Printed Antimatter

It's the Titanic and the iceberg

You think hemp is a unique construction material for a boat? During WWII, Winston Churchill authorized the construction of a gargantuan aircraft carrier made of ice. (Actually, it was a blend of ice and wood pulp called pykrete, much stronger and resistant to melting.) The ship, dubbed the Habbakuk, was to be 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide, displacing 2 million tons. (By comparison, the largest ship around today is a 1,504-foot-long, 565,000 ton supertanker) And, oh yeah, the walls were to be 40 feet thick, making the damn thing invulnerable to gunfire or torpedoes.

It was brilliant idea, reversing the conventional wisdom of shipbuilding... If you build a hull out of metal, it has to be hollow to float, and when pierced by a torpedo, the hull will fill up and sink. So why not build a hull out of a solid material that floats no matter what, and is way more plentiful? That kind of sideways thinking is the hallmark of true innovation.

A prototype was built in Canada, but the Habbakuk itself was never begun, for a few reasons: It would have taken 8,000 men 8 months to complete; the amount of wood pulp needed for that much pykrete was prohibitive; and the war started turning around for the Allies anyway. But you have to give these people credit for thinking outside the icebox. (It hurt just to type that.)

For more about this fascinating project:
The ubiquitous Wikipedia
A great essay from Cabinet magazine
Shipwreck Central explores the remains of the prototype

.mobi: Smart idea, dumb suffix

Go read this post by my colleague Michal Lev-Ram on the new .mobi top-level domain. I left a brilliant, incisive comment for her which included this excerpt:

I welcome the .mobi domain, and hope to see it achieve widespread usage. It will be nice to know that, whichever website you want to view on your phone, if you just change the TLD to .mobi things will be copacetic. My main complaint is that ".mobi" is probably the stupidest suffix they could have come up with.

I want to elaborate on this from a design perspective: Creating a top-level domain for mobile-device-optimized sites is a great usability decision. Currently many websites have mobile incarnations, but they use inconsistent URLs. For instance, while Google uses http://www.google.com/mobile/, the Onion uses http://mobile.theonion.com. And if you don't know the URL, you can't always find it easily either-- to get to Google's mobile page, you have to click through a pop-up box that doesn't pop up on my Sidekick. As for the Onion-- there is no link on its main page that leads anywhere to the mobile version. In fact, the only reason I know the URL is because it is pre-installed in my Sidekick's bookmarks.

This unfriendliness is a barrier to the usefulness of mobile browsing. Widespread adoption of .mobi will break that barrier down, by introducing simplicity and consistency.

Critics say that well-designed websites should automatically scale themselves to the device on which you're viewing them. I think that's a great idea, but considering that half the websites I visit don't even work properly on Safari-- including the site I'm using to write this post-- I'm not holding my breath.

As for the suffix, which sounds stupid and will launch a thousand dick jokes, I propose that it should be shortened to ".mo". Of course, we'd have to buy it from Macau, but then they can buy ".mac" from Apple.

Parking is such sweet sorrow

Typical parking for San Francisco
Originally uploaded by keithwanders.

This annoys me.

A new mall and Bloomingdale's store, opening today in downtown San Francisco, will lure big crowds to the shops, restaurants and movie theaters. But visitors also could encounter traffic jams and parking shortages -- at least during the holidays and big events at Moscone Center...

No new parking was built to accommodate the 25 million people a year expected to visit the mall, which has tripled in size. The decision not to add parking is in keeping with the city's "transit first" policy, which encourages the use of public transportation.

I won't go off on too much of a rant here but this city does not encourage the use of public transit so much as it discourages driving. It's a no-carrot, all-stick approach. Maybe I'm spoiled from having grown up in New York City, but our transit system here does not possess a fraction of NYC's utility, convenience, or reach. (Although parts of it may be lovely.)

Bloomingdale's is going to be a destination for shoppers from all over the Bay Area. People who live outside of SF will not heed SF's transit-only imperative, and they are going to drive here. When they do, they will find that parking lots are packed and prices have been jacked up to height-of-dot-com-bubble levels-- but that will not convince them to take a 2-hour bus-and-BART odyssey with fifty pounds of shopping next time.

Then there's this graphic, which shows all the parking lots within a ten minute walk of the new store. I'm a swarthy, 6' 1" guy from NYC, and I wouldn't park in half of the encircled area. The idea of middle-aged matrons carrying thousands of dollars of purchases through the scummiest parts of the Tenderloin and SOMA would be laughable, if not for all the muggings and killings that will ensue.

I'm not a city planner, but I am a designer, and design is all about problem solving. And I can tell you, the way to solve a problem is to address it, not ignore it and hope that the negative consequences nudge other people into the behavior you prefer.

If you disagree with my take, please take a minute to tell me why in the comments. If there's some factor I'm not considering, I'd like to know.

11 Alive!

Speaking of TV: Man, this station identification for WPIX channel 11 brings back memories of my childhood spent in front of a TV in Queens. Even as a kid I found the aesthetics of the '70s hateful-- Rainbows and grooviness and schmaltzy music. But if this ran now it would be considered the coolest thing on TV.

This also reminded me of "TV PIXX," a call-in videogame for which you would cry "pixx pixx pixx PIXX" over the phone and someone on the other end would press the fire button on an Intellivision game for you.

How TV ads will survive the post-TiVo era (Hint: the networks are already doing it)

The fate of the 30-second spot in the post- TiVo world is quite the hot topic. The New York Times thinks it will survive by narrowly targeting audiences. Douglas Rushkoff thinks it will be replaced by sponsored programming. Product-placement company NextMedium thinks it will be supplanted by... wait for it... product placement. My brother, Chief Marketing Officer for Fireman's Fund, thinks it will need to get a lot more entertaining.

Fox has the opposite idea. They think it needs to get a lot more boring.

U.K. advertisements for Fox's new drama, "Brotherhood," which premieres in Britain in October, simply shows an image of Providence, R.I., where the show is set, and the program's logo... Viewers fast-forwarding through the ad would see the image for a few seconds; those watching it normally would hear dialogue from the show in the background.

What Fox may not realize is that, by doing so, they are merely bringing television advertising full circle:

On July 1, 1941, the New York television station WNBT-TV interrupted its normal viewing to show, without comment, a Bulova watch ticking. For sixty seconds the watch ticked away mysteriously, then the picture faded and normal programming resumed. It wasn’t much, but it was the first television commercial. --Bill Bryson, Made in America

Anyway, the idea that Fox has is to make a TV spot that is intelligible to DVR users yet of interest to non-. I have not seen this spot, but I get the feeling it will fail on the second count. Television ads depend on catching one's attention, and a static image for 30 seconds is not going to cut it, unless that's some kick-ass dialogue.

Look after the jump for ideas that would work...

The perfect way to control speeding

I know I promised to continue the blogs vs. magazines bit I started yesterday, and I will. but first I wanted to share something cool.

There are a couple of these radar speed signs on Market Street between my home and my office, and I have to say, I find them very helpful. For one, it makes my commute more fun, as I try to see how high I can make the number go. Two, when I drive by one, it spares me from having to look down at my dashboard to see how fast I am going, saving wear and tear on the dashboard. It's handy, I guess, but I wish it told me something more useful, like whether it's time to change my oil.

Seriously, though, these radar signs are just one vector in the science of "traffic calming," which I believe is the British phrase for "making sure asshole drivers don't break the god damned sound barrier rocketing through residential areas." Important stuff, to be sure, which is why I'm amazed that, in this case, the task is left to the most ineffectual, passive-aggressive way of enforcing the speed limit there is.

THE PARABLE OF THE RADAR SPEED SIGN
Me: [drives past sign at 33 mph]
Sign: You know, the speed limit here is 30. But just so you know, you're going 33. I'm just saying, is all. You can do whatever you want, I'm not here to judge. But you were going 33. And the speed limit is 30.
Me: Whatever. [continues on at 33]

It was difficult for me to imagine that this approach to traffic calming would work, as most people know they're speeding and don't care, and the radar sign offers no disincentive. I tried Googling up some stats on their effectiveness, but no luck; all I found was a bunch of pages saying, "yeah, sure, they're effective"-- mostly from the sites of radar sign manufacturers. (That's as deep as I searched-- I'm a creative director, not a reporter, and all I know how to do is Google).

Check after the jump for techniques that work better...

Why blogs will be the end of Business 2.0 as we know it (part 1)

Much has been made of the end of print and I'm not going to rehash it all. But here's a simplistic outline:

1. Printing is expensive, making paper is expensive and polluting, and shipping paper you printed something on is expensive, polluting, and slow.
2. Soon everyone will have super-fast wireless internet all the time forever.
3. Economics will dictate that we all stop printing entirely and put everything on the internet.

The argument against it goes something like this:

1. Books are warm and cuddly, computers are not.
2. Books don't need batteries, they're cheap and sturdy, and printed pages look better than any screen.
3. And besides, everyone's been reading books all their lives and they're not going to stop now.

Both arguments have good points but both are myopic (that's right, I have a black belt in knocking down strawmen). The pro end-of-print contingent seems to think that a superior medium will completely and inevitably supplant the previous medium. While it's true that you don't see many wax cylinders these days and the telegram just went extinct, there are many media that learned to adjust to their new niches. Film did not supplant theater, broadcast TV did not supplant film, videotapes did not supplant broadcast TV, and radio has survived it all. (Video did not kill the radio star, it just made the radio star into Rush Limbaugh.)

Meanwhile the pro-book contingent suffers from a lack of imagination on this topic:

"A book, you don't need to plug it in, it's very convenient. Also people are very comfortable with it," says best-selling Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She believes that the printed book is here to stay, "they will. Trust me on this."

She seems to be forgetting that there's a whole crop of children who have never known life without the internet. They've grown up with mp3 players, cell phones, and GameBoys clutched in their sweaty paws. They'll switch to e-Books with no problem when the time comes (and remember to plug them in).

But where does this leave magazines? Swarming onto the net, or clinging to dead trees? Find out after the jump.

:-) turns 24

So it turns out the original smiley emoticon was invented 24 years ago yesterday to signify joke postings on an online bulletin board (at Carnegie Mellon University, which I briefly attended). Someone made a deadpan joke about a chemical spill in an elevator, which was taken seriously by someone else, triggering much caterwauling and gnashing of teeth. The smiley was meant to prevent such misunderstandings in the future, so really, it's a safety measure!

Yeah, the smiley is annoying and insipid, and the recent graphic updates are horribly worse. But it's pretty fascinating that when presented with a limited means of communications-- i.e. an ASCII-text-only bulletin board-- people were able to repurpose existing symbols to have an almost immediately-evident new meaning, compensating for said limitations. Emoticons would have been perfect for telegraphy's charge-per-word model, except that telegrams counted each punctuation mark as a word.

I LOVE YOU TOO COLON HYPHEN CLOSE PARENTHESIS STOP

It's also interesting that the smiley was preceded by another, much lamer ASCII smile icon: \__/ Perhaps one could use it today to signify "washtub."

Next post will be meatier, but this one had a time peg ;-)

The most important thing in the world

This blog is about design, which is the most important thing in the world. Bullshit, you say? Take a look around you. The letters that make up the words you're reading, the browser you're reading them on-- they were designed. This computer you're sitting at, the chair you're sitting on, the pants you're sitting in-- all that was designed. The room you're in, the building it's in, the city the building is in-- all designed. Everything man-made is by definition designed, and even some things that are not: The fruits and vegetables you eat are the result of directed breeding, not to mention your dog. You can't even escape design by fleeing into nature; you'll still be carrying it with you in your hiking shoes and your canteen. Design choices influence every experience you have, except maybe transcendental meditation. But even then, you'll probably be wishing you had that new Eco-Gel™ yoga mat.

So since everything is designed, this blog is about everything. But I'll be looking at everything from a critical, design-oriented point of view; figuring out what makes things successful and what makes things crap. With luck, my bloviation will turn up some usable lessons that you can apply to your next project or venture.

Stay tuned for my next post, in which I discuss why blogging is going to put me out of a job.