Second Verse

My slides from Adaptive Path’s Managing Experience [MX '08] conference are up over at Slideshare.

I’ve realized a couple things over the past year. The big one is that I like to use abstractions to make certain things make sense to myself - and then use them to explain things to others. I also tend to return frequently to my time as a line cook at Aqua here in San Francisco for inspiration. My talk at MX reflected both of these threads.

I took the Glushko and Tabbas paper as a starting point, and discussed service/customer experience design from the perspective of the restauranteur. The needs and capabilities of the front and back of the house must be managed and balanced to provide a complete and compelling experience for diners - something I think everyone struggling with getting front and back stage organizations to cooperate could learn from.

There will be MP3s available at some point, and I’ll link to them when they’re up. For the time being, enjoy the slides. [ed note - image credits are all at the end, Keynote builds all got flattened, and the
typography is Whitney and Archer, both from the inimitable Hoefler & Frere-Jones]

Really quickly, I want to put up a link to the whitepaper I referenced during my MX talk today. Sometime between now and getting back from New Orleans next week, I’ll try to get the slides up on SlideShare, and sort out when the video will be live.

Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design
Robert J. Glushko, UC Berkeley
Lindsay Tabas, UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT:
Service management and design has thus far primarily focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is determined by the customer during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back-stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

I while back I blogged about the US Government’s approved emblems, a moderately popular post for Second Verse. This article in the NY Times today caught my interest in a similar way; it details an attempt by Trevor Paglen to decode the nature and missions of a variety of military “black budget” operations based on some of the only public information that’s available about them: their patches. Paglen has done some work to decrypt the imagery and (really, really poorly written) Latin slogans of these shrouded projects’ emblems. I find the whole concept deliciously intriguing.

I just bought his book, the whimsically titled “I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me” off of Amazon. Here’s hoping I get a chance to write it up soon.

Over at the AP blog, I put some excerpts from my interview with Adaptive Path’s good friend Matt Jones of Dopplr. Peter suggested that I use my personal blog for the “DVD extras” (as he put it), so I’m posting the entire 2 hour IM interview here. It’s long, it’s weird, and it was seriously a lot of fun. I hope you dig it.

And oh, hey, if you decide to register for MX, be sure to use FORF as your registration code (as in “Friend of Ryan Freitas”) for an additional 10% off!

Interview with Matt Jones

Ryan Freitas: Thank you for agreeing to chat prior to your appearance at MX next month.

Matt Jones: No problem! Or ‘np’ as they say on the internet.

RF: Will the talk you’re doing be similar to your IXDA presentation?

MJ: My IxDA presentation was about process and form in a way - how my way of working has been changed by new tools and new ways of developing. It was also about the nature of designing services that have a geospatial and time-based component. Hence it’s title “Designing for Spacetime.”

RF: I enjoyed the hell out of that talk.

MJ: Thanks! My MX talk will be more generally about the social component.

RF: Oh good. That’s actually part of your talk that I wanted to discuss.

MJ: But! It’s hard to get me off the spacetime subject… It’s a continuum…

RF: Of course. And we’ll get to THAT too. But I wanted to get deeper into something you mentioned in your “Spacetime” talk… because you actually did me a huge favor by mentioning Jyri Engestrom and “social objects.” Discussion of social objects actually gets us to Grant Morrison in two moves. [smile]

MJ: Yahtzee!

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Dan’s post got me thinking I should write up where I’ll be speaking and attending in the next few months. I’ve been so buried on the Project I Can’t Talk About that my details are still a little hazy. I was actually on the fence about attending the next An Event Apart in New Orleans, and then Brian Oberkirch (who’ll be speaking there) wrote the following:

Need more incentive to come to New Orleans in April? Jasmine, sweet olive, honeysuckle, street car rides down St. Charles to Audubon Park, boiled crawfish at Frankie & Johnny’s, 5 napkin roast beef po boys, Liuzza’s, Mandina’s, Jacques-Imo’s, the Carousel Bar, loa, Pimm’s @ Napoleon House, a gulf coast lingering slow night on the porch at the Columns. Beignets. Streets full of people more colorful than what you got in your town . (Just don’t bet them. They *can* tell you where you got your shoes.) Burgers at Port of Call after you drink too many touristy drinks like hurricanes & hand grenades. Faulkner House books. The Maple Leaf Bar. There’s a million of em, baby, you just got to come on down.

How can I resist a sales pitch like that? Expect to see me there. If you’re attending, tell me you read Second Verse and I’ll buy you a Sazerac.

… it’s about information design. Just let me say that up front.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has released a report on recent anti-insurgent activity in Iraq. The report is provided in a slide show format, and I downloaded it after seeing a preview of the slides depicted below. I find them visually striking - the reduction in orange/red blooms across the map as time passes is hard to misread, given any context for what has happened in the last 9 months.

Which is why the rest of the report is such a shocking disappointment. Horribly overcrowded text, meaningless chart junk and worse all combine to muddy and obscure what could be vital information for policy makers and the general public. All of it is just too reminiscent of Tufte’s take on the Challenger disaster for my taste.

I’m not entirely certain why I’m posting this here - my parents always tried to get me to avoid talking politics in polite company. But I suppose I’m hoping its of interest to others, primarily those whose work relies on the clear communication of important information. This would be the latest in a long line of examples of what to avoid when you want people to walk away with a clear understanding of what you’re trying to tell them.

I enjoyed the hell out of Michael Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.” I thought it had one of modern fiction’s greatest character introductions, even.

But I swear, I think I’m gonna like the movie even more:

“Coens Take on Tale of Alternate Alaska”

Well, I do.

My friend Jason Li pointed me to the video for the New Pornographer’s “Myriad Harbor” - can’t believe I’d missed this gorgeously animated video. Hosted over at imeem, so I’m sorry I can’t embed it here. Go check it.

[update] According to the folks over at Drawn!, the “video is called ‘Hair Band’ and produced by Montreal production company, Fluorescent Hill.”

Found this morning:

[1] An article from the New York Times, “Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should.”

[2] A poem titled “Things” by Fleur Adcock, from Selected Poems. © Oxford University Press, 1986. (Heard on this morning’s Writer’s Almanac)

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse
and worse.