This weekend I built my first single-speed bicycle. It’s not a fixed-gear or track bike — it has a single gear in the back with a freewheel mechanism, and as you can see it has brakes, too.

For years I’ve wanted a single-speed bike just to see what all the fuss is about, but also I wanted to experiment with what I’ve heard are the benefits of single-speed training. But most importantly I also wanted a basic bike that I would feel comfortable leaving locked up in my lobby or even on the street for hours or days on end. My other two bikes are a just little too attractive to thieves, so I can never leave them anywhere for long. Basically I needed a kick-around set of wheels.

Speaking of thieves, this whole project has a little bit of a shadow over it: Over the years I’ve been collecting enough of my own bike parts for this project, but I was missing just one critical piece: the frame. It finally occurred to me that a pile of abandoned bikes locked up in my building’s lobby might be ripe for the picking. There was one bike, an old Nishiki, that looked my size and had the requisite horizontal dropouts. I knew the bike hadn’t been touched in two years, but still I put up several signs in the building’s lobby seeking the bike’s owner. After a few weeks of hearing nothing, I made my move and, yes, I stole the bike.

I like to think I salvaged it, and I did my deed during a high-traffic part of the day so as many fellow residents as possible would see me doing my work (I merely unbolted the rear wheel, which was the only part locked up). But honestly I am still a little afraid that the bike’s owner will someday return from his three-year ’round-the-world hike, or kick his drug addiction, or whatever has kept him from his wheels, and he will see me on a bike whose dents and angles look a lot like those of his beloved Nishiki. Such worries are the wages of my sin, I guess.

I stripped the bike of nearly every part it had, dramatically reducing the weight by replacing the bike’s original parts with my own slightly-higher-quality parts (the original handlebars were made of steel!) or by just leaving certain parts off the rebuild entirely. The only part I’m (literally) stuck with is the seatpost: it seems the previous owner installed a replacement post that was too big for the frame, so he simply hammered the thing into the seat tube as far as it would go. As a result, the seat is immovably positioned about an inch too low for me. Even if I figure out how to remove the seatpost, I’m not sure a properly-sized seatpost would even work anymore since the seat tube seems permanently expanded.

On my first test ride of about 15 miles, I came to enjoy the single-speed’s simplicity, and it was surprising how often I managed to keep up a steady pace without shifting gears. On the hills I had to stand up and hammer, but even then I managed to keep a good pace.

The best part was that with this beater bike I can stop riding, lock up the bike in the park, and then do a few miles running on foot. The toe clips require me to wear normal sneakers, so I didn’t need to pack an extra pair of shoes. And, as I said, I’m not overly worried about the bike being stolen. Hooray!

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I want to go to the IDEA Conference, which starts in two weeks here in New York.

Conferences generally come in two categories.

1. Conferences to meet people who do exactly what you do, and where you learn about how to do what you do better.
2. Conferences to meet people you can do business with, and where you learn about how they work and what they need.

IDEA looks different. While it is clearly aimed at people who design interactive experiences (and the lineup of speakers includes more than one card-carrying information architect), the speakers and the program are more specifically designed to spark innovative thinking, to expose and educate participants to interaction worlds they may not be familiar with, and to generate a broad spectrum of ideas from many inspirational and thought-provoking angles.

In short, it’s a conference to inspire you to do something you’ve never done before.

(I didn’t pre-register for this conference since I had already had plans for those days in October, but my schedule has recently changed. What’s more, the organizers are offering a free pass to the blogger whose published desire to attend pleases them the most. I shamelessly hope I am that blogger!)

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I’m the skinhead in the red shirt.

A year ago I entered my first bike race. It didn’t go well.

Yesterday I entered my second race, and my first multi-sport race. It was a “duathlon” — running and bicycling — around Brooklyn’s lovely Prospect Park in the twilight hours of a perfect summer weekday.

How did I get myself into this situation? It all started so innocently, in a late-night AIM chat with Adam Greenfield in which I mentioned that I heard about an event called the “Brooklyn BricK Duathlon“, and that it looked like something I might be able to handle. Next thing I knew, Adam and I were both registering online at the same time, spontaneously and impulsively. There’s no way either of us would have done this if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement you get from having even just one person to commit with you.

The start was at 7:00pm on a Wednesday night, just as the park was getting dark and the streetlights were coming on. This alone made the race attractive to me: I am not a morning person, and my evenings on Fridays and Saturdays tend to involve fine wines and good spirits into the wee hours. This makes early morning weekend racing a bit of a problem for me. Having a whole day to eat properly and prepare mentally for the race really helped.

The BricK was what they call “sprint distance”, a cynical term for what is still an endurance event for most mortals. It consisted of:

• A 3/4 mile run through wooded trails.
• A 10 mile bike around the park loop.
• A 3.2 mile run through the woods and around the meadow.

So how did I do? I think I did pretty well. Of 133 entrants, and 89 finishers, I came in 35th overall (results here). I did equally well in both the run and bike phases, and felt pretty good at the end, too. Which means I am definitely doing this again.

The event was inspiring, to say the least. Adam and I felt like we were surrounded by superhuman professional athletes, and the carbon-fiber stealth-fighter looking machines most of them had put ours to shame: me on an 18-year-old steel frame, Adam on a single-speed (!). Many of the competitors were tricked out in team gear, ripped with muscles, sleekened hairless, and sharing war stories about the other triathlons they’d triumphed in lately. Nonetheless, the whole event was really low key, very DiY and ad hoc, and completely devoid of the kind of aggression I felt all around me in when I was racing in a cycling pack. In a triathlon/duathlon, drafting behind other cyclists is illegal, which means it’s just you and the wind — which is how I like to roll.

The race was brisk, of course, but the vibe was pure fun. A great first-time experience. The best part was on the last run, where the race leaders would pass the rest of us on their return trip to the finish line. Most of the top five finishers took the time to cheer on the rest of us as they ran by us: “great job, way to go, great pace!”. That meant the world to me.

I want to commend the information design by the kids who chalked the directional arrows on the roads. The running route was fairly complex, the maps they prepared were god-awful messes, and the race director could barely describe it without just confusing people even further. But some young kids were sent on a mission to put directional arrows on the paths using chalk, and they did a great job. The route doubled-back on itself, and there were two runs on the same trail, so the signage needed to indicate which way to turn on the way out and which way to turn on the way back. Here’s what they came up with. Not bad, huh?

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I am speaking at two upcoming events sponsored by several New York-based information architecture organizations. When my wife asked who the organizers were, I said “It’s the IA Union!” At both events, I will be delivering a version of my informative, fast paced, and fun IA Summit presentation, “Interaction Design Style“.

July 19: IA Summit Redux

This Thursday, July 19, the NYC IA Meetup is throwing an “IA Summit Redux”, featuring six New York-area presenters from the 2007 IA Summit, sharing abridged versions of their Summit presentations. Avenue A|Razorfish is hosting at their midtown offices at 1440 Broadway (map).

The evening’s presenters will include:

• Chris Fahey (me!)
• Garrick Schmitt
• Joe Lamantia
• Lou Rosenfeld
• Michele Tepper
• Victor Lombardi

Doors open at 6:00, speakers begin at 6:30, wrapping up around 9:30. Refreshments will be served throughout. Seating is limited, and the event may well be fully booked up by now, but if you would like to attend, the RSVP address is rsvp-UX@avenuea-razorfish.com. Make sure to send your name, company name, and job title (so when you arrive you don’t have to indignantly ask “Do you know who I am?!?”).

This event is sponsored by the IA Institute, the NYC IA Meetup, and by Avenue A|Razorfish.

July 26: NYC IxDA

This is a solo show for me, a full hour of speaking and a dazzling display of all 250+ slides. It’s the extended epic story of Style and Interaction Design. All the essential information is here, more details coming soon…

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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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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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