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WSJ: In Chinese Buildings, a Copycat Craze

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February 8, 2013, 7:14 p.m. ET

In Chinese Buildings, a Copycat Craze

Duplicating Versailles, the Chrysler Building or the White House is seen as a mark of skill and superiority

By BIANCA BOSKER

In Beijing, the new Wangjing SOHO complex, a trio of curvy office buildings designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, is slowly rising in the smog-filled skyline. Meanwhile, 1,000 miles south, a set of two buildings is going up—and the design looks just like Ms. Hadid's, say the backers of the Beijing complex.

The other development company has denied copying the design and coined a slogan about its project. "Never meant to copy," reads a pitch posted on the firm's official microblog. "Only want to surpass."

Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

BONJOUR CHINA | An Eiffel Tower looms over a road in Hebei province.

That motto could be the mantra for China's massive movement in architectural mimicry. To show they are making it big, the Chinese have turned to faking it big.

In recent years, some of the nation's real-estate developers and even government officials have been churning out detailed counterfeits of the West's greatest architectural hits, from Unesco World Heritage sites to Le Corbusier gems to Manhattan skyscrapers.

Paris, Orange County, Interlaken, Amsterdam—all have their doubles in China. In Hangzhou, gondolas glide through the man-made canals of Venice Water Town, which boasts its own Piazza San Marco and Doge's Palace.

Last year, developers in Huizhou unveiled a brick-for-brick replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt, complete with its cobblestone streets, historic church and even sidewalk cafes. Hallstatt residents were surprised to learn that Chinese planners had studied the village's buildings on location in Austria, according to news reports.

The award for the most copied building goes to the White House, says Yung Ho Chang, a Chinese architect and the former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's architecture department. The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

This "duplitecture" is not meant to flatter the West, nor is it a form of "self-colonization." The copies are built as monuments to China's technological prowess, affluence and power. The Chinese have seized on the icons of Western architecture as potent symbols for their own ascension to—and aspiration for—global supremacy.

It is an impulse with deep roots in Chinese architectural tradition, dating back thousands of years. In pre-modern China, emperors demonstrated their dominance by re-creating rival territories within their own: Sprawling imperial parks, which featured flora and fauna assembled from remote lands, buttressed rulers' authority by showing their ability to both create and possess an elaborate facsimile of the known universe.

China's emperors also used copycat buildings to convey their mastery—actual or anticipated—over their adversaries. In the third century B.C., the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, commemorated his conquest of six rival kingdoms by ordering that exact replicas of their palaces be built in his capital. Today, the ersatz Eiffel Towers and Chrysler Buildings symbolize China's power to control the world by transplanting Europe and the U.S. into its domain.

Traditional Chinese attitudes toward replication also help to explain the trend. While Americans view imitation with disdain, the Chinese have traditionally taken a more permissive and nuanced view of it. Copying can be valued as a mark of skill and superiority. The director of China's National Copyright Administration has even praised copies as a sign of "cultural creativity."

China's expanding economy, along with the financial woes of the European Union and the U.S., could usher in a new era in which the Forbidden City replaces the White House as the coveted status symbol. Buildings modeled after traditional Chinese architecture are already appearing in some parts of the country, next to Versailles look-alikes.

Chinese people "realize now, 'We have money. We have a lot of money. We're even richer than our Western rivals,'" said Zhou Rong, a professor of architecture at Beijing's Tsinghua University—and this has led to new interest in Chinese styles. Rather than grousing about being copied, the West might instead worry about the day China stops looking to us for models.

—Ms. Bosker is the author of "Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China," from which this is adapted.

A version of this article appeared February 9, 2013, on page C2 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In Chinese Buildings, a Copycat Craze.

NY Times: Where Apps Become Child's Play

 

July 7, 2012

Where Apps Become Child’s Play

By NICOLE LaPORTE

AN iPad case that doubles as a teething toy? Yes, such a product exists. It’s known as the Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Apptivity Case (also available for iPods and iPhones) and it sells for $35.

It’s well known that children are quick to learn new technology. But 6-month-olds? How did the idea arise for a toy that allows its user to gnaw on its brightly colored handles and drool on its protective screen, while also manipulating apps for counting and singing?

At Fisher-Price, such products result from a process known as spelunking, which in its literal sense means to explore caves. But in the realm of toy making, it refers to the simple act of watching children play.

A similar process is alive and well at other companies, like LeapFrog, maker of the LeapPad, a touchscreen tablet for children as young as 3; and at Hasbro and Crayola, which have partnered with digital media companies to create apps for very young children.

At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps, different types of products,” said Deborah Weber, senior manager of infant research. Her job, she said, is to “understand the ages and stages of babies — what they can and can’t do, what their interests are, and the growing needs of families today.”

Spelunking has been around since the Fisher-Price PlayLab was formed in 1961, the same year that bricks made by a Danish company called Lego made their American debut. In its earlier days, the lab was filled with toys like a googly-eyed rotary phone known as the Chatter Phone, and the Corn Popper, a kind of mini-lottery machine on wheels.

Today, the lab, located at the Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., looks more like an Apple store. But instead of adults and teenagers, there are infants staring into computer screens, and parents and toddlers are passing iPads back and forth.

The setting is similar at LeapFrog’s Kid Lab in Emeryville, Calif., where digital devices and apps are tested by children who both have and haven’t had regular exposure to computers.

“Two years ago, it was harder to find kids who had used an iPhone or an iPad at home,” said Alissa McLean, a senior researcher in LeapFrog’s user experience group, which examines how children interact with online content and computers. “Now it’s not hard at all.”

“We used to talk about kids being the first generation of digital natives,” said Jason Root, chief content officer at the Ruckus Media Group, which has partnered with companies like Hasbro to create storybook apps. “Now we have a generation of newborns who are going to be weaned on touch devices.” 

At Fisher-Price, Ms. Weber said, “We see 6-month-olds batting at the screen, 9-month-olds swiping, and 12-month-olds pointing out objects to see.” Observations like these are passed along to toy producers and industrial designers, resulting in products like the iPad case and the Laugh & Learn Apptivity Monkey, which comes out in August.

The Apptivity Monkey would pass for just another stuffed animal if it didn’t have a thick, plastic iPhone case attached to its belly; the front of the case is made of see-through plastic. An iPhone can be placed inside, and a child can play apps on it, either by pressing on the iPhone directly or on the monkey’s paws, which interact with an array of alphabet and singing apps.

The monkey is big enough and soft enough so that the iPhone can sustain even major tumbles, Fisher-Price asserts. But the iPhone is not included. So doesn’t that make for a pretty expensive toy?

Maybe not. When Kathleen Kremer, another spelunker who is the company’s senior manager of user experience, was observing how preschool-aged children played with their parents’ iPhones and iPods, she stumbled on the “pass-back factor.”

“People are now on their second-generation iPad or second iPhone, so what they typically do with the old one is give it to their child, so the kids actually have ownership of these devices,” she said. She has also studied diaries and scrapbooks that parents were asked to keep, documenting their children’s behavior.

Because of the pass-back factor, the new Kid Tough Apptivity Case — similar to the Laugh & Learn product, but designed for older children — is made to fit all generations of the gadgets, Ms. Kremer said.  

Innovations like this are fueling the digital toy trend, according to Lisa Harnisch, senior vice president and general merchandising manager at Toys “R” Us. Last year, she said, the trend in children’s apps and app-related products “really started to heighten and explode.” Indeed, in the last year, there have been nearly three million downloads of Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn apps. By year-end, LeapFrog expects to have 325 apps at its online App Center, double the number at the end of 2011.

Not everyone sees this as a justification to ply infants with computers. “Infants learn best from real people and playing with real toys,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the author of “Baby 411.” “They learn how to communicate, how to engage with others and how to problem-solve using their five senses. While technology can offer a virtual way to learn some of these skills, they will never replace the value of interacting with humans or being able to manipulate and play with toys in one’s hands.”

In any case, it might be too late to stop an 18-month-old from discovering the joys of Netflix — selecting a movie or TV show to watch, or rewinding and replaying a favorite scene — something that Ms. Kremer has come across in her field research.

“It was pretty remarkable that she could master all those different steps,” she said of the tech-savvy toddler. “The motivation was there.”

E-mail: [email protected].

 

NY Times: Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

 

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September 5, 2011

Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

By GUY GUGLIOTTA

LOS ANGELES — There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space.

Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was.

At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston.

Then the music stopped and the lights came on. It turned out that the Immersive Audio Lab at U.S.C.’s Viterbi School of Engineering is dark, a bit dingy, and only 30 feet wide, 45 feet long and 14 feet high.

Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the “ground truth” — to replicate the original in every respect. “We remove the room,” he said, “so the ground truth can be delivered.”

Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors.

But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. “It’s about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound,” Dr. Kyriakakis said.

Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. “Psychoacoustics is fundamental,” said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. “You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works — how sound relates to human perception.”

The field’s origins date back more than a century, to the first efforts to quantify the psychological properties of sound. What tones could humans hear, and how loudly or softly did they need to be heard?

Pitch could be measured in hertz and loudness in decibels, but other phenomena were not so easily quantified. Human hearing can discern the movement of sound with a surprising degree of accuracy. It can distinguish timbre, the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. It can remember patterns of speech, to immediately identify a friend in a phone call years after last hearing the voice. And a parent can effortlessly sift the sound of an infant’s cry from the blare of a televised football game.

Finally there were the imponderables, things we do with our hearing simply because we can. “Everyone knows the sound of a bowling ball as it rolls down the alley,” said William M. Hartmann, a Michigan State University physicist and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. “What is it about that sound that we can identify?”

For much of the 20th century, engineers devoted themselves to developing acoustical hardware like amplifiers, speakers and recording systems. After World War II, scientists learned how to use mathematical formulas to “subtract” unwanted noise from sound signals. Then they learned how to make sound signals without any unwanted noise.

Next came stereo. By recording two tracks, engineers could localize sound for the listener. “Simple enough,” said Alan Kraemer, chief technological officer for SRS Labs, an audio company in Santa Ana, Calif. “If something’s louder on one side, you’ll hear it on that side.”

But stereo had no real psychoacoustics. It created an artificial sense of space with a second track, but did so by dealing with only one variable — loudness — and enhanced human perception simply by suggesting that listeners separate their speakers. 

The digital age changed all this, allowing engineers to manipulate sound in ways that had never been tried before. They could create sounds that had never existed, eliminate sounds they did not want and use constant changes in filter combinations to deliver sound to listeners with a fidelity that had never before been possible. 

Digital technology has led to innovations that have been critical in improving sound reproduction, in tailoring hearing aids for individual patients and in treating hearing impairment and developing cochlear implants — tiny electronic devices linking sound directly to the auditory nerve of a deaf person.

“Hearing aids are not the same as glasses,” said Dr. Oxenham, at the University of Minnesota. “It’s never been just about hearing sound; it’s also about understanding sound and separating it from background noise. We can help with microprocessors. Without them it would have been impossible.”

Despite recent advances, however, psychoacoustics has shown engineers that they still have a long way to go. No machine can yet duplicate the ability of the human ear to understand a conversation in a crowded restaurant. People with cochlear implants have “a terrible time” with background noise, Dr. Oxenham said. They also have trouble with pitch perception and distinguishing the sounds of different instruments. “Hearing loops,” which are transmitters that broadcast sound signals directly to a receiver in a hearing aid, are catching on in concert halls, places of worship and even subway booths.

“The technology is really being strained,” said Dr. Hartmann, at Michigan State. Because of psychoacoustics, “we know so much more, and therefore we can do so much more,” but “there is so much more to do.”

One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said.

It was this anomaly, in part, that led Dr. Kyriakakis in the 1990s to venture into psychoacoustics. He, his U.S.C. film school associate Tomlinson Holman, and their students were trying to improve the listening qualities of a room by measuring sound with strategically placed microphones.

“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

The trick was to establish a baseline for what sounded best, and there was no guidebook. So Dr. Kyriakakis and his students went to Boston Symphony Hall in 1998 to conduct a series of sound tests and to record the “Messiah.”

At that time, acousticians had long known that a shoebox-shaped concert hall like Boston’s offered the best sound, but what was important for Dr. Kyriakakis was to know why the human ear and the human brain that processed the signal felt that way.

Back in Los Angeles, his team began a series of simple experiments. Listeners were invited into the labs to hear the Boston tests and music and to rate the sound, using a scale of 1 to 5. Researchers shifted the sound to different combinations of speakers around the room.

Statistics showed that speakers directly ahead, combined with speakers 55 degrees to either side of the listener, provided the most attractive soundstage. The “wide” speakers mimicked the reflection from the side walls of the concert hall by causing the sound to arrive at the listener’s ears milliseconds after the sound from the front. Sound from other angles did not have as great an effect.

Next, the team asked listeners what combination of speakers gave the best impression of “depth of stage.” Here again, statistics showed a clear preference for speakers in front of listeners and high above them. This sound — also slightly delayed — gave the ear and the human brain a sense of where the different instruments were on a bandstand.

With these results as his template, Dr. Kyriakakis founded Audyssey. His idea was to make dens and living rooms sound like concert halls and movie theaters. Microprocessors made it possible to filter sound to minimize distortion and add the delays that make the music sound nearly perfect to the human ear from anywhere in the room.

Audyssey’s first product, MultEQ, started with a five-speaker configuration, but for a full concert-hall-like effect, it now offers what Dr. Kyriakakis calls an “11.2” system: three speakers in front of the listener; two elevated speakers; two wides; two speakers slightly behind the listener, and two speakers directly in back. Audio-video receivers with Audyssey’s latest MultEQ technology cost $1,000 to $2,000.

For the unsophisticated listener, top-of-the-line sound equipment by itself seems good enough, but it is not like the psychoacoustically adjusted version. A video of the Eagles singing “Hotel California” sounded nice to a visitor until Audyssey’s hardware director, Andrew Turner, pointed out that there was no bass when the volume was low. He flicked a switch and the bass returned, enriching the music with startling effect.

“At the concert itself, where there was a big room with a lot of high-volume sound, you could hear the low tones,” he said. “But here in the studio, your brain is filtering them out as irrelevant at low volume. So you have to restore them.

“It’s pure psychoacoustics.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 7, 2011

A picture in some editions on Tuesday with an article about advances in psychoacoustics was published in error. It showed the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan — not at Symphony Hall in Boston, which is regarded by many critics as an acoustically perfect space.

FT: The pasta equation

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7134bd64-c874-11e0-833c-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXfcSHlu

August 19, 2011 10:07 pm

The pasta equation

By George L. Legendre. Photographs by Stefano Graziani

In a new book, an architect uses mathematics to give a surreal vision of the varied world of pasta

Left: Galletti, use in tomato sauces. Right: Fusilli Lunghi Bucati, eat with meat ragu

The architect Marco Guarnieri and I share a professional address in a quiet lane off Bermondsey Street in south London. On most evenings we mill about the office’s communal table and exchange our impressions of the day’s crop of problems: delayed professional fees, contractual instructions and interim certificates. But first we sit ­­down and eat pasta.

Being Italian, Marco knows all about pasta. It takes him around eight minutes to prepare the simplest of pastasciuttas – a dish of spaghetti all’aglio, olio e peperoncino. Sadly, it takes us no more than a few minutes to finish our portions.

During one of these evenings, the concept for a book about pasta emerged. Its premise is simple: to work out the mathematical formulas of pasta and use the results to produce a culinary resource that is both beautiful and useful. My firm uses mathematics to model anything from pedestrian bridges to playground slides, so why not food too?

There is a huge canon of pasta, and often names or forms overlap, or become confused. Many regions in Italy produce lesser-known varieties of pasta, or spawn minor variations of established ones, then give them local names. This all makes classification a difficult task. Inspired by the science of phylogeny (the study of relatedness among groups of natural forms), we pared down the startling variety of pasta to 92 unique types, divided according to their morphological features, with each pasta illustrated by its parametric equations, a 3D diagram and a specially commissioned photograph by Stefano Graziani.

Left: Funghini, good in minestrone. Right: Fagottini, fill with ricotta or fruit

In the examples above, you can see the complexity of galletti, combining a bent longitudinal profile, a hollow cross section, striated surface and smooth edges; fusilli lunghi bucati, a distinctive member of the fusilli clan with a spring-like profile; funghini, with their dainty crenellated edges; and fagottini, pinched into shape from a circle of durum-wheat dough.

Combined, these representations capture the essence of each pasta, and give a concise, elegant and unique expression of a familiar thing. It is a surreal presentation of a wildly popular food, perhaps sometimes overlooked for its aesthetic depth and variety.

And does this scientific approach result in tastier pasta? Absolutely. The topological properties of each shape impacts how it absorbs heat and water, cooks, soaks in liquids, and retains a sauce – a shape may even be designed for a given sauce.

Our next project, to make a pasta derived from periodic equations, pasta ioli, is still a work in progress. But the pasta family, in all its shapes and sizes, is bound to keep growing.

‘Pasta by Design’ by George L. Legendre is published this month by Thames & Hudson, £16.95

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Fast Company: How to Build an Unforgettable, "Smashable" Brand Identity (Hint: It's not the Logo)

April 11, 2011

How to Build an Unforgettable, "Smashable" Brand Identity (Hint: It's Not the Logo)

By Martin Lindstrom

No, you don't have to tell me, because I know what you're about to say: your new product is brilliant. It's a game-changer. Problem is, you need a killer logo. Well, today, designers, inventors, and investors are facing a dilemma similar to the one that writers and artists have struggled with for decades: there's nothing left. Or here's another problem: if you do manage to create a jaw-droppingly clever or memorable image, rather than engendering widespread consumer recall of your brand, your Easter-blue palette risks looking uneasily similar to the Tiffany box, and your little black bull is a transparent rip-off of the one that dangles from the neck of Sangre de Toro red wine.

As far as the logo is concerned, to paraphrase Bill Maher, it's time for New Rules. Today, what counts far more than a puma, a monkey, or a snarling aardvark is the cross-sensory experience your brand offers. I'm talking not only the emotion, beliefs, and desires your brand evokes, but its feel, touch, sound, smell and personality, of which the logo is just one small part. Whether it's a soda can, a car, a doll, a fragrance, a smartphone, or laptop, your brand needs to be smashable, e.g., instantly identifiable via its shape, design, copy, contours, and even navigation. Aside from adolescents, who are always on the lookout for the coolest logos to set them apart from, or help them gain traction with, their peers, today for most consumers the logo comes in near-to-last place to other considerations.

Why? Well, various reasons. The first is, when we see a logo, our defenses go up and stay up. We fear we're being played, or manipulated. Not least, I might also add that subconsciously, a logo reminds us of our complicity with big brands, of our own shot-with-guilt overconsumption that helped drive the world's recent financial downfall.

The term "smashable" dates back to 1915, when the Coca-Cola company asked a designer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to design a bottle that consumers could still recognize as a Coke bottle, even if someone flung it against a brick wall and it shattered into a hundred pieces. Coke is a smashable brand. So are Guinness, Ferrari, Harley-Davidson and, of course, Apple (take a sledgehammer to an iPad and you'll know what I mean). Which suggests that the logo as we once knew and loved it--from Citibank's Scowling Umbrella (I don't know what else to call it), to Nike's Swoosh, to Starbucks's Whoever-The-Heck-She-Is--needs to be re-considered if it's going to play any role in future brand-building.

Let's do a little experiment: Erase the logo from every single one of your brand identifiers--products, stationary, signage. Close your eyes, now reopen them. Is there anything left? Would consumers still recognize those items as belonging to your brand? Look at your packaging, your copy, your colors, your design, your font, your spacing. Do any of them convey your brand's identity? Or without a logo are you adrift and bailing water?

Next let's examine your website. Again, by eliminating the logo, you'll embark on a fun (I promise) and instructive exercise that will relieve you of any stubborn logo-fixations that may still be nagging at you. It's one that will force you into acknowledging the value that every single one of your communication elements plays in defining your brand's identity. Okay, still hiding the brand logo, eyeball your copy, your graphics, whether your pages are spare or dense-looking. Do all these things convey what your brand represents? Does your brand have a personality anymore, or is it standing shyly and stiffly against the wall, hoping no one notices it now looks (I hate to tell you) like every other brand out there?

To wrap up, let's have a look at your navigation. By navigation, I'm talking about everything from the iPod's clicking wheel, to the ritualized twist and snap you hear when you open your favorite soft drink, to Amazon's simple, one-click button you press to buy books or download them onto your Kindle. In my experience, once consumers have used Amazon a few times, they get hooked on the site's simplicity and navigational ease (During a recent round of focus groups, by a long shot Amazon was at the very top of consumers' favorite brands.). Sure, the site stocks every book (and everything else) under the sun, it over-delivers, it undersells iTunes, its data-mining techniques are on the positive side of creepy, but I'm pretty sure that most consumers' loyalty to the company derives in large part from Amazon's incredible and intuitive ease of navigation.

We're creatures of habit. Once we grow accustomed to a certain way of shopping, running, eating, drinking, shaving, brushing our teeth, showering, dressing, or any of 100 other things, our methodology becomes our own. Like the familiar, well-worn route we take to our favorite beach or restaurant, habit becomes personal, automatic, and unconscious. In the same way, navigational rituals are a vital, whispered element of any brand's attraction. Having said this, human beings are supremely adaptable. Basically, we can get used to anything. If you've ever switched cell phones, or made the change from an Apple to a PC, yes, at first it felt obnoxious and foreign and even wrong. But once we became accustomed to that new environment--be it a trackball or a new, melodic suite of start-up and shut-down sounds--nothing else would do the trick.

So reserve a brick wall, cock your arm, aim, and begin smashing your brand. While you're at it, smash your website, to ensure your brand remains consistent via your web pages' navigation, style, ease, and/or special features. Now ask yourself: does my brand "own" this cross-sensory experience, from web to wireless to PDA, right down to the bricks-and-mortar product I'm gripping in my right hand? If not, your carefully crafted logo might as well not even exist.

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine’s “World's 100 Most Influential People” and author of Buyology—Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best–seller. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best sellers translated into 30 languages. More at martinlindstrom.com [1].

Read more by Martin Lindstrom: The 10 Most Addictive Sounds in the World [2]

Top image via Lawrence Whittemore [3]; small photo via thewhitestdogalive [4]

Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/1745884/how-to-build-an-unforgettable-smashable-brand-identity-hint-its-not-the-logo

NY Times: Stuffed Piled in the Aisle? It's There to Get You to Spend More

 

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April 7, 2011

Stuff Piled in the Aisle? It’s There to Get You to Spend More

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Americans like stuff.

That’s a given. But it turns out that lots and lots of stuff piled onto shelves or stacked in the middle of store aisles can coax a shopper to buy more.

After the recessionary years of shedding inventory and clearing store lanes for a cleaner, appealing look, retailers are reversing course and redesigning their spaces to add clutter.

Dollar General is raising the height of its standard shelves to more than six feet; J. C. Penney is turning its empty walls into jewelry and accessory displays; Old Navy is adding lanes lined with items like water bottles, candy and lunchboxes; and Best Buy is testing wheeling in bigger items, like Segways and bicycles, to suck up the space created by thinner TVs and smaller speakers.

Wal-Mart Stores may provide the marquee example of a failed makeover. Two years ago, it remodeled, trying to hang on to Target shoppers who traded down to Wal-Mart during the recession.

Out went the pallets of items like juice boxes or sweatshirts stacked in the centers of aisles. Merchandise on “end caps,” displays at the ends of aisles, slimmed down. Shelves got shorter, and Wal-Mart whittled the number of items it carried by about 9 percent, so as not to overwhelm shoppers. Customer satisfaction scores soared.

Despite those ratings, Wal-Mart has been encountering one of the longest slides in domestic same-store sales in its history. 

“They loved the experience,” William S. Simon, the chief executive of Wal-Mart’s United States division, said at a recent confer-ence. “They just bought less. And that generally is not a good long-term strategy.” 

So after remodeling a large percentage of its stores, Wal-Mart is now re-remodeling them, adding back inventory, plopping stacks of stuff into aisles and stacking shelves with a dizzying array of merchandise. 

As it turns out, the messier and more confusing a store looks, the better the deals it projects. 

“Historically, the more a store is packed, the more people think of it as value — just as when you walk into a store and there are fewer things on the floor, you tend to think they’re expensive,” said Paco Underhill, founder and chief executive of Envirosell, who studies shopper behavior. 

Retailers are crowding shelves for a couple of strategic reasons.

After years of expansion, many retailers are halting building plans and closing stores as sales and traffic shift to the Web. That means the main way to increase revenue is by selling more stuff at the existing stores. 

“All the retailers are stuck with less traffic going to the stores, and leases that are 15 to 20 years long,” said Fiona Dias, executive vice president of strategy and marketing at GSI Commerce, which provides e-commerce technology for retailers like Toys “R” Us. “What do you do with all the extra space that you’re paying for?” 

Also, same-store sales are getting stronger, so retailers are adding back merchandise. At Wal-Mart, for instance, inventory at the end of January was 11 percent higher than a year earlier. 

Best Buy, which had big stores to begin with, recently was faced with “bowling alleys’ worth of space because the product has all shrunk or gone digital,” Ms. Dias said, noting the switchover to music sold on MP3s rather than racks and racks of CDs.  

J. C. Penney is also trying to maximize its existing spaces. 

Old Navy has added “fast lanes” where shoppers can pick up Nantucket Nectars, toys and other impulse items. About 100 stores now have the lanes, and about 200 more are being added this year. It is meant to maximize sales per square foot around the checkout area, a spokeswoman, Louise Callagy, said in an e-mail, especially important as many Old Navys have been or will be remodeled into smaller spaces.

“One of the ways to improve the productivity is to get more things out on the floor and to show the product in a better way,” said Jan Hodges, senior vice president and general merchandise manager of women’s accessories at J. C. Penney. The retailer has turned empty back walls into accessory displays, added coordinating jewelry and handbags to tables of clothes, and later this year will switch from flat tables to ones with pegs that can carry loads of hanging socks or underwear. 

At Dollar General, the tops of the shelves have been raised to a standard 78 inches. Some were as short as 62 inches.

“Think of the shelf heights as air rights, if you will — it’s easier to raise the shelf height than expand the footprint” of the store, said a spokeswoman, Mary Winn Gordon.  

Raising the shelf height, she said, raised sales per square foot to about $201 in 2010 from $165 in 2007. 

Dollar General is now adding what Ms. Gordon called “speed bumps,” merchandise in the aisles or at the entrance, or stacks of related items — like piles of bananas alongside boxes of vanilla wafers.  

“We think of them more like virtual speed bumps — they don’t really impede or slow down the shopping in a physical way, but highlight in a consumer-friendly way items that we know our customers are interested in, or items that go together,” she said. “You’ve got just a few seconds to capture your customers’ attention when they come into the store.” 

Wal-Mart is realizing the same thing. It has dismissed or reassigned the top executives who came up with the cleaner-stores plan, and a new group of executives is adding items — and a little bit of mess — back to shelves. Still, Wal-Mart says that it is not totally repeating the past and that the stores are easier to maneuver than they were years ago.)

“We just overreacted,” said the chief financial officer, Charles M. Holley Jr., in a February call with reporters. “It didn’t allow us to carry the assortment that our customer wanted.”  

It is not just about what customers want but how they perceive a store.

“Messiness, or pallets in the middle of an aisle, are also a cue for value,” said Ben DiSanti, senior vice president of planning and perspectives for TPN, a retail marketing consultant. “There are a lot of cues that the shopper picks up on in stores.” 

A streamlined, simplified store, he added, “begins to alter that shopper’s perception of, ‘Does Wal-Mart have the best prices?’ ”

 “Whether they know it to be more of a discounter or not, if shoppers walk into a less organized environment, I’d bet their first impression is going to be, ‘O.K., you’re going to find lower prices here,’ ” Mr. DiSanti said. 

Still, not all price-conscious retailers are crazy for clutter. Family Dollar has been taking items out of the middle of aisles, hanging them or stocking them on shelves instead. 

“Most of our customers, regardless of their walk of life, want a pleasant experience,” said Mtu Pugh, vice president of format and space management. 

And Mr. DiSanti suggested that an untidy ambiance could be counterproductive. 

“The clutter doesn’t help the shopping experience,” Mr. DiSanti said. “If I have the choice, I will always choose a cleaner environment.” 

Then again, in that pleasant atmosphere, a shopper might just stick to her list and not get distracted by Easter decorations toppling from a shelf, or the two-for-one cereal special she has to maneuver her cart around. 

“If you have the temptations there, it will lead to additional sales,” Mr. DiSanti said. 

===

An Eye for Retailing

Successful retailers strive to establish familiar spaces for their customers, emphasizing a number of messages through the look and feel of their stores, their merchandise and their employees. Sharon Love, chief executive of TPN, a retail marketing agency, offers an annotated guide to the designs of four chains. Clockwise from top left: Wal-Mart; Uniqlo; Best Buy; and Dollar General. 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/08/business/20110408-clutter.html?ref=business

WSJ: Why Are Fitting Rooms So Awful?

FASHION
APRIL 6, 2011

Why Are Fitting Rooms So Awful?

Stores Try To Beautify Spaces, 'Seduce' Shoppers to Buy More With Better Lighting, Mirrors, Design

By ELIZABETH HOLMES and RAY A. SMITH

You spot a gorgeous dress on a hanger and, hopes high, make your way to the fitting room.

The Dream Dressing Room

Stores are making over these spaces with a variety of features.

View Interactive

It's downhill from there. The door doesn't fully shut, the lighting makes you look ill and the frock looks frumpy in a mirror fit for a fun house.

The retail dressing room can be a total sales killer.

Now stores are making a big push to transform the dingy fitting room into a more flattering space. It's part of an ongoing struggle by retailers to coax consumers to spend more. Having saturated the market with stores over the last decade, they can't expand to increase sales. Instead, companies are trying to squeeze more profits out of their current fleet.

Retailers are taking steps to battle a sales killer: the dressing room. As Elizabeth Holmes explains, by fixing up the rooms, stores can increase the odds customers will buy clothing.

Customers who try on clothes in fitting rooms have a conversion rate—meaning they ultimately buy something they tried on—of 67%, according to retail consultant Envision Retail Ltd., of Surrey, England, based on observations of more than 8,000 shoppers. Customers who don't use the fitting rooms have only a 10% conversion rate. Shoppers who use the fitting rooms spend a third of their in-store time there.

Aesthetically, the dressing-room makeovers are an attempt to go from bland and barren to comfortable and inviting, as if the shopper is trying on clothing in her own home. Chandeliers are cropping up in luxurious anterooms, where racks of camisoles hang waiting to smooth the unexpected bulge. Inside the fitting rooms, wallpaper and back-lit mirrors aim to flatter, not frighten.

Before

To revamp its fitting rooms, Ann Taylor changed a bland space, above, into a lounging area for shoppers with clothing, accessories and seating, below.

After

Stores are focusing their design efforts on dressing rooms in the women's clothing sections. Men tend to buy without trying on in the store, says Paco Underhill, founding president of Envirosell, a retail behavioral research and consultancy firm, who has timed men's visits in stores.

The new design at Ann Taylor, a division of Ann Inc., is intended to replicate a shopper's walk-in closet, says Samantha Dorfman, senior vice president of store development, design and facilities. A huge chandelier and larger-than-life marketing poster fill the entrance to "seduce" customers back to the space, Ms. Dorfman says. It's an about-face from the barren, beige entrance to the fitting rooms in the current layout.

Old Navy, the bargain-priced division from Gap Inc., moved fitting rooms to the center of its new store design. The relocation came after customers referred to the old tucked-away location as the "dungeon," says Tom Wyatt, Old Navy's president. To further cater to its target customer—a time-starved, young mother—the chain added what it calls "quick change" areas. The half-circle spaces are enclosed by a curtain.

Noticing that many women like to go into a fitting room together, Anthropologie, a division of Urban Outfitters Inc., makes sure each room can accommodate more than one person. "They consider it a little bit of a party," says Co-President Wendy B. McDevitt.

This Bloomingdale's concept store has created a dressing 'pod' made of fabric that can be hoisted to the ceiling to make room for events. Bloomingdale's plans to use these in other stores as well.

For women shopping with children or a boyfriend or husband, department store chain Macy's Inc. has been gradually updating its stores to add communal waiting spots with flat-screen TVs tuned to either sports or cartoons and upholstered seating. The theory: Parking a husband, boyfriend or kids in that spot helps a shopper feel "less rushed and stressed," a Macy's spokeswoman said in an email.

Clothing stores typically allot about 20% of the square footage towards fitting rooms and storage and 80% towards displaying the merchandise, says Robin Kramer, head of Kramer Design Group, a retail branding and design firm which works with clients from Talbots to Alexander Wang. She has lobbied stores to dedicate more space to their fitting rooms. "It's the moment where you put the brand on your body and decide if that's what you want," Ms. Kramer says.

Anthropologie wants shoppers to feel 'relaxed and out of the fray,' says Co-President Wendy B. McDevitt.

Some retailers are filling the fitting room area with merchandise. At Ann Taylor, racks and drawers in the lounge area display undergarments such as shapewear and camisoles. Its sister division, Loft, also includes a bar of belts and jewelry. Sales associates manning the fitting room are able to sell more items to a customer without leaving the space.

Lighting is a critical component. "Any woman who goes into a fitting room that has really bad lighting, you look at yourself, you look at your skin and you're completely distracted," says Anthropologie's Ms. McDevitt. "Then you lose the real reason why you were in there."

The new Ann Taylor rooms have six sources of lighting and three types of bulbs, compared to one source and type of lighting in the old design. The mixture of ceramic metal halide, compact fluorescent and low-voltage bulbs is more flattering, Ms. Dorfman says.

Bloomingdale's has installed rear-lit three-way mirrors, which allow customers to see themselves from a variety of angles. There is also a ceiling-mounted light three feet back from the mirror to eliminate shadows on the shopper's face, says Jack Hruska, executive vice president of creative services at Bloomingdale's.

Old Navy added quick-change areas.

Personal touches at Old Navy include labels placed over a trio of bright yellow hooks, helping shoppers organize their haul. "I love it!" and "Not for me," the signs read. Anthropologie writes shoppers' first names on the fitting room door, making it easier for sales staff to refer to them by name. That one-on-one time with a customer helps the store to engage shoppers on an intimate level, Ms. McDevitt says.

Because fitting rooms are highly trafficked areas, stores must make the design durable as well aesthetically pleasing. At Ann Taylor, the gray tones of the custom-designed floral wallpaper mask scuffs. The leather benches were chosen for the material's resistance to stains, like lipstick.

To help shoppers get the attention of salespeople, some fitting rooms at Bloomingdale's, such as those in the intimates departments, have phones. Customers are automatically connected to a sales associate to obtain another size, or ask questions regarding fit. Bloomingdale's says the phones are used frequently.

Victoria's Secret, a lingerie chain from Limited Brands Inc., is testing buttons in a small number of its fitting rooms which, when pushed, alert a sales associate via headset. The system also keeps track of how many people use the fitting rooms, how long they stay and how many times they ask for help, says Marge Laney, president of Houston-based manufacturer Alert Technologies, which installed the Victoria's Secret system.

Write to Elizabeth Holmes at [email protected] and Ray A. Smith at [email protected]

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Telegraph: Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8417723/Robert-Bunsens-birthday-marked-with-Google-Doodle.html

Google

Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

Robert Bunsen, the German scientist who developed the Bunsen burner, has been honoured on what would have been his 200th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Robert Bunsen's Google Doodle 

8:00AM BST 31 Mar 2011

19 Comments

The distinctive laboratory gas burner used by generations of schoolchildren in science lessons takes centre stage in an animated graphic on Google's home page.

It shows a flame changing colour from blue to purple as a multicoloured chemicals bubble in a series of pots and test tubes while steam flies out of a coffee pot.

Born in Gottingen, Germany, on March 31 1811, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was a prominent chemist in his day who discovered the elements caesium and rubidium and developed the Bunsen cell battery.

But he is best remembered for the distinctive gas burner he developed with his laboratory assistant Peter Desaga in 1854 and 1855 to study the colour spectrum of different heated elements.

It was during the construction of new lab facilities at Heidelberg University that he came up with the idea.

Fast Code Design: Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker

Source: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663488/you-are-solving-the-wrong-problem

Wanna Solve Impossible Problems? Find Ways to Fail Quicker

A case study in how an intractable problem -- creating a human-powered airplane -- was solved by reframing the problem.

1959 was a time of change. Disney released their seminal film Sleeping Beauty, Fidel Castro became the prime minister of Cuba, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower made Hawaii an official state. That same year, a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer wondered: Could an airplane fly powered only by the pilot's body?

Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to try to turn his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a human-powered plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers set a half-mile apart. Also, he offered £100,000 for the first person to fly across the English Channel. In modern U.S. dollars, that’s the equivalent of $1.3 million and $2.5 million. The Kremer Prize was the X-Prize of its day.

[Paul MacCready holding a “Speed Ring,” a device he invented for competitive glider flying.]

The problem was the process itself.

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, Paul MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions had failed, and how people were making their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

MacCready’s insight was that everyone who was working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without a base of knowledge based on empirical tests. Triumphantly, they would complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a year's worth of work would smash into the ground.

Even in successful flights, the flight would end with the pilot physically exhausted just a couple hundred meters later. With that single new data point, the team would work for another year to rebuild, re-test, and re-learn. Progress was slow for obvious reasons, but that was to be expected in pursuit of such a difficult vision. That’s just how it was, went the common thinking.

The problem was the problem. MacCready realized that what needed to be solved was not, in fact, human-powered flight. That was a red herring. The problem was the process itself. And a negative side effect was the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding of how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: How can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours, not months? And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, re-test, and re-learn cycle went from months and years to hours and days.

Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again.

Eighteen years had passed since Henry Kremer opened his wallet for his challenge. Nobody could turn that vision into an airplane. Paul MacCready got involved and changed the understanding of the problem to be solved. Half a year later later, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A little more than a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the English Channel. So what's the lesson? When you are solving a difficult problem, re-frame the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

[Thanks to Alan Kay for turning me on to this story.]

Aza Raskin

Aza is the founder of Massive Health, and was until recently Creative Lead for Firefox. Previously, he was Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. He's been responsible for... Read more

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ST: an hour @ the museum (playgrounds in Singapore)

Life!

Home > Life! > Life Events > Story

Jan 7, 2011

an hour @ the museum

 

In this weekly column, we visit museums and art spaces and highlight what you must see if you have only an hour to spare.

School Of Hard Knocks by The Little Drom Store is a photography exhibition of playgrounds of the past by graphic designer Stanley Tan and his wife Antoinette Wong. The couple started taking pictures of these playgrounds about four years ago.

The works capture and celebrate the nostalgia associated with these playgrounds which are vanishing all too soon.

The exhibition is part of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival.

Where: Esplanade Tunnel, 1 Esplanade Drive MRT: City Hall, Esplanade When: Till Jan 23, 5.45am - 12.15am Admission: Free Tel: 6440-8115 Info: www.singaporefringe.com

Deepika Shetty

1 THE PELICAN

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Dover Road

The couple wanted to look at playgrounds which once sparked children's imaginations. Decorated with colourful mosaic tiles and unpadded, these playgrounds saw many children suffering injuries and knocks.

2 THE ELEPHANT

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Pasir Ris Park

Playgrounds today lack a theme but in the past, animal-centric playgrounds helped parents educate their children while the little ones played. Children enjoyed simple activities such as sliding down the elephant's trunk at this playground in Pasir Ris.

3 THE SEAL

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Dakota Crescent

This playground with a seal design featured a colourful suspension bridge that appealed to more adventurous kids, who could slide down or climb up a pole.

4 THE DRAGON

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Toa Payoh

This playground with a dragon motif had a colourful suspension bridge as the dragon's body. Sand helped cushion the fall from the slide.

5 THE WATERMELON (SMALL)

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Tampines

Other themes which inspired playgrounds built in Housing Board estates in the 1970s were fruit such as watermelons, which were used as motifs to promote healthy living as well as to represent tropical fruit familiar to Singaporeans.

6 THE CLOCK

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Bishan

The design of the playgrounds in later years was influenced by nursery rhymes for children such as Hickory Dickory Dock, and became more sophisticated and Westernised.

7 THE TRISHAW

Period of construction - 1970 to 1980

Location - Eunos

The trishaw was a reflection of Singapore's past mode of transport as well as an easily identifiable element of Asian culture.

FT: Listening to customers can be bad business

Listening to customers can be bad business

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: October 17 2010 15:51 | Last updated: October 17 2010 15:51

Last week, for the first time ever, the mob on Twitter and Facebook forced the management of a big company into defeat. This victory of democracy over autocracy was scored over something people feel strongly about: whether three letters belong inside or outside a box.

For the past 20 years, the letters G-A-P have resided in a dark blue square, but two weeks ago the management of the clothing company announced that the letters had escaped and that a smaller blue square would henceforth sit above the P. All hell then broke loose. Thousands of people protested online and, a week later, Gap backed down. The big box was going to stay.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: We need CEOs who speak out - Oct-10

Lucy Kellaway: Posing and flattery beat an MBA - Oct-03

Lucy Kellaway: Jobs was clear, tetchy and right - Sep-26

Lucy Kellaway: Words to describe the glory of Apple - Sep-19

Lucy Kellaway: CEOs cry all the way to the bank - Sep-12

Lucy Kellaway: Personal life invasion - Aug-29

The new Gap logo was not obviously an improvement on the old one. And the sight of management listening to customers and accepting humiliation in order to satisfy them seemed like a good thing.

Yet what happened was not really good at all. It isn’t progress when a company panics and surrenders when faced by an armchair army of protesters. It is feeble.

Compare Gap’s experience to that of PwC, which changed its logo two weeks earlier. The new PwC look is an even uglier version of the new Gap effort, with the letters in italicised lower case, and not one, but a whole jumble, of little boxes scattered over the C. This logo was launched old-style, with corporate fanfare and a statement of customary idiocy from senior management, followed by customary sniping from journalists and from a couple of tweeters (people don’t care as much about accountants as about jeans) and that was that.

“We think our new brand expression visually distinguishes PwC in the same way that the quality and expertise of our people differentiates the experience of working with PwC,” said the firm’s chairman. Which is, of course, absolute, total tosh. Three little letters and some squares cannot say anything about quality or expertise at all.

But then logos are a fluffy subject; I have never heard anyone say anything that wasn’t daft about the thinking behind any change. This is because there never is any thinking, save the idea that it’s time to do something different.

PwC’s management evidently judged that time had come, and knows that any fuss will quickly die down. One day people may even become fond of the nasty new look – to the extent to which it is possible to be fond of the logo of an accountancy firm, that is.

Now back to Gap.

Once Marka Hansen, the company’s president for North America, got wind of the scale of the protest, she wrote a piece on The Huffington Post defending the “contemporary and current” new logo. Her post is a marvel for students of corporate language, with its “living and breathing”, its “alignings”, and its “journeys”. But mainly it is remarkable for its disingenuousness. Ms Hansen was surely feeling shock and awe at how badly her new logo had gone down, but claimed to be delighted that everyone felt so “passionate” about it.

The chummy message that she simultaneously posted on the company’s Facebook page was even more frightening for its attempt to get down with the kidz and talk the right chirpy language through gritted teeth: “Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

But even this didn’t work. The mob continued to show its passion by saying it hated the new design and, last Monday, she gave up.

This time the tone was more like when Princess Diana had died. Ms Hansen spoke of the “outpouring of passion from customers” on the company’s old logo and solemnly announced that the letters would stay in the box after all.

She should not have capitulated. By letting tweeters see the whites of her eyes, she has done other companies a disservice. Now that the mob has got its way on this, it is going to be harder for other companies to insist on their management’s right to manage.

Listening to customers is one thing, when they are voting with their wallets. But company logos should not be designed democratically on Twitter. If managers allow themselves to be frightened of the tweeting mob, they will become emasculated, change will be even harder than it ever was, and the status quo will always prevail.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Put train station on the right track

See also:  ST - Calls to preserve train station

Life!

Home > Life! > Life Arts > Story

Sep 30, 2010

Put train station on the right track

Tanjong Pagar railway station should be a 'living heritage' building that is open to all

By stephanie yap, culture vulture

 

In the land swop deal with Malaysia finalised last week, Singapore is giving its neighbour six land parcels in exchange for those now owned by Malaysian Railway.

The plot that has captured the most public interest is the site on which the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station stands.

Besides the fact that it is prime property, the railway station itself is a remarkable building with great historical significance and emotional resonance, especially for an older generation.

The grand Art Deco-influenced building, built in 1932, harks back to another age where rail was the primary means of travel to faraway lands. Thus, the station was built as a grand civic space that would leave an impact on any visitor leaving or arriving in Singapore.

Its imposing facade is adorned with four white marble figures by Italian sculptor Rudolfo Nolli, representing Agriculture, Industry, Commerce and Transport, then the engines of growth for the Malayan peninsula. Entering the main hall, the visitor is greeted by a high vaulted ceiling and colourful wall murals depicting romanticised scenes of Malayan economic activity such as shipping and rubber-tapping.

No wonder there are calls to turn the station into a museum that would preserve the atmosphere of a bygone age. Also high on the wish list is that the station remain a public space.

As IT firm manager Carolyn Seet, who is spearheading a petition to turn the station into a transportation museum, told The Sunday Times recently: 'The railway was for everyone - rich or poor... So we must keep it accessible and not so posh that only a select few can go there.'

It would be a pity if the station were taken over by a private entity which, although taking the burden of upkeep off the taxpayer, subsequently restricts the public's access to this piece of national heritage. For example, the historic Command House near Bukit Timah, built in the 1930s as a residence for British military leaders, was gazetted as a national monument in November last year. But public access is restricted as it is leased to Swiss bank UBS.

Even if this piece of national heritage is preserved and opened to the public, another question arises: How often will the public bother to actually go and see it?

Even the most enthusiastic Singapore-based museum visitor is unlikely to visit such venues more than a handful of times a year, especially if nothing fresh is offered in terms of exhibits or events.

Without careful programming, there is a danger of a museum becoming a mausoleum: a quiet space of dusty exhibits, the resting place of a past that feels distant and irrelevant to people today.

The challenge, then, is to bring the present to a place which, by definition, is about the remembrance of things past.

One way is to slip the heritage in with a serving of modern glitz. Major Singapore museums such as the National Museum of Singapore and the Asian Civilisations Museum have incorporated elegant F&B offerings into their premises, drawing patrons who might otherwise never consider stepping into a museum.

Arguably, the most heavily frequented heritage buildings in Singapore are the ones that have reinvented themselves as F&B and nightlife destinations, from the upscale restaurants at Chijmes to the downtown hawker centre Lau Pa Sat.

Not everyone is as fond of Lau Pa Sat's current form as I am. A forum letter published in this newspaper in April by prominent senior lawyer Joe Grimberg lamented how the late 19th-century structure has gone to seed: 'This wonderful old cast-iron building is in a miserable state - a clutter of stalls and murky tarpaulins - and not helped by the new elevated road nearby.'

Most of the harried office workers sweating while scarfing down their lunch probably aren't taking the time out to ponder the building's history, or even to admire its graceful arches and lace-like ironwork.

Yet, isn't it wonderful in a sense that Lau Pa Sat - which means 'the old market' - is still serving its purpose as a gathering place for the masses, more than a century after it was first constructed? This continuity is in some ways as precious as historical knowledge; the past does not have to be remembered, because it is still with us and is part of us.

Of course, not every old building should be turned into a food court or nightclub. But the key to getting people to appreciate their heritage is to draw them to it in an organic fashion, rather than by setting it aside as a hallowed space where people feel the need to tread softly.

One of the best examples I've seen of a 'living heritage' building is in New York City. Grand Central Terminal, built in the Beaux-Art style in 1913, was almost gutted in the 1960s to make way for a skyscraper, until a campaign - led by former American first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - saved it, and it remains to this day a vibrant and vital hub at the heart of the city.

Grand Central has several advantages over Tanjong Pagar: It is still serves its original purpose as a railway station. It is also plugged into the city's subway system and serves as an interchange.

The terminal is also a destination in itself. The vast ceiling of its main concourse, depicting a blue-green night sky with golden constellations, is a favourite with tourists and native New Yorkers alike. The building has a shopping arcade, there is a food court in the basement for affordable dining as well as finer fare such as the famed Oyster Bar and swishy cocktail lounge The Campbell Apartment. And the building is home to an annex of the New York Transit Museum.

Some of these ideas could be transplanted to Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. A transportation museum is definitely a good idea. And to make things convenient for visitors, what better way than by incorporating the station into the MRT network, as suggested by Straits Times Forum letter writer Gerald Tay in July? As a bonus, the railway station is in fact already a popular food destination, serving up Malay and Indian favourites to workers from nearby offices as well as gourmands in the know.

Whatever lies in store for the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, I hope that its vast hall will welcome the hubbub of many, rather than the hushed whispers of a few. Even as we preserve the past, let's make sure it also has a place in the future.

[email protected]

 

TED: Seth Godin - This is broken

http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1.html

Why are so many things broken? In a hilarious talk from the 2006 Gel conference, Seth Godin gives a tour of things poorly designed, the 7 reasons why they are that way, and how to fix them.

FT: China boxes clever on mooncakes

China boxes clever on mooncakes

By Mina Hanbury-Tenison

Published: September 16 2010 23:29 | Last updated: September 16 2010 23:29

At a branch of Xing Hua Lou, a famous traditional bakery chain in Shanghai, the evidence of the upcoming Autumn Moon Festival is visible. Thousands of boxes of mooncakes are stacked high inside the store and the staff can barely move.

Outside the store, meanwhile, touts try to entice customers in with laminated pamphlets offering up to 25 per cent off the listed price.

The Autumn Moon Festival – which this year falls on September 22 – is a traditional Chinese holiday. It is feted by the consumption of mooncakes, the roundness of the sweet pastry symbolising the union of family members.

According to the Shanghai Confectionery Industry Association, 21,000 tonnes of mooncakes were sold in the city in 2009 – worth Rmb1.85bn ($275m). Sales for the whole of China were estimated at Rmb11bn according to China Reports Hall, a market research firm based in Xiamen.

“It’s the time of the year for businesses to show gratitude to their business partners, to the government officials and to their own employees,” says Shaun Rein, the managing director of China Market Research (CMR) Group in Shanghai. “It’s a vital way of building relationships.”

However, in recent years the gifting of mooncakes has taken on a new significance in China, where a show of purchasing power and price-indexed gratitude has become more important. “As people get richer, they need more expensive gifts,” says Mr Rein.

Food retailers have cashed in on this opportunity with zeal. At Xing Hua Lou, single mooncakes, which typically cost about Rmb5 each, are repackaged in gift tins. The lowest price for a basic boxed set of eight goes for Rmb78, while for those seeking luxury there is a Rmb780 version filled with abalone fins.

Western retailers such as Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs have also embraced the seasonal retail opportunity. Häagen-Dazs, whose mooncake vouchers are one of the most circulated in China, offers boxed sets that range in price from Rmb268 to Rmb988 – a steep price tag for many Chinese workers.

Kris Kaminsky, the food and beverage manager at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, says the hotel expects to sell about 20,000 of its boxes this year. The value is often not in the mooncakes, he says, but in the presentation. “We’ve created a very nice red box that looks like a jewellery box. It’s a box to be kept after the mooncakes are eaten.”

Mooncakes are also the most re-gifted item in China. “Many people give their mooncakes to someone else,” says Shen Hongfei, a well-known food writer. “Not because people don’t want to eat them but because some receive so many gift boxes that they want to offer them as presents. It’s a sign of respect and gives face.”

Byron Kan, the general manager of the Shanghai Centre, which houses the Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel, has chosen to give Häagen-Dazs gift certificates this year to his corporate clients.

“[Mooncakes] are indeed vital, must-do corporate gifts,” he says. “But when companies started giving more and more extravagant mooncake gifts, to the point that the packaging and the gifts inside cost more than the mooncakes [themselves], the government decided to step in a few years ago and put a limit on the price.”

Now you can no longer buy a mooncake box with a watch as a gift inside or with solid-gold packaging.”

Many vouchers are returned for cash, allowing touts and middlemen to make a healthy profit margin. But as with any paper asset with an expiration date, the window for such buy and sell activity is limited. “The value of these mooncake vouchers go up and down according to how close one gets to the final date,” says Mr Rein of CMR.

Paul Smith, the president of Costa Coffee China, which expects to sell 8,000 boxes from its 70 outlets this year, offers his own solution. “We honour the vouchers for up to one year after the date,” he says.

“So if they don’t get to collect for this year, they can do it next year.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Boing Boing: Seeing Languages Differently

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/27/seeing-languages-dif.html

Seeing Languages Differently

Mike Shaughnessy at 10:13 AM Sunday, Jun 27, 2010

Guestblogger Dr. Michael Shaughnessy is a German professor who specializes in computer assisted language learning and visual representations of culture at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the director of the CAPL project to provide free CC licensed media to language and culture instructors worldwide.

How we see the world impacts our use of language and our use of language impacts how we see the world. Cognitive scientists in the vein of Benjamin Whorf regularly investigate the connections to thought and language use, including how visual perception varies across languages. Since I use (authentic) visual media to assist in foreign language acquisition, my research does have a practical side to the normally impenetrable fields of visual cognition and psycholinguistics. I use photographs at the earliest stages of language learning to train the brain not only in the use of new words, but literally how to "see" in the new language. Seeing a language differently embeds that language into a visual cultural context for the learner and makes for more effective recall later.

Let's look at two aspects of the visual world that provide good examples of how the visual impacts language and vary between languages and cultures: Color & Space.

Color

In order to highlight how color perceptions vary among cultures, I like to use the example of how we linguistically categorize certain colors. Let's take the range of colors in what we call "blue" and "red" in English.

When you look at the following colors, typical native English speaking respondents will describe these two colors as existing with the range of colors we call "blue".

Conversely, the following two colors here represent two distinct color categories in English, namely "red" and "pink"

If one looks at other languages, this same categorization scheme is not evident. For example, the blues above are distinct color categories in Russian. Plain or dark blue (синий, siniy) is a distinct color from light blue (голубой, goluboy). Each of these color categories has its own associated meanings, invoking a specific thought for many Russians. In Moscow, there are separate blue lines on the city metro system which helped me finally learn the difference between синий & голубой . Winawer and other at MIT take a close look at this subject in "Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination." (2007) For the red & pink example, there is a correlating opposite in Chinese. The color distinction is not as prevalent as the colors are in the same category linguistically. Red is 红 (hóng) and pink as 粉红, (fěn hóng) or literally "powder red", a linguistic derivation similar to 'light-blue' in English. Where Russian blues are distinct, so are the Reds in English, but in Chinese, they are linguistically related.

The Winawer study takes this a step further. What does it mean for the function of our brain when we categorize what we see in different ways? They show that Russian concepts of blue affect visual performance, particularly on the language users' ability to discriminate between colors.

They state " ... our results suggest that language-specific distortions in perceptual performance arise as a function of the interaction of lower level perceptual processing and higher level knowledge systems (e.g. language)."

This insight/observation points towards a direct connection between the language one speaks and the functionality of the visual cortex and the brain. In other words, the vocabulary you use and how you categorize the world affects the speed at which you brain can recall certain information through your optic nerves. They also hint that left brain hemisphere tasks may be affected by language and visual perception as this is the hemisphere of the brain where language and logical performance is organized. Interestingly enough, this is switched in infants as visual perception is not yet attached to a language center. Apparently, babies see color purely as what they see is not filtered through the lens of language. I am not sure what it means to see a color "purely", but the Color label wheel from Dolores Labs provides an interesting look at color perceptions within the English language.

Space

In addition to color, spatial perception varies among cultures according to researchers. These differences in how we perceive space (eg. size, distance, depth, and direction, etc) lead to corresponding linguistic differences manifested in the words we use to describe our surroundings in different language. This lens of language here affects how we perceive and feel about our surroundings. One might easily imagine how a phrase like "that is a large house", "it is within walking distance", or "it is located off to the right" would vary in meaning between cultures, but there are more subtle and stark differences in how we perceive space differently. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has several examples of cultural variances. Researcher Steven C. Levinson has interesting insights and states that in "...many cultures (as suggested by at least a third of the small sample) spatial conception is organized in a fundamentally different way than expected on the basis of familiar western languages."

According to Levinson, a linguistic example can be found in the lack of spatial descriptors as in front of, in back, left of, and right of. Some languages instead use absolute terms or "fixed" cardinal direction such as north, south, upstream, downstream that are irrelevant of the direction of the speaker.

Perhaps it is that certain languages are less ego-centric, linguistically speaking, and focus more on cardinal directions. Apparently, the only universal content in regards to spatial perception in language appears to be the direction 'up' since it is a function of the gravity that we all feel, regardless of our cultural or linguistic background.

Geography, culture, and even technology shape how we view space in our world. In addition to variance among cultures, there is constant change within languages. Additionally, it is not solely a function of this 'lens of language'; it is both a function of our language and our experiences. For example, the exposure to mathematics and science has an impact on how we perceive space.

The following figures represent some classic optical illusions to demonstrate examples of how cultures perceive length differently. In the first image, the question is "which center line is longer?

In the second image, the question is whether the blue line is longer than the red.

In both cases, the lines are the same length, we only perceive them to be different lengths; an optical illusion. Interestingly enough, these optical illusions are only perceptible by members of traditional 'western cultures'. Segall, et al. in "The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception " wrote in 1968 that susceptibility to optical illusion is, indeed, a culturally determined factor. Their experiments conclude that the "European and American samples made significantly more illusions-supported responses than did the non-Western samples."

I use these examples of visual differences between cultures to highlight the point that the visual impacts language, and if you use media to teach a language, you need to use authentic media. Clip art and generic stock photography don't take advantage of the benefits of media in learning. Many language learning software developers use inauthentic images, stock photos, or clip art simply because of cost issues. A full description of the design problems in language learning software can be found in my 2003 article: CALL, commercialism and culture: inherent software design conflicts and their results ReCALL, 2003 - Cambridge Univ Press. In the mean time, I will continue to ponder how what I see affects how I think and how I think in a given language affects how I see.

Businessweek: Google's interactive Pac-Man doodle

 

Google's interactive Pac-Man doodle

Posted by: Helen Walters on May 21, 2010

In honor of the 30th anniversary of everyone’s favorite arcade game, Google has outdone itself. The company has not simply embedded a static artistic homage to Pac-Man on the Google.com homepage, but installed the game itself. Yup, the Google logo has been turned into a Googlified version of the Pac-Man game, and is the company’s first interactive home page. Searchers can hit the “insert coin” button or wait ten seconds to get playing and can then apparently work their way through all 256 levels. Once they’ve won (or, you know, failed miserably) the search engine sends them to a search results page for “Pac-Man 30th anniversary”. Curmudgeons, or those not obsessed with 80s arcade game culture, can search as usual. The doodle was the brainchild of senior user experience design, Marcin Wichary, a self-confessed “Pac-Man enthusiast” (y’think?) along with regular doodler Ryan Germick. The game will be live for 48 hours.

NY Times: Putting Customers in Charge of Design

May 14, 2010

Putting Customers in Charge of Design

By AMY WALLACE

THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”

But what about those times when you get a hankering not to wear the same thing that 10,000 other men are wearing? Or when you wish you could have the fabric, collar, pockets and lining you’ve always wanted — not what some fashion buyer has chosen for this season? What if you could design that shirt yourself and hang it in your closet for about the same price as a mass-produced button-down?

“The value proposition of customization at retail prices was a cornerstone of our company from the very start,” Mr. Bi tells me by phone from Shanghai, where Blank Label shirts are sewn to customers’ specifications and delivered anywhere in the world in about four weeks. But Blank Label, his Web start-up based in Boston, offers something else that off-the-rack doesn’t: “the emotional value proposition: how expressive something is.”

“People really like a Blank Label shirt because they can say, ‘I had a part in creating this.’ ”

Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola (MeAndGoji.com), jewelry (gemvara.com), chocolate (CreateMyChocolate.com), handbags (LaudiVidni.com) and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 (FashionPlaytes.com). There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site.

The upside for business owners is obvious: low overhead. At Blank Label, for example, the sew-as-you-go business model eliminates the need to produce shirts of every size and style. There’s no need to rent space to store inventory. There’s no storefront, no office other than a borrowed space at Babson College in Boston, where until recently Mr. Bi was an exchange student from the University of New South Wales — he grew up in Australia.

“We’ve focused on being very bootstrap, very lean,” says Mr. Bi, who says the business has sold about 450 shirts. Recently, it has seen a big bump in traffic, with orders of about 10 shirts a day. He says the company makes money on every shirt.

Once, Mr. Bi wanted to be an investment banker. In the summer of 2008, while pursuing his finance degree, he worked as a junior analyst at a Sydney bank. But the experience left him disenchanted. “Probably a product of my generation — I was too entitled,” he acknowledges. “I felt I’m just one very, very small ant in this massive firm. I’m not feeling very engaged. And entrepreneurships and start-ups became interesting.”

On a trip to Shanghai, where his parents grew up, he got an idea: a service offering custom-tailored suits to college students at a bargain price. He wasn’t thinking about an online business. He thought he’d hire a rep at every college in the Boston area and sell suits one at a time.

Then he met Danny Wong, now a 19-year-old communications major at Bentley University. Mr. Wong had applied to be a rep. Excited about “bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer,” Mr. Wong remembers quizzing Mr. Bi about his marketing strategies, particularly on the Web. They teamed up and, several months later, Blank Label was born.

At first, Mr. Bi and Mr. Wong tried to raise venture capital.

“To be honest, we couldn’t,” Mr. Bi says. “We were two very young guys who had no track record.” So Mr. Bi financed the site with about $10,000 in savings, he says, recruiting a programmer and a Web designer and vowing to make leanness a strength, not a weakness.

One goal was to communicate directly with customers. The Web site commands: “Call us. We like to talk.” Depending on the time of day, Mr. Bi answers the calls himself. When he is awake, he also activates a feature that sends instant messages to customers who have been on the site for more than 90 seconds.

Need help? he asks. For several hours a day, he and his partners chat with customers about what they like and don’t like on the site.

The feedback has led to several site revamps and — I can’t resist — alterations. The company is on its third home page in six months, and the partners say they tweak the site every day.

A FEW weeks ago, before I had decided to write about Blank Label, I sat down and designed a shirt for my 13-year-old son. It was a striped button-down made of “Green With Excitement” — all Blank Label’s fabrics have hyperdescriptive names. I chose the cut, the size, the placket and the collar; I opted for single-button cuffs, no pockets and no epaulets.

For fun, and to test the ordering interface, I added a contrasting inner collar and cuff in a solid fabric called “Masculine Poplin Grey,” and added a monogram of my son’s initials on the cuff. For the inside of the collar, I made up a custom label, “Live Free or Die” — I was reading “Game Change” and had New Hampshire on the brain.

The whole process took 10 minutes. With all the bells and whistles, the shirt cost $72, compared with $45 for Blank Label’s most basic, no-frills model.

The site showed me a mock-up, which looked great. But when I went to check out, the order summary did not list the contrasting inner collar. No matter what I did, the inner collar was green and excited instead of masculine and grey. So I clicked on “Help” and sent a message. Soon, I heard back — from Mr. Bi himself. Notably, this was before he knew he would be in my next column.

On Friday, the shirt arrived. It was just as I’d designed it, just as Mr. Bi assured me it would be. If my son doesn’t like it, Blank Label policy is that I can return it, no questions asked. And here’s the best part: I sort of made it myself.

E-mail: [email protected].

Businessweek: How Google Got Its New Look

Technology May 5, 2010, 12:01PM EST text size: TT

How Google Got Its New Look

The process that led to the redesign of Google's all-important search results page

By Helen Walters

Every day 268 million people use Google (GOOG) to search for something. The query goes in, the company's software delivers back the most relevant links. The interaction is so simple—and the hidden calculation behind the results so complex—that it's no wonder people tend not to notice much about the process. Who bothers to ask the ingredients of a magic formula?

For all of its experiments with maps, books, e-mail, and social networking, Google is still an empire built on search. Ninety-seven percent of the company's $23.7 billion haul in 2009 came from advertising. While Google doesn't break out what each of its individual ad products such as AdWords or AdSense generates, multiple people within the company concede that Google is as dependent on the "Sponsored Links" generated by search queries as an oil nation is on its wells.

Since Google's 1998 debut, the search results page—where a home page query is returned with 10 suggested links on the left and multiple advertiser links on the right—has been through seven subtle redesigns. The most recent, in May 2007, saw the addition of images and video in what was dubbed "universal" search. On May 5, Google unveiled its eighth iteration, which Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience, calls "particularly large and particularly important."

Google has long had advanced search capabilities, but they were difficult to find. The goal of redesign eight was to surface them and integrate them into the main results page. Users now get results with an extra column of tools to drill deeper into information. That means a query can be quickly refined to show only results from shopping sites, say, or just videos on a topic, or the latest news results. Add in a new logo and a splash of colorful icons on the left side of the page that guide users through the new options, and the look is noticeably different.

Given that the shift of a few pixels can affect Google's profits, why would the company ever mess with the most successful product in the history of the Internet? "The Web is always changing, evolving, and innovating," says Mayer. "It's important even for sites that people use every day and are very familiar with, like Google, to update their look."

It's not just the look that's been updated. Microsoft's Bing and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have made a case for the past few years that Google's search, based on ranking the overall relevance of a Web page, is outmoded, and that the future lies in an integration of relevance with real-time search. In December, Google conceded the point and announced it would begin indexing the Web in real time to help users organize the cacophony emanating from social media.

Some in the search industry are skeptical of introducing such complexity to the results pages. "Advanced search almost never works," says Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Norman Nielsen Group and co-author of the book Eyetracking Web Usability. "People don't want to use a search engine. They want to get away from a search engine. That's the reason the advertising works so well—the search engine is one site they want to get away from so they might go to an advertiser." In other words, Google has thrived precisely because it hasn't tried to envelop its users in a full-frills experience.

Still, the competitive landscape is changing. In March, Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. Microsoft has unveiled its own plans for Bing, which currently comes in a distant third in the battle for eyeballs but is making a play in searches along topics such as travel and shopping. Bing recently rolled out a design that adjusts the user interface of search. So if it's clear a user is looking to buy a plane ticket, Bing morphs into a travel engine. "It's a very radical departure from the dominant paradigm of the link-based system on the Web," says Stefan Weitz, director of Bing. "For every query, presenting results back with the same user experience doesn't make sense. You want to book a flight or track a flight, why display a bunch of links? That's illogical."

All the tweaks Google has made complicate its algorithm—and none of them can be allowed to complicate its interface. "They have to try to continue to innovate and evolve the product but stick to keeping things simple," says Andy Miedler, senior technology analyst at St. Louis investment bank Edward Jones. "People have grown to love the simplicity of Google." Every previous redesign has negotiated the demands of simplicity and complexity while improving Google's bottom line.

Google allowed Bloomberg Businessweek access to the core design team of 16 staffers in March, as the company was fixing bugs and gearing up to roll out the redesign—a process marked by collaboration between people who create wild illustrations with dry-erase markers and mathematical types who write in precise code. The atmosphere was loose, though the pressure of the job—engage the new decentralized, socialized Web while still driving users to the advertisers paying the bills—generated its share of stress. "There's a lot of weight associated with the project," says product manager Nundu Janakiram, the point person between engineering, design, and the five other departments involved in the project. "Everyone feels invested in the search engine; it ties together the company. We have to get this right."

Every Google page must work seamlessly on countless different computer makes, connection speeds, browsers, and screen sizes. It also must be optimized to keep people searching and clicking as fast as possible. Just thinking about the technical requirements can drive designers mad. So when the team assigned to Search Results V8 first gathered in the summer of 2009 in a small room at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, they opted not to think about requirements at all.

Janakiram, a 24-year-old Stanford grad, Web designer Jon Wiley, a 34-year-old ex-improv artist, and two visual designers mocked up hundreds of different results pages that turned everything users know about Google inside out. "Anything we could move around, we moved around," says Janakiram. Navigation tools were switched from the left to the right side of the screen. Colors changed from Google's muted blue to variations with Crayola-like vibrancy. Link styles got tweaked and modules were inverted. One proposal crammed every pixel on the page with information. Another added display advertising.

The wild-ideas phase was a good mind-clearing exercise—and mostly just that. When it came time for the designers and engineers to move into a larger space together and get serious about the new look, the exigencies of reworking one of the world's most profitable Web pages couldn't be held off. "We tend to focus on an evolutionary model where you can bring users along with you vs. dropping them into some completely radical experience," says Wiley, who once ran the Web operation for Texas Governor Rick Perry and who joined Google in November 2006. The engineers try to view themselves as enablers rather than wet blankets. "Sometimes a designer will tell you what they want, and you'll tell them you can give them 90 percent of that with a quarter of the work," says Nate Gaylinn, the technical lead on the project. "If it's really worth it to have the right experience, then you have to put in the extra work. But if it's a minor detail that you can argue either way, we'll take the easier route."

Most of those details are hashed out at a daily "stand-up" meeting of 10 people or so, held at 4:07 p.m. (Google co-founder Sergey Brin once estimated that it took seven minutes to walk across the Google campus; it's now company tradition that meetings end on the hour and new ones start seven minutes later.) Everyone working on the project gathers standing up, to make sure no one gets too comfortable and no time is wasted during the rapid-fire update. Janakiram, balancing a keyboard on the back of his chair, takes notes throughout. "The whole concept of the stand-up is to talk through what everyone's doing," says Gaylinn. "So if someone's working on what you're working on, you can discover and collaborate, not duplicate." Every proposed feature is put through a user interface review conducted by members of the larger search team, who work nearby and police proposed changes to make sure they won't have an unfavorable impact on the search-engine infrastructure. "They're making sure we don't screw up," says Gaylinn.

By October 2009 the team had its first functional prototype ready for "dogfooding"—in which all of the company's 20,000 employees can opt to test a new product. The internal focus group members can log bugs or simply comment on the design. Google won't say how many staffers took part, nor will it release the text of any comments. Janakiram will reveal that at its peak the team received a piece of feedback every 10 seconds and that not all of the responses were helpful. Even Google employees, he says, will send a message to let designers know they think their work is terrible.

One immediate focus of the feedback was the search button: The designers had turned it blue. "We got a lot of people telling us they found the button distracting, or they usually hit enter to search, or their gaze was going to the box, not the results," says Janakiram.

In addition to dogfooding, Google researchers ran 19 test subjects through hour-long eyetracking sessions to monitor responses to various aspects of the new design. Eyetracking has come a long way since the early 20th century, when objects were glued to a test subject's eyeballs. Now multiple cameras are built into computer screens, and the technique provides detailed analysis of where someone browsing a Web page is actually looking. Users often read Web pages as two lines across the top followed by a vertical stripe down the left side of the screen, in what's known as the "F-pattern."

During eyetracking, the engineers and designers sat in an adjoining room and gawked through a two-way mirror while users tried out various incarnations of the new search results page. Each participant was given prescribed tasks to search for so that the Google team could see the page in action. In a test staged during Bloomberg Businessweek's visit, a user was told to imagine his niece was writing a report about Michael Jackson, and he was tasked with helping her find specific information. When users got distracted—as they were by the same blue search button the dogfooders objected to—or failed to grasp how they were supposed to interact with the page, it meant it was time to scrap an idea. In other instances eyetracking data helped designers decide between different colors and type sizes.

While the engineers and designers pored over eyetracking results, Google statisticians conducted months-long experiments with hundreds of thousands of live users. (One advantage of having 268 million users a day is that you can roll out new products to a fraction of them and still have the benefits of a large sample size.) Google wants more searches and more clicks on its Sponsored Links, and anything that slows the process or inhibits clicking can have disastrous effects on profits.

Toward the end of the redesign process the statisticians focused on the slightly expanded gap between the Google search box and the first result. "No human being will notice they spend on average 10 milliseconds longer to click on a search result," says software engineer Patrick Riley. "But if all users take 10 extra milliseconds, we need to be concerned." This analysis was fed back to the designers, who adjusted accordingly. "We take the quantitative and qualitative feedback together with our own intuitions about how the search results pages should be working, and we iterate on the design," says Janakiram.

The focus on metrics is a deeply ingrained part of Google's culture. Brin and co-founder Larry Page are both engineers, and they've been consistent in expressing a belief that form must always follow function. (Page has gone so far as to wonder why the home page needs anything except an empty search box.) That doesn't mean designers have to like it. Douglas Bowman, Google's first visual designer, left the company in March 2009—and lit the Web equivalent of a bonfire on his way out the door. In a post on stopdesign.com, Bowman claimed that at Google, data "becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions." He noted that one project was delayed when a team couldn't decide between two blues—so it tested 41 different shades between them. "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case," wrote Bowman, who is now the creative director at Twitter.

Other ex-Google design stars acknowledge that the emphasis on data can be grating. Jeffrey Veen, who joined Google as design director in 2006, says "the designers I worked with were fantastic but very formally trained in human computer interaction rather than having MFAs. That frames how design happens at Google." Veen, who left the company in 2008, adds: "None of the colleagues I would want to hire would be able to get a job at Google because of the computer-science-based requirements."

Mayer, the vice-president of search products, doesn't buy the criticism. "We're not curtailing instinct at all," she says. "We need that to fuel the innovation engine that yields great designs from Google. What we can do is use the power of the Internet and the measurability of it to figure out in a scientific way if something is a good idea or not." Wiley, V8's chief designer, insists he's comfortable with the mission and understands that search design is not intended to wow users. "It's like lighting design or sound design in a movie," he says. "If you're sitting watching a movie and you say, 'that's really great sound design!' then that's probably not right.…I don't want someone to say 'look at this gorgeous search results page!' I want them to say 'where's my…?' And click, they've gone."

In the period leading up to the rollout, changes continued. Some were major: The launch date slipped five times. A plan to include a widget underneath the search query box so users could tailor results to their location was dropped after engineers decided the technology didn't perform consistently enough. A feature offering users a way to look for similar types of results was renamed from "Not Entirely Unlike" (an oblique homage to sci-fi author Douglas Adams) to the less whimsical, more intuitive "Something Different."

As the redesign was being unveiled to the world via a blog post penned by Mayer, the team continued working. For the engineers, launch is the most critical and nerve-racking time. "We'll definitely be biting our fingernails. You can't just turn this on with a switch," says Gaylinn. Even as the team breaks up and moves onto different projects, changes will continue. "In many ways the project never really completely ends," says Janakiram. "There are always improvements to be made."

Helen Walters is the editor of Innovation and Design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek .

BusinessWeek: Why Design Matters

The Value of Design February 1, 2010, 4:59PM EST text size: TT

Why Design Matters

Good business outcomes treat design as a holistic process that pulls in savvy marketing and research, as well as smart ideas, says IDEO's Diego Rodriguez

By Diego Rodriguez

Good design does not always equal good business. But good business outcomes—especially when the goal is to create new sources of value in the world—are most often achieved through a well-structured design process that is more holistic and inclusive than the notion of good design.

All of the energy fed into the debate about the value of good design to the world of commerce would be better spent building ways to make holistic design a routine activity in business—and society. Here are three ways to get us there:

Stop Treating Design as A Noun

When we talk about it as such, the world stops listening and starts wondering which color the designers are going to pick for the drapes. Unfortunately, good design has come to stand for something akin to "style," largely a relativistic judgment of aesthetics and semiotics informed by a constantly shifting zeitgeist. I'm as much a fan and consumer of aesthetically pleasing things as the next guy, but I fear that much of what passes for good design is actually a class of shallow luxury goods aimed at a specific set of market demographics and psychographics. And these goods don't represent the creation of lasting value in the world: In the parlance of soul group Tower of Power, what is hip today quickly becomes passé.

Instead, we would all be better off treating design as a verb, a process, a way of approaching challenges which designers and nondesigners alike can learn to use to create positive change in the world. Throughout history design as a verb, also known these days as design Thinking, has created things of enormous value to humanity. The Bill of Rights, the Aravind Eye Care System, Medecins Sans Frontières, and the Marshall Plan will never show up in a Design Within Reach catalog. And yet each of these amazing achievements of humanity was designed.

Rethink the Relationship between Design and Market Success

Success in the marketplace is a complex endeavor which requires methods of creation that go beyond the limited scope of good design. Apple (AAPL), a company justifiably known for its design, must be applauded for the way it lets its designers and engineers design things to the hilt. But how Apple has created and captured shocking amounts of market value in the music (iTunes + iPod) and telecommunication (iPhone) industries is due as much to skillful systems engineering and infrastructure development as it is to compelling aesthetics. Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them. For every success like the iPod, there are scores of beautiful market offerings that failed because no one bothered to think about how to manufacture, deliver, sell, support, and retire them in ways that met people's needs. Since market success depends on the complex interaction of so many variables, it is silly—even naive—to try to pin it all back to just good design.

Use Business Constraints as Inspiration

Potential market value creation should be treated as a generative part of the design process, not as a post-rationalized output with suspect causality. At any given time, a team using design thinking should be able to give a sense of how strong a business they are creating. Let's take the essay about the U.K's National Health Service that prompted this Bloomberg/BusinessWeek special report. Before blowing cash on a logo redesign, a team using design thinking would quickly test the relationship between brand recognition and the ability of the service to help individuals reach healthy outcomes. They would run a series of quick experiments to generate evidence, and only then embark on a full rebranding initiative—if that turned out to be the way to create the most value from scarce resources.

This approach fundamentally shifts the dialog away from a reactive posture of "how much value did design create?" to an expansive notion of "how much value can we create?" as well as "how might we maximize the odds of that potential value coming to fruition?" This systemic view of the creative challenge is the signature characteristic of design thinking. When we use design thinking to balance desirability, feasibility, and viability, we unlock the measures of value creation so desperately sought after by the world of good design. Impact in the world becomes the focus of designing.

Whether or not you call yourself a designer, when you work to relate people's needs to broader webs of individual, social, and economic factors, and pour your energy into creating better outcomes via an evidence-driven process, you're using design thinking to increase your odds of success in the world. That sounds like good business to me.

Rodriguez is a partner at the design and innovation firm IDEO. He is also a professor at Stanford's d.school, where he teaches classes about business design and entrepreneurship. His blog metacool has a passionate following among people who spend their lives trying to make a dent in the universe. 

Economist: The book of Jobs

Tablet computing

The book of Jobs

Jan 28th 2010
From The Economist print edition

It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once

Illustration by Jon Berkeley

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.

As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 (see article). Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical online speculation in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics in the blogosphere jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet.

The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone, but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Keep taking the tablets

Tablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles.

The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids. Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit a vast array of games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles. Different industries are already converging on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.

If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleash fierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of e-books to take the plunge, accelerating the adoption of this nascent technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.

Hold the front pixels

Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits—metropolitan newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfil their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.

Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.

If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.