30
Sep
2008
0

Being vindicated is the most fun a person can have without taking their clothes off.

I’m going to keep my mouth shut and let (inter)national news media do the talking.

And then there’s the blogosphere’s take on it.

Also, I should note that I was on the outside of this decision and that the people who made it are a group that includes my direct supervisors and others vastly above my pay grade. My contribution was actually just making that page where the error message now resides.

And I don’t agree with it at all, not when reducing the number of requests was really what would bring the situation under control, and the simplest way to do that would be to just surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. Let me repeat and italicize that seemingly revolutionary idea: surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. This is what I advocated for years. And anybody with an eye on the trends – search logs, web stats, etc. – and a long enough memory to recall the drop of the 9/11 Commission report PDF and the Mark Foley resignation (which brought down the Clerk’s site with hourly spikes two years ago, to the day) would’ve seen this coming as early as Thursday. Where the asinine triage command originated I can’t identify. It’s just unfortunate that constituents hoping to contact their representatives in earnest are the group most adversely affected (to say nothing of the group in the Infrastructure branch monitoring the servers, the legislative correspondents under the deluge, and anybody else freaking out about the arbitrary path the American government has chosen to remedy massive failures in private enterprises).

I sent over to Lou a copy of the top 20 search queries from Sunday, 28 September, and he’s posted it to the Search Analytics blog at Rosenfeld Media. I intend to follow through with this research (off the top of my head: “bailout” was the top query starting on 23 September, “Barney Frank,” “email,” and “contact” each cracked the top ten in days preceding), not that it’ll make a dint of change in my employers’ minds. It’s just nice to know, as time passes, as I’m now well into my fourth year of employment, that I haven’t lost my ability to think beyond what this job requires – rote production of kilobytes of rhetorical fluff – and about what this situation requires.

I wonder what legislative change, if any, this will prompt. Granted the House has pressing issues on the floor but this is just embarrassing. Can the paradigm with which lawmakers have approached the World Wide Web – mid-’90s stamp of technology adopted for its own sake – be shifted into something more appropriately modern by passing a law? That remains to be determined, although I’d like to help write that legislation, if only to actually guide and assist instead of just saying “I told you so” years after the fact. Not that it isn’t fun to say.

I told you so.

19
Sep
2008
0

A designer’s guide to bar fights.

As my conversation with Kristy and Patrick at the bar last weekend turned to politics, two other patrons within earshot expressed their disdain with icy silence proportional to our increasing application of decibels. It became clear that their body language was expressly directed at us, and we considered the possibility that continuing our conversation would lead to the necessity of physically incapacitating two men larger than either of us. In short, we began preparing for a bar fight.

Design is inherently a practice of problem solving, and the problem was that in a brawl of brutes, Kristy, Patrick, and I would not be favored against these two. (How many pitchers of Coors would I have to imbibe over how many decades to be at once that intimidating and pathetic? There’s a Fermi problem for you.) But designers never solve problems in vacuums (unless you’re James Dyson, but I digress). Our solutions must always follow contextual parameters, and if you’re resourceful, in those parameters lie the keys to those solutions.

I immediately surveyed the room for a pool table — none. No pool cues or balls. Cues can make clumsy weapons, but they’re effective for creating a defensive radius while employing a projectile offense. In any case, no need bring out the amphibious invasion strategy guide for a landlocked country.

Liquor bottles can be dangerous either as projectiles — they’re heavy enough to have a predictable trajectory — or lacerating weapons — though there’s a high likelihood of injuring oneself as well as an opponent if employing a bottle as a breakaway club. I wanted to harness a beer tap — solid wood and built to grip. It would be the closest thing to a Major League Baseball bat readily available. Patrick mused that one could brand an opponent’s face with the etched-metal Magic Hat #9 tap.

Kristy and I were working on wine, but Patrick had beer served in an acrylic pitcher and glass mug. Hold the bowl of the mug inside the fist (loosely so it won’t shatter) with the thick glass handle facing outward — aim for the teeth. With a hand wrapped in cloth napkins and holding the acrylic pitcher, one of us could distract with a splash of beer and follow it with devastating plastic battery. Aim for the neck.

The tchotchkes on the walls, the contents of the speed rack, lonely drinkers in dubious football jerseys, failing pickup artists, girls-night-out girls, bartenders and bouncers — all contextual parameters, all potentially problematic and indispensable to the solution. There was no way to consider all the possible outcomes and iterations and the half-price cabernet wasn’t a boon to scenario planning. Besides, I tend to favor diplomacy: solve the problem by negating its existence.

But Patrick and I agreed: we’d both, inexplicably, wanted to be party to a bar fight. These two guys with their asinine burger orders (just say ‘medium well,’ no need to explain the physical properties of charcoal) and jingoistic politics who’ve probably been in bar fights before have won some and lost some and lived to tell. Maybe they go out looking for a fight; maybe bad beer does that to a man.

For me, for as much as being a designer requires a thorough understanding of context, often in the form of immersion, it is also characterized by a kind of academic remove. It’s just research, just business. And so often, I just negotiate, compromise, move on to the next job. But one day soon, I’ll skip that diplomacy stage and just solve a problem in the thick of it — wield a beer tap, maybe kick some ass, maybe take a beer mug to the teeth. Because bar fights, day jobs, love — it’s all in the context. And soon, I’ll knock ‘em all out.

5
Sep
2008
0

Bag the box.

When I came across the packaging for HP’s Pavilion dv6929 laptop, I was stunned. Not for what it is, but because it hadn’t occurred to anybody, myself included, before the year 2008 to actually do this: ship the laptop in a messenger bag.

Packaging, no matter how sleek, is ultimately disposable, and laptop users who pay the premium for a portable computer already consider the investment of an additional piece of luggage that’ll keep it safe from office to home, subway to sidewalk, journey to destination (and that piece of luggage will have its own packaging, to be sure). The packaging and the messenger bag serve the same purpose for manufacturers and end-users respectively — to protect the computer from damage in transit — so if one designs a unit that serves both audiences, it’s that much less raw material consumed in the process.

And marketers also score a victory, a substantial one at that. It gives them more leverage because the product packaging, if used as intended, continues to promote the brand even after the owner calls it a day at the coffee shop. I find the prominent logo displayed on the bag problematic since it easily identifies it as the container of a computer, increasing its likelihood of being stolen and bordering on conspicuous consumption. I understand the compromise from a marketing perspective, but I advocate taking a more stealthy approach — one that HP has actually done with some success with its “The computer is personal again” campaign that shrewdly excluded celebrities’ faces from their endorsements. Screw the logo, let’s see business-class models shipped out in carbon-fiber or aniline leathers, student editions wrapped in cotton duck and wool felt, and of course, limited-edition collaborations — imagine Halliburton Zero × Lenovo ThinkPad and Mulberry × MacBook Air (Coach × Dell seems sadly inevitable) — stamped by the starchitect du jour, touted on NotCot, destined for eBay.

I expect the trend will continue, and though the HP Pavilion dv6929 in its aquarium-printed sling may ultimately be a middling computer in an obvious container, its precedent will hopefully (and I think likely) be followed in more sophisticated execution. Well, it better be, or else I’m going to end up with a bunch of crappy looking bags sitting around my apartment from computers through the years, given that’s the form computers continue to assume.

3
Sep
2008
0

Ultimately violet.

Like an obscure band that high school kids you once mocked now call their god, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about purple entering the pedestrian American fashion lexicon. In an attempt to spur myself to introduce myself to strange women and simultaneously spare myself inevitable humiliation, I’ve made it a point to approach women wearing aubergine overcoats, those black swans of fashion inhabiting the improbable intersection of a practical garment and a color apparently not as practical. As a sign, it tells me that the wearer, first, loves the color enough to be clad in it neck-to-knee, second, has the confidence to own that color, damn the common advice of a neutral palette, and third, understands that the point of a cornerstone is to be built upon. If purple is the chromatic love of your life and it flatters your complexion, then I see no reason not to rock the purple overcoat and outfit the rest of the wardrobe around it, rather than the reverse (which a neutral color too easily accommodates).

There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.

And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.

And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.

2
Sep
2008
0

A scholar’s return.

My four-year hiatus from academia is over. Half of my first class at Georgetown was an introduction to WordPress, the same software in which this is being composed. I’m still optimistic.

Between Once and Man on Wire, there’s an undercurrent in my choice of cinema this past weekend of little things — pop songs and filament-tied-to-an-arrow — urged by good-humored gamines and can-do cads toward the seemingly impossible. I’m not in touch with most of my mentors from five or six years ago (and in some cases not on speaking terms), but I sense they’d smile knowingly at the return on their investments of encouragement and time (if not straight cash), the dividends paid to progeny. I didn’t know then clearly who I was or what was next, but their guidance in entrepreneurship, design practice, and, let’s face it, psychological warfare — and away from hourly retail in indistinct suburbs, indefinitely — capitalized the belief that I was meant to transcend the path my history implied, make great art, write a killer thesis, see the world. And lately, though it’s been a difficult belief to sustain, I’m here. The band’s in the studio; the cable’s between the towers.

It’s daybreak, and it’s time to dance.

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