding of New York’s lay of the land. Who knows, the medallions may even have the happy side effect of educating the commuters who don’t quite get it.
2. I really dig the nice touch of deliberately making the compass a little bit inaccurate in order to conform with the average New Yorker’s mental model of the city. You see, the long slender island of Manhattan is not actually oriented directly north to south. The island and its avenues actually run a little more north-north-easterly, rotated slightly away from the true N-S axis. But most people think of uptown as due north, so that’s how the MTA oriented the compass directions and the street IDs. No hobgoblins of foolish consistency here.

Also, it’s delightfully surprising to me that this idea was originally proposed by a regular New Yorker, and the city somehow made it happen. Nice job.

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We recently stopped for coffee at an urban intersection where a Starbucks and a Dunkin’ Donuts sat on opposite corners, facing off in a classic retail rivalry like Macy’s & Gimbels. Deciding to avoid Starbuckian yuppiness (okay, we drink there all the time), we walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts.

But something seemed wrong… the DD looked a little, er, fancier than normal. The lighting was dimmer and less antiseptic, the signage and typography more upscale, the furniture made of wood instead of plastic. Even the logo had a playful little twist to it.

Turns out we had walked into one of DD’s new experimental brand environments, where the traditionally downmarket store is aiming for a more upscale clientele, or at least to catch up with the aspirational brand feeling of Starbucks. This experiment in environmental design was recently featured in ID Magazine (illustrated above).

We walked out with three medium iced coffees (and please note that the DD medium is equivalent to Starbucks’s biggest size, venti – and the DD large looks like damn near half a gallon of coffee) plus three donuts for $5.81, probably 1/3 what we would have paid across the street. The upscale decor and merchandising apparently does not translate into upscale prices. And the coffee was great.

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Large retail stores and fast-food restaurants have a simple choice when designing their checkout customer experience:

• Multiple registers, multiple lines, one line per register
• Multiple registers, single line

This problem is known in the retail industry as “queue management”. The New York Times today features an article comparing the checkout experiences of several New York City supermarkets, and concludes that Whole Foods’s single-line approach is the most efficient. The article suggests that the multiple-line approach is common in the suburbs, but that a different approach is needed for Whole Foods’s New York stores… so a “single-line, bank-style system was quickly chosen for its statistical efficiency.”

Um, duh. Don’t we all know this yet? Isn’t this common knowledge. Isn’t it just common sense? Well, apparently a lot of retailers haven’t yet gotten it.

But customers know it.

Lately I’ve noticed that when presented with multiple registers, customers (at least in New York City) will naturally form into a single line when given half a chance, even when store policy doesn’t ask for a single line. Maybe it’s because it just seems rude to slide up to an open register when somebody else is already waiting in line behind another customer at another register. It’s taking advantage of another person’s bad luck or complacency.

In fact, the multiple-line system almost deliberately encourages people to treat each other as rivals, asking them to think hard before choosing a line, to make tactical decisions to switch lines to maximize their own efficiency, even to send spouses and children to “hold places” in multiple lines to hedge their bets… all of this adds up to a kind of laissez-faire capitalist, survival-of-the-fittest model of the customer experience. In short, these stores are making the customers do their queue management for them.

This system is not only statistically inefficient, but (more importantly) it is a bad customer experience on an emotional level. It implicitly treats customers as animals, like pigs at a trough fighting for food. While some customers may complete their checkout happily, others will feel screwed because they chose the wrong line, or because they didn’t quickly switch to a more efficient line at the right time. It alienates customers from each other, too, by forcing them to focus on tactics and not on normal social niceties, which can’t be good for the store’s sense of community.

In short, the multiple-line system lacks grace. Customers want to be polite and social, not rude and anti-social. We feel better about our experiences when they don’t bring out the worst in us. We want experiences that enable us to behave graciously.

I can’t believe this is still subject to debate, but many retailers are sticking to their guns. In the local CVS and McDonald’s stores near my office, whenever the customers naturally and politely queue up into a single line the staff has to step in and practically yell at them to break up and form separate lines.

Why do they do this? Is it because, as the Times article suggests, customers are scared by long lines and, presumably, can be fooled into thinking that 10 lines with 5 people in each is a far shorter wait than 1 line with 50 people in it? Is it because of space/design constraints? Is it in order to better discipline and monitor unskilled cashiers? Is it because in many communities customers don’t yet understand the mechanics of the single-line approach? Or is it just plain old corporate inertia and stupidity?

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My IA Summit presentation was an experiment in what is a new presentation style for me. I have long admired the rapid-fire presentation style of Lawrence Lessig (aka the “Lessig method“) and in particular the example of Dick Hardt’s keynote at Identity 2.0. Also, I’ve always wanted to achieve the same aesthetic and pedagogical dazzle that my freshman art history teacher managed to lay down every Friday morning at 9:30 to a room full of overworked and/or hung-over art students.

I knew from the start that I would have a lot of slides – that was part of my basic concept, to show style in action across a broad variety of professional disciplines, as a quick barrage of images to drive home the point. In most of my day-to-day business or academic presentations, “1-minute-per-slide” is a pretty good rule of thumb, but for this presentation I ended up with 239 slides to show in 40 minutes. That’s one slide every ten seconds!

I was shocked that it actually worked – quite frankly I was bracing myself for a train wreck. The biggest reason for my surprise is that although I worked extraordinarily hard on the talk, I didn’t manage to get even one chance to rehearse it to see if it even came remotely close to fitting in at under 40 minutes. But in the end, thanks only I suppose to my intuition about my speaking skills, I managed to get to the final slide with five minutes to spare and without losing too much momentum along the way, even as I had to disappointingly breeze through a couple of segments.

About the Topic

After doing all the research and all the thinking, after diving so deeply into the subject of style, I still feel there’s a LOT to say about it. In fact, I feel like my 239 slides barely scratched the surface. Due to time constraints, I glossed over my discussion of three fascinating topics:

Functionalist Modernism

The first was a more in-depth discussion – a refutation, in fact – of what I call “functionalist modernism”. I touched on it briefly with one example, showing that Charles and Ray Eames were not at all the form-follows-function minimalists contemporary design catalogues would have us believe, but that, rather, they loved ornament, kitsch, bric-a-brac, patterns, and all of the decorative crimes that the true modernist eschews. In other words, they were immersed in an ocean of style.

But my primary target was Le Corbusier, an icon of functionalist modernism whose posture as a scientifically-based designer was, in fact, a self-deceptive sham – in much the same way that I think that much of today’s “lab coat” information architecture (and indeed a certain subset of the broader design world) is, sadly, a self-deceptive sham in which style exists but is deliberately obscured.

I also wanted to heap more praise on Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, a book that I think not only puts the lie to so-called functionalist modernism, but exposes the deeply poetic and humane nature of good architecture – a way of thinking about architecture that, I think, has yet to be explored adequately in the world of information architecture (a connection that, I think, Donald Norman attempted to make in his under-appreciated Emotional Design).

Abductive Reasoning

The second topic I had to skip over was my discussion of “adbductive reasononing”, a type of semi-logical thinking that envisions not what is (as with inductive and deductive reasoning) but what might be or what could be, a type of thinking more common among artists and designers. I wanted to connect this with the concept of “design thinking”, a methodology that is the inverse of the business-based risk-averse process of building products to precisely fill carefully-measured needs… but after reading Dan Saffer’s lament on the topic, I’m reluctant to use that term any more (a post on this is to come) so in a way I’m glad I didn’t go into it too much.

Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns

Finally, I sadly had to skip over my take on Christopher Alexander’s concept of design patterns. Alexander’s name is dropped frequently these days, especially in the interaction design field, but I see his work very differently than I think most people are currently interpreting it. I consider Alexander’s design patterns to be highly idiosyncratric, deeply creative, overtly political, a wee bit spiritual, and ultimately poetic in nature – which is to say that they are not at all the scientifically-based proven best practices they are too-often presented as. I would even say that Alexander was advocating a certain style of architectural theory.

For Future Development

After all the research and writing, my appetite for this topic is only just beginning. I’m not even entirely sure if the concept of “style” covers the full breadth of what I am seeing here – perhaps it’s more about aesthetics or the re-emergence of the formal and decorative, even the idiosyncratic and poetic, as key drivers of good design.

I have uncovered surprising connections between truly fascinating subjects. I’ve found remarkable authors and designers whose work I was previously unfamiliar with (who on earth is Mr. Keedy and how did he get to be so clever?). It’s clear to me that there is an incredible amount of additional material here, and a lot more for me to think about and say. I would love a chance to continue developing this topic, whether as a longer presentation, more formal articles, or even, heavens, a book.

In the Sausage Factory

If you can stomach it, I wanted to share a little insight into the development of my presentation (or, if you will, the magnitude of my procrastination).

I was working on the speech and the slideshow all night right up to my Friday morning flight, on the plane, off and on throughout the conference, and all night long leading right into my Monday morning session. While in Vegas, however, I did manage to squeeze in a stunning dinner at Bouchon, a drive-in showing of 300 with a few six packs and some excellent soul food, and, on the final night before speaking, a rapid-series of thematic drinks at Quark’s Bar at the Star Trek Experience (including a massive “Warp Core Breach”).

Yes, that’s right, I had too many drinks and absolutely no sleep in the 24 hours before speaking. While the drinking didn’t help any, I do kind of thrive in no-sleep circumstances, actually, as long as a quart of coffee is consumed immediately prior to the moment when top-performance is required (this does not, however, apply to athletic performance, however).

Lou Dorfsman, the great advertising and design luminary, once told my partner Jeff Piazza that his secret to giving a great presentation was to gulp down a shot of Scotch immediately before speaking. I have immense respect for that, I really do, but I guess I’m just made of somewhat different stuff than Mr. Dorfsman.

My work process can be divided into five very distinct phases:

1. Topic Generation (two weeks of occasional work): The topic and the presentation format came to me in the most clichéd of contexts – in the shower. I was a last-minute addition to the Summit schedule after another speaker had to withdraw, so I was already a month or two behind when I was asked to participate (and the fact that I was permitted to skip the judging process only put more pressure on me to do a kick-ass presentation). It took about two weeks from having the initial ten-word concept before I got to the point where I could write a coherent three paragraphs about the topic, and by that point it was too late to get my description into any of the printed materials for the conference.
2. Idea Collection/Research (four weeks of occasional work): Idly and intermittently thumbing through my bookshelf, browsing the web, bookmarking links, jotting down random thoughts in my sketchbook, and writing jumbled blog drafts. At no point in this timeframe did I have an overall outline of the final presentation – I was letting the research and my own unpredictable inspirations shape my thinking.
3. Formal Preparation (five semi-intense evenings): This is where I picked up a few new books and consumed them rapidly, and where I formed the bulk of the overarching concept. During this time I mostly focused on switching back and forth between gathering raw materials (copying or transcribing text snippets into my outline, structuring the outline, and collecting/scanning/photographing images for use in the PowerPoint show) and actually writing my original commentary. I had the final outline 50% done in this timeframe, and had probably written down about 30% of the actual words I wanted to say, but only about 10 slides were actually in the PowerPoint deck at this point. It’s three days before showtime.
4. Frenzy! (four intense days and nights): This was the most schizophrenic part. I was quite literally doing a little of everything during the final four days. I would spend an hour fine-tuning individual slides, aligning images and normalizing fonts, only to spend the next hour completely re-ordering the thematic flow of the whole presentation and writing the final script. Intense and completely random alternation between micro and macro.
5. Purge! (2-3 hours): Only in the final hours before showtime did I actually throw in the towel on some sections of the presentation that I knew I would not be able to discuss adequately. I deleted about 10 pages of what would ultimately be a 33-page script, and maybe 50 slides to bring the total PowerPoint page count to 239. I’ve saved all the deleted material, so they’ll probably come up again in a longer-format version of this topic.

I’m very happy to note that my process was entirely consistent with the basic premise of my talk: I had my final delivery style decided very early on, my fundamental outline was never really final until nearly the last minute, and in any event it didn’t completely dictate the content anyway but rather the concept was as much influenced by the content itself – in the same way, I think, that a product’s style shapes that product’s basic premise as much as the premise sets the framework for the product’s ultimate style.

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It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style.

Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here’s all the stuff:

Slideshow

• Slideshow as PDF (19mb PDF)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 1 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 2 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 3 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 4 of 5)
• SlideShare presentation (Part 5 of 5)

Reading List

These readings are in roughly the same pedagogical sequence that the concepts appeared in my presentation. Note that not all of these were actually cited in the talk, but I did have all of them either at hand or in mind as I wrote.

MORE…

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I am speaking next Monday at the 2007 ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas.

My topic will be “Interaction Design Style“. It will be a highly visual romp through a variety of topic having to do with the concept of style and how it fits into the design of interactive systems:

• The definition of style.
• The history and meaning of the concept of “style”, across many disciplines including art, architecture, music, design, writing, and more. Style is not not just fashion!
• How a consciousness of style can and should fit into a user-centered design process.
• How style constrains the design process, through both the anxiety of influence and through the availability of overly easy solutions.
• How style inspires the design process, opening us to new ideas we might never have thought of.
• How style guides the design process through pattern libraries, best practices, and more.

I was inspired in part by Stewart Brand’s 2003 IA keynote speech, in which he dismissed style (and fashion, and art) as an ephemeral, superficial, and ultimately flimsy basis for design strategies, an assertion that rubbed me a little wrong. Lately this has come back to me because style, broadly defined, is not brushed aside at all in so many other worlds of design and development. It’s not a dirty word.

Maybe, I thought, there are in fact major stylistic drivers behind much of what interaction designers and information architects do, in the same way that style drives much of architecture, music, etc. Maybe we shouldn’t reject stylistic influences, but should instead embrace them.

I’m working feverishly to make the most thought-provoking and interesting 45 minutes I can craft. It’s not going to be a research paper nor will it be a case study — it will be something I hope will be at least a little entertaining and educational, but most importantly a little eye-opening and inspiring. There will be lots and lots of pretty pictures!

Monday at 9:30 in the “Mesquite Room”. I hope to see you there!

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A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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