...but I <3 technology

I’ve been so busy scouring the internets for posts that I almost forgot to post about this myself! The site is for IRO Cycle, which we just launched last week.

First the back story….

IRO makes fixed gear bikes, which, if you lived in Williamsburg (like I do), the Lower East Side, or the Mission District in SF, you would already know have worked their way up the urban cycling chic food chain from exercise track bike geekiness to messenger bike craziness up to hipster status symbol. I’ve developed an eye for them while working on this site and can safely say that there are between 1 and 3 brakeless fixed gear bikes parked on every block of Bedford from S2nd up to N11th. Now. Even among this already elite crowd, there is a coolness pecking order. Lots of guys will buy old bikes and modify them. Some people will buy a trak bike, or whatever. BUT if you are really in the know, then you’ve already bought and Angus or a Mark V from Tony.

And that brings us to the other part of IRO…for being such a well-known company, it is really just a small family-owned and operated business. (Although, I guess it’s smallness sort of adds to its hipness.) Like a lot of guys into fixed gears at the time, Tony started putzing around with designing his own frames while living out on Staten Island a few years ago. Unlike all those other guys, however, he seemed to hit some magic numbers, and really make some waves in the community. Ask anyone today why they ride an IRO, and they will tell you “because of the geometry.” Other companies try to emulate the sizes and angles of Tony’s frames, a few with some success.

Enter Woods Witt Dealy & Sons, the creative agency I’ve been working with as an IA on their digital projects since last Fall. The design mission was to make Tony an awesome website that makes his company look bigger than it is, but one that really shows off the bikes and his custom build approach to making them. We wanted to do it up “dude” style and to really appeal to the lust for gadgetry and workmanship that the dudes in his demographic tend to feel. But Tony also wanted to grow his business. So from that perspective, the goal was to create a website that would help along the n00bs without insulting the novices. This meant a build process that educated as it entertained, but never talked down to its audiences.

The response so far has been overwhelming. Tony can’t build fast enough, and the orders starting to roll in are from a whole new demographic of guys (and girls – now that Tony’s selling the Heidi) who are just starting to get into fixed gear bikes, starting with freewheels on their single speeds. Everyone here is really proud. I’m so glad to have had a chance to work on this.

Update: As of 2010, this site is not longer available online. I wish I had more information about why.

An interesting side effect of being a user experience designer is having a hightened awareness of your own work process. I often find myself, for better or worse, thinking not only about the work that I’m doing, but about how I am actually doing it. On a project-wide scale we generally think about our tasks in terms of milestones and deliverables, but I think it’s worth noting that in going through the motions of a project from conception to completion, we’re not simply creating the thing itself but also developing, exploring, refining or simply practicing the framework for our creative process. At the core of creativity there is a foundation on top of which we find the ability to create. Working on a team, we need to understand the roles we play in layng that foundation and be committed to further refining and improving the process as wholeheartedly as we approach the work itself.

Wether this preoccupation is some vestige of my background in classical music performance (a highly methodical, often excrutiatingly structured process in the midst of which the performer has to find the inspiration and opportunity for creativity) some tell-tale of the point I’m at in my career (where my personal creative process is still being refined) or simply the fact that this is what I do, I’m not sure. Whatever the reasons, I really enjoyed this talk at SXSW given by Bryan and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path. The talk is about points in the creative process that teams from a variety of fields share. We all have deadlines, and how we come to a process that helps us meet those deadlines without stifling creativity is tricky business. Click through to hear the full audio with slides.

And if you don’t have time to listen, here’s my take on the 10 tips below:

Cross Training:
I guess I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for and with multi-talented people, so I tend to take it for granted, but it’s important. On the flip side, however, I will say that there’s nothing more annoying than a person who thinks they know so much about another role that they can butt their heads in too much or at inappropriate times. Sure, sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s productive, but a lot of times, you’re just dealing with some jerk who thinks they need to naysay what everyone else on the project is doing. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman (yes I went there, but it’s true – many people I’ve worked with are naturally predispositioned not to believe that I have any understanding or authority over technical matters) or maybe it’s because I work in web (where everyone seems to dabble, but few really master) or maybe it’s because I’m an interaction designer (and so am forced to constantly field other peoples’ well-meaning opinions about how things should work). But I think we can all tell the difference between a person who is informed in fields outside their expertise and a naysayer. I do agree that understanding other roles allows you to understand technical constraints and feel empathy for those roles. While I don’t particularly enjoy programming or technical development myself, I’m really glad to have sent some time doing it, and will continue to do it in an effort to stay informed. I’m not going to tell my developers how to do their jobs, but I like them to know that I will understand most of the problems their facing, and that I might be available to talk about them suggest other ways of doing things that they might not have thought of themselves.

2. Rotate Creative Leadership:
I like to think that a person can feel ownership over a project that they aren’t necessarily leading as well, but I get the point here.

3. Actively Turning the Corner:
I love the way Sarah puts this. She says that in any creative process there is a period of divergence followed by a period of convergence, and like she says, there is nothing worse than having to entertain the person who doesn’t know which phase the team is in.

4. Knowing Your Roles:
See comment #1. On a more positive note, there is nothing that helps the creative process more than knowing what other people can be relied on for.

5. Practice:
This was a general theme for me at this year’s SXSW – practice was a major point in this year’s Kathy Sierra talk as well (no audio on this one yet), and it just made me pine for my music school days. As grueling as it is to sit in a practice room for 6 hours a day, I’ve had few other experiences in my life so rewarding as actually feeling myself getting progressively better at something, to the point of a sort of level of mastery. In other fields, it’s not so easy to justify or make time for a practice period, and Sarah addresses this point in the Q&A at the end. I try to make sure that in every task I perform, I am either introducing or practicing some new tool or technique. Also, an iterative approach to design could be considered a form of practice.

6. Make your mission explicate to the whole team:
Ah, yes. So important! This is one of those things that makes me happy that my job exists mostly at the beginning of a project, during the requirements gathering phase. I don’t think there’s anything more integral to the success of a project as identifying clear goals! Almost any moment of doubt or internal dispute can be resolved simply by revisiting those goals. Unfortunately it’s often the case that not everyone on the project gets to be in on this phase, so it’s equally as important that these goals are properly communicated – to everyone! (This reminds me also of the talk that Tony Hsieh of Zappos gave at SXSW, which also speaks to the idea of cross-training – apparently every new employee spends their first two weeks taking customer service calls. At Zappos, customer service is the most important part of the business so he needs to make every new employee aware of the company’s goals. He says that later on, the real payoff is employees who can be trusted to make independent decisions with those goals in mind.)

7. Killing your Darlings:
I don’t know what the actual term for this was in the talk, but the point here is to have a system in place that allows the team to essentially veto any material that doesn’t further the goals of the company or project. We often end up calling this a “Phase 2,” especially when you’re dealing with features that take development time. I think that can be really misleading to clients though, since a Phase 2 isn’t always a guarantee, and just lumping everything together doesn’t really give you a chance to do any strategic thinking about why something should be launched when. So there must be some better way to refer to these ideas internally without any delusion or false hope. I do, however, really like their point here in that it’s often important not to discuss what gets tossed out in too much detail. (Other terms I’ve heard for this include the "parking lot" or the "refrigerator", as Jean Marc used to say.)

8. Leadership is a service:
Leadership is about support and facilitation of the members of the group. If everyone in the group doesn’t feel enfranchised then they are going to be miserable. Totes agree!

9. Generate projects around the groups creative interests:
Again, yes! We all know how miserable a project can be when it’s not actually interesting to you, or how suddenly fun it can be to do work on a topic you personally find new or exciting. I’d like to also add, to people who aren’t managers but workers, that a lot of this is your responsible too. If you’re interests aren’t shared with the company you are working for, then you already know you are doomed. It’s important to communicate these interests up the chain as well or no one will ever know.

10. Remember Your Audience:
Like they say, this is an obvious one for us UX peeps

11. Bonus Point! Celebrate Failure:
Red Burns would be all about this one. She gets an almost sadistic pleasure in seeing her students fail. Not because she’s mean, just because she doesn’t like to think of the fear of failure as something that will hold people back from trying something new and exciting. I think it’s a great point to live by.

Seriously. One of the nicest, simplest UI’s I’ve seen in awhile. For your updates on all things Christin visit xinroman.tumblr.com. If that’s more than you can handle then just stick with me here.

The tumblr UI has really led me to rethink my feelings on the whole “lifestreaming” trend (a trend that, like most among the super geeky, seems to have lost it’s spark twice as quickly as it got it). I dunno, there’s just something so pretentious and self-indulgent about “lifestreaming.” Like it’s just a more streamlined manifestation of that fascination we all have about ourselves as we “exist” on the internet.

Or maybe I’m just not putting it in the right context — I don’t know if googling yourself has the same social stigma that it used to. It’s more about keeping tabs on your digital life and connecting with others anyway. I can name a number of times that “vanity googling” or, rather, just checking up on my inbound links has lead to new friendships (facilitated by a few pseudo-anonymous emails, of course). This is not to say that we’re not still somehow fascinated with ourselves, but being able to chart this stuff is becoming increasingly important.

On that note, there was a great project a Picnic last week, called iTea. Everyone who had a badge at the festival also had an RFID keychain type thingy, and there were various hacking stations and projects setup to do cool things with the tags. (And please do take the use of the word “cool” here with a grain of salt. In reality some of the workshops were bordering on corporate and scary.)

So, iTea is a tea cup that tells all about you, sort of like having your tea leaves read. What it’s really doing though, is searching the internet for your name (kind of like that game we’ve all played where you google the phrase “Christin Roman is” and laugh at what comes up). The results were mixed, but what I found most interesting, in my case, was that I knew exactly where each reference was coming from, and wether or not it was really about me, or about some other Christin Roman (of which there are very few, but one of them is some sort of German folk songstress of sorts, so her stuff tends to come up a bit high).

I can’t say that I’m embarrassed that I know all of this just from googling my own name (in fact, I think that this process is what really should be streamlined, more so than just subscribing to a feed of search results for your own name) but I do know that at one time it was considered a little tacky. Now take “lifestreaming,” which, is just the opposite – instead of getting a feed of what other people are saying about me, I’m assuming that all of my friends want to know at all times what I have to say about, well, everything, as it’s related to me – and think about how tacky that is. Maybe we’ve all just finally accepted the fact that we are obsessed with ourselves, and I guess I’m okay with that. But it’s the delusion that other people should be obsessed with us too that’s a little scary.

It’s my first “employee outing” at a new part-time web/tech start-up gig, and we’re on our way to an evening of obscure microbrewery beers and nostalgic button punching at <a href="http://www.barcadebrooklyn.com/">Barcade</a>, when my boss’s wife gets hit hard by an 8 1/2 month pregnancy-induced burger craving. Having been a vegetarian for the last 14 years of her life, she is new to the many 1/4 pound options that our great neighborhood of Williamsburg has to offer. While I do consider myself somewhat of an expert in this area, I’m also just hoping to get in good with the new boss’s wife, and possibly score some brownie points along the way. Nothing wrong with that, I think, as I reach for my phone to dial in a delivery order to <a href="http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/restaurants/archives/2005/03/dumont_burger.html">Dumont</a>, my burger of choice. Browsing through my contacts, I tell her to be sure to skip the fries and order a side of mac and cheese instead. “And order it a tad bit rarer than you want it to be when it arrives,” I add, knowingly. “It’ll cook a little on the way here.”

But then, just as I’m beginning to browse through the “D’s,” the realization that I’ve never actually bothered to store their number in my phone sets in. This is some mistake on Nokia’s part, I convince myself. Surely, a number dialed this often on the same phone should eventually be permanently stored somewhere for later retrieval. But it’s silly to argue this now. We have a problem at hand, and, being the technically adept and super resourceful geeks that we are, we set about trying to solve it as best we know how.

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“Does anyone here use <a href="http://www.dodgeball.com/">dodgeball</a>?” I ask my fellow employees. “I’ve got google maps on my phone!” one screams out as they stare blankly at their little screen waiting for the tiny map to load. “What about that google directory service where you just punch in a zip code and what you’re looking for? Does anyone know that number for that?” “I’ll check <a href="http://freewilliamsburg.com">freewilliamsburg.com</a>” another says. “Maybe I can get a WIFI signal here,” as he eagerly pulls his laptop from his bag and sits down on the street corner. “Twitter it!” someone else blurts out, half-jokingly (though, to be honest, querying the crowd seems to be our best bet right now). Everyone’s chiming in with their solutions – about a dozen of them – but none of them seem to be accomplishing the task just right. I step back for a minute and examine the hilarity and the tragedy of this scene.

Nowhere, I think, in all of the visions of the fast and fabulous future, did anyone ever predict a technological failure of this magnitude. At its worst, an accidental melt-down in the core, or a malicious hacker in the mainframe, might cause death and destruction the universe over. At its best, a young programming genius stops the computer virus and saves all of mankind. Either way it’s all made to look pretty damn sexy. But no where, I think to myself as I watch my otherwise intelligent cohorts bumble on the side of the road, feverishly poking their fingers at their phones or snuggling their laptops against the sides of tall apartment buildings, has anyone ever bothered to dramatize the kind of burger-craving pregnancy paings that this poor woman was forced to endure, while her only hope, a group of 20-30 something tech nerds, were momentarily stricken technologically impotent by their array of ubiquitous technology. In the face of danger, rather than use our gizmos and gadgets to solve the problem at hand, we freaked the fuck out.

Now, I spent most of my formative years growing up in the 90’s, and for all its flaws – Friends, scrunchies, Smash Mouth – it really was an amazing time. When I look back on it, I see a time when our parents’ space-aged notions of a Jetsons-like future, rife with obnoxiously invasive technology were finally shattered by the futuristic vision of realists. We didn’t want house-cleaning robots or bubbly flying cars. What we wanted were tools that would actually be useful in our lives, without requiring us to wholly rethink the way that we live them. There may have been a few false starts, but I like to think that we finally got there- Fresh Direct, Google. LOLcats. My generation may have begun its adolescent technological fascination with virtual terror the likes of Lawnmower Man – dire warnings of an alternate reality gone frightfully right, fear of a cyberworld that tears lives and families apart, a cyberbeing becomes sentient and grows increasingly stronger – but it eventually grew into the self-deprecating Existenze, the obviously fantastical Matrix. Maybe it was my coming of age coinciding with these times, but I swear that somewhere along the line we simply stopped being afraid. We all know by now, that much worse than Willow accidentally scanning a demon out of its book-bound dungeon onto the internets, is being stuck out in the world without any aid in figuring out those most mundane, yet pressing, questions in life – “Where am I right now?” “Where is the place where I am going?” “How do I get there?” And while we may still intermittently suffer the obligatory “ghost-in-the-shell” episode of our favorite tv shows, I do generally believe that we have finally gotten what we really want out of sci-fi techno fantasy – a better reality.

This means that I, as an average cell phone-carrying person, can reach my virtual arm out into the cyberworld, and find a burger. Like, now.

So the question at hand, “What is the fucking number?” simple as it sounds, is part of a much larger, much more defining question of technology as it stands in our lives today. We’re still flopping around a bit, and as the situation I found myself in this day has shown me, it’s not for a lack of resources that we haven’t managed to answer it, but rather an over abundance of tools, difficult to navigate and manage, that have made the process clunky and awkward, much less seamless than it should be, the problem itself heightened by the fact that there are just too many damn ways to solve it, so many that none of us could really feel confident in any one tool to be able to use it, none of them really just suited for the situation. Dodgeball, while it could tell us where the place was located, couldn’t give us the number. Google maps – slow and clunky. That Google directory service thing – what was the number again? What was the syntax? WIFI – if we were lucky. Twitter – opps I only have 5 friends and none of them live in Williamsburg. The whole thing reminded me of something my 5th grade English teacher used to say, rather politically incorrectly, that has always stuck with me – “Leave it to a man to invent the leaf-blower. It does all the work of a regular broom, with 10 times the noise.” Suddenly my vision of technology as a better reality seemed like just that, a bunch of noise, and my technically adept friends, not the problem solvers and realists I usually see them as, but a bunch of nerds just getting hyped up about the latest new thing.

But surely, by now, you will have solved this conundrum I’ve described, perhaps even with the same strange mixture of elation and embarassment as I did when, cell phone held to the sky, looking at my intelligent yet confounded friends I yelled “I know! I’ll call 4-1-1!” Now, before you get too excited, and start thinking that you just saved the day, just remember that those 3 little numbers have existed for exactly this purpose for a number of decades now. The same 3 little numbers with which we all experienced the thrill of our first prank call, or the amazement at finding a friend “listed.” But, before you feel too embarrassed either, just recall how long it’s been since you used 411. And, more importantly, ask yourself why. Did you forget your password? Does it not work with your carrier? Or is it just not “loud” enough? Not sexy or new enough to stand out amongst all the tools at our disposal?

Amsterdam & Picnic 07
2007-09-29 10:54:25
So I’m in Amsterdam at this festival called <a href="http://www.picnicnetwork.org/page/5586/en">Picnic</a>. It is very corporate and very heavily-sponsored…but also incredibily well-organized and just, well, beautiful! As far as conferences go. There was definitely some extra effort put into making sure the food is good, the setting is lovely, the tech is there…all the extras. Here I am sounding like a petty American wondering how much money they put into this thing and why, then, is it so damned expensive to go. (About 1,000 Euros for the whole 4 days!) Of course it doesn’t matter…it’s lovely nonetheless. And, while one of the stipulations of tagging along with Josh for free is that I only had an attendees pass for one day, I still got to see a few things. Here they are, and then I’m off to attend the rest of the <a href="http://www.comeoutandplay.org/">Come Out and Play</a> Festival, where Josh is presenting his phone-to-screen video game.

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It was a slow morning, and we got here late, meaning that I didn’t so much “see” the first two presentations as I “overheard” them while doing my first email check of about two days (the internet has been flaking out in our apartment, and Amsterdam coffeeshops aren’t exactly known for their WIFI). But I did find myself perking up a bit for <a href="http://www.softhook.com/">Christian Nold</a>’s presentation on participatory mapping, a concept that I find pretty interesting, Nold’s <a href="http://stockport.emotionmap.net/">emotion maps of Stockport</a> were not so much about mapping physical structures as they were about mapping emotional responses to given locations, something that, he seems to hold forth, should be taken into consideration when building new architecture. As you can imagine, it’s not anything terribly scientific, but it is telling. I really enjoyed the pictures that his subjects, mostly teenagers, drew of their surroundings – they aren’t great art or anything, but you can’t help but imagine that they are genuine. My first criticism of the project was determining wether asking someone to become hyper-aware of their surroundings doesn’t totally skew their opinions. Typical Christin, I know. But, looking at the actual maps, it occurred to me that these kids had been living in these towns all their lives, and that these reactions were not just a result of being asked for them. They were solid and pre-meditated, and I had to wonder how validating it must feel to be asked to put onto paper the random thoughts about a place that enter your mind involuntarily when you walk through it everyday. These are thoughts that one generally keeps to onself. The whole thing brought back to mind a project I was considering once, which involved meta-mapping personal experiences onto a real-world map, sort of creating a map out of your own experiences, your own names for things – all fantasy but also rooted in fact and totally navigable in the real world. I love the idea of your own personal world floating above a real city, and being able to share that world with others.

Next up was a guy from <a href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/">Blast Theory</a> who talked about urban gaming, specifically, his game <a href="http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html">“Can You See Me Now”</a> which is currently being played in the CO&P tent just across the park from the cafe where I’m sitting. I zoned in and out of his talk a lot (so many RSS feeds gone unread these past few days!) but a couple of things caught me which I know I’ll be thinking about for the rest of the weekend. 1) Do all games have to be fun? and 2) Is it right for urban games to incorporate innocent bystanders? A comment about how the Dutch are culturally united against closing their curtains, even at night, sparked this one, and I could understand his temptation to use this social feature in his game design, even while I found it totally indecent and irresponsible. Regardless, there is a danger in saying that all urban games SHOULD incorporate some aspect(s) of their cultural surroundings. It goes without saying that in doing so, a game designer severely limits the portability of his game. And I suppose that this was his point – that big game designers are having to make these kinds of trade-offs and decisions while they attempt to discover where there art (or design, or technology, or whatever you want to call it) fits into our historical, cultural perspectives on play. (After watching a dozen twenty somethings roll around in the mud dressed like bunnies and tigers, I can’t help but think that it’s all just some fad of the Wes Anderson/Peter Pan generation we gen-Xers have turned out to be. What ever happened to “being cool?”)

<a href="http://stamen.com/studio/neb">Ben Cerveny</a> gave an excellent talk which I don’t feel entirely licensed to summarize here. There was just too much to think about! But the crux of it was something we’ve been hearing more and more about recently — how to use gaming elements to improve user interface experience in computing. “Games,” he said (and I’m totally paraphrasing here) “are how we learn to test the limits between ourselves and the physical world around us” his enduring example of this being kittens at play. (Awww…) But more than just pose the same question that all interaction designers have already been thinking about, he got beyond the general postulating about games and interactivity, mentioning the Dutch architect Van Ijk, whose preoccupation with the spaces between physical nodes (very Jane Jacobs when she talks about the importance of sidewalks) could be compared to the way an interactive designer has to think about not just what the user sees when a task has been completed, but what they experience along the way. It’s about designing those spaces which were earlier seen as undesigned, to create a total experience. (I’m suddenly reminded of my music mentor’s analogies of music to architecture, calling musical phrases the arches and their resolutions the pillars. You need the pillars to keep the damn thing up, but that’s hardly the most interesting part.)

Last, I was disappointed to see that <a href="http://www.lunchoverip.com/2007/10/comdays07-the-2.html">Stefana Broadbent</a>, whose research (what little of it I could find, anyway) was pivotal to the early stages of my thesis project last year, didn’t make it to the conference for her scheduled talk. Actually, I’m not sure what the story on this is except that her name was in the program, yet she did not present. Maybe I will catch her some other time! (Update: Damn! It looks like she did present afterall, the day before.)

Well, that’s a whole lot of post for so little conference! Amsterdam has been absolutely wonderful, our apartment in De Pijp is gorgeous (right on Albert Cuyp market), we finally got to experience real, old-fashioned Dutch food (thanks to Josh’s friend Marc, a Delft student who he met at the Microsoft Design Expo competition last year), and I am so lucky to have had the chance to come here for the first time! (Pictures coming soon…)

PS: Dutch men are very nice. The cheese is sharp and crunchy and amazing. Everyone here speaks perfect English. The weather sucks. There’s nothing good on tv. Ever.

PPS: Untranslatable English phrases that pop up in Dutch conversations include: “Fuck it” and “Google it.”

PPPS: <a href="http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hamsterdam">Hamsterdam</a>. Huh.

…And I only bring up 9/11 at all because a) I coincidentally happened to just finish re-reading David Foster Wallace’s “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” today, b) I am extrememly disappointed in how The Events Of are still hanging over this country as we are determined to allow the most ridiculous security measures be taken against our most basic freedoms to feed some strange sense of patriotism we all feel that earned the hard way 6 years ago (in other words, I’m leaving for Amsterdam in two days and I’m very upset that I have to decide wether to pack the hair product OR the facial cleansing system, seeing as I can’t very well squeeze BOTH into a quart-sized ziploc bag), and lastly, c) I feel strangely guilty for having entirely skimmed over the whole anniversary thing two weeks ago while I was vacationing in Florida. Don’t ask me why.

So.

Does it show some lack of judgement to walk into an airport with a circuit board strapped to your sweatshirt? To be sure.

But is that any excuse for law enforcers in this country to take the “better safe than sorry” approach? It’s disgusting the way that they’re touting their handling of the situation, as though they did this girl some favor by not completely overreacting from the onset. I mean really, what could she have possibly said or done, apart from running away, or throwing her ball of play-do at their faces, that would have caused them *justly* to use deadly force?

And I feel the same way about that UF student at the John Kerry lecture last week. Sure, he was an asshole, but really, how much physical power are we willing to let law enforcers exert over an obviously harmless person? All because of what…”we’re in the orange!?”

Fuck this shit, dudes. Fuck. This. Shit.

Honestly though, unlike CNN seems to imply, I don’t think the MIT student is an idiot. I do think it’s kind of sad that we live in a world where her self expression, be it badly implemented wearable art or a “hoax bomb” or whatever, seems so obviously “stupid” to the rest of us. At worst maybe she was trying to embarass her local airport police, and at best, impress her inbound friend with her new MIT engineering degree.

But to the media, and to the police who probably harassed the shit out of this poor girl, none of that matters. They were certainly not impressed, and the big clue to their total LACK of embarassment is the fact that headlines read “Bomb Hoax” when they probably should’ve said something more along the lines of “Boston Police Totally Overreact to Perfectlly Harmless LEDs again.”

Is Boston, like, totally jealous that 9/11 didn’t happen in their crappy city or what?

I touched an iPhone.

I presented my thesis project to ITP, my mom, and the world on Monday evening, two days following the semi-final round of the Stern Business Plan Competition, where we learned that, while we have a kick-ass business plan, an excellent presentation, and a damn good team of very capable founders who know what they’re doing, we just don’t make rich white colonialist VCs’ hearts long for hip, sustainable consumerism the way they do for poor, exploitable rural Indian villagers. I’m not bitter, just increasingly disturbed at the way that people measure Social Impact without any concept of the difference between “helping” and exploiting. There’s just something about going into other peoples’ countries and telling them how to solve their problems (especially if the solution involves delivering targeted ads from Unilever to a “new market”, or creating low-level data entry jobs in opressive office complexes) that really gives me the creeps. “How is this business supposed to solve poverty?” Red leaned over and asked me during one of the winning teams’ presentations. “It’s technology,” I said, “It solves everything.” I made her laugh a little, which made me happy. That woman is scarily clairvoyant, and just pretty amazing. She’s sat through every thesis presentation so far, and has said very little. I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through 20+ years of that. I’m going to miss ITP.

Anyway, in the post thesis, post competition lull, I’ve managed to reorganize my desktop, install some new software, eat a lot of fried foods and red meat products, catch up on my blog reading, and rack up about 6 hours of Rabid Rabbits on the Wii. I still have a paper to write, a final project to finish, and two submissions in the Spring show in various stages of brokenness, but I’m not worried. The break has been really nice, and much needed.

So, it’s decided, I’m writing letters for people – you type and submit a letter online, including some instructions for how you want the letter to be written, and then I personally write and post it (as in, send it by post). It’s time to start putting together the actual site (it’s pretty barebones right now) so I’m thinking a lot about the interface and how I want everything to work and look.

Essentially, I think what I am going for is a functional design portfolio site, where previous letters are displayed (not for their content, but for their look and feel, also just for my own documentation of the process, which could end up being somewhat performative in and of itself) and anyone who uses the site can indicate how they want the letter to be written. It should be a sort of tiered approach, where they can choose from a variety of choices but also have the freedom to write in requests, in which case, I am taking on less of a letter monkey position and acting more like a consultant, reading into the tone of their letter, perhaps, to decide what stationary, handwriting, or writing implements to use.

There’s a lot of ins and outs to this app – why I’m doing it, what judgements I’m making about the people who do (or don’t) use it, and what it means in regards to the ways we communicate with each other today. Ultimately though, I’m looking at it, as I think most people still look at technology, from the “black box” angle.

I’ll try to explain – I’ve started reading a book called The Victorian Internet, all about the telegraph and how it changed society. What’s especially interesting to me are the fears people had about the new technology and what it would do to their message. I think the same fears apply to all communications technology, although it gets easier as we get more used to a particular medium. But the fact remains – you say what it is that you want to say in one end, something happens behind the curtain (emails get broken up into packets, voice is transmitted as frequency signals, etc) and then, eventually, your message is spat out the other end. There is always that fear of how your message will be respresented on the other end (think about a crummy fax machine or an email app that doesn’t do proper line breaks) but we are at the mercy of these technologies and constantly use them anyway. In this case, I like to think of myself as “the man behind the curtain” and hope that people will both participate by offering as much information as they want on the input end, but ultimately resigning themselves to the fact that I (the “technology”) will actually control how it looks in the output end.

So next up, in addition to building the actual site where people can choose the options they want for their letter, is to start putting the options together, and “curating” them, if you will. This means one of my favorite activities – a trip to the paper store!