Hippo Dignity

My New Year’s resolution to post to my blog more often was quickly challenged by my ongoing battle royale with the office cold, which has been epic. Thus I didn’t have a chance to post a timely link to Clive Thompson’s terrific piece on the problems with computerized voting machines - luckily, now the NYT archive is free, and Clive handily posted the piece to his blog.

It was a typically Clivean excellent piece - full of great details, good explanations, and terrific quotes. No one who works with computers could have failed to have a chill run up their spine reading this:

When a county buys touch-screen voting machines, its elections director becomes, as Warren Parish, a voting activist in Florida, told me, “the head of the largest I.T. department in their entire government, in charge of hundreds or thousands of new computer systems, without any training at all.”

My one disappointment with the piece is that he didn’t mention the other way people are working to ensure that votes are counted correctly — through design. The Design for Democracy project of AIGA, which featured among other contributors the work of my friend and neighbor Mary Quandt, has created best practices for polling place and ballot design, from a visual and information design standpoint. Their work has been accepted as official guidelines by the federal Elections Assistance Committee, and AIGA continues to work with individual states (including, yes, Florida), to make their ballots and polling place instructions easier to read and understand. Reliable voting machines are important, but a butterfly ballot could still screw up even the most technologically perfect election.

Happy birthday to my niecelets, who are three years old today, and not so small anymore. I spoke to them on the phone today, and they both wished me a happy birthday too, so we’re even.

(Also, my sister related back the best comment ever, when she took her always-up hair down: “Mommy, you have hair like Aunt Michele!” Those girls understand a trademark look when they see one.)

Vacation culinaria

Originally uploaded by michelet.



Over the past week, I’ve been mostly hanging out at home, getting reacquainted with my apartment after a long and stressful last quarter of last year. When I spend time at home, taking care of the place, the urge to cook mostly just shows up by itself, and the last few days I have been cooking up a storm — my freezer now has oatmeal breakfast clafoutis, French lentil soup, and mini leatloaves made entirely with farmer’s market and other locally grown meat (so, so good.) A few of the dishes that never made the freezer were a white chili that improved markedly once it had sat in the fridge overnight, and this “pizza” on a whole wheat pita.

Riffing off of a cookbook recipe and my favorite pizza at Amorina, I caramelized half a thinly-sliced onion with some dried thyme, and at the very end added one chunked-up cremini mushroom to soften it. I put those on the pita with some mozzarella, a couple of pitted olives, and some marinated artichoke heart pieces. Ten minutes in the oven and it was delicious — and, I thought, lovely. Here’s hoping 2008 stays so satisfying.

For myself, I’ll be continuing to read The Arsonists’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, which is, fear not, a novel. But if you’re looking for some Awesome Design reading, you could do worse than Five Reasons Why The iPhone Is Older Than You Think, which was written by my boss and makes reference to some findings from a research project I led. I also recently had my mind blown by The Sound of Interaction Design, which manages to combine principles for good design for interactive products with The Sound of Music. Goddamn clever British people.

For those of you observing Yom Kippur, an easy fast, and a happy and a healthy New Year. Everyone else, have a great weekend, and eat something really fattening and greasy for me!

Dramatis Personae: Me and Lisa, who have had tickets since February, and Max, who delightfully was available to step in when Lisa’s mother couldn’t use her ticket.

Max: I… I just saw Ian McKellen’s bits.
Me: You really didn’t read any coverage of this play, did you?
Max: You mean, you knew?
Lisa: It’s been in all the articles.
Max: Was that why you bought the tickets?

Recently, I had to write a bio for a not-work project I’m doing. I’m doing interaction design for the project, but I’m doing it for free in my (hah!) spare time, and I don’t want it to seem like my employers are involved or endorsing it. So I left out their name and what I’ve done for them, and I sent the draft to Shana, my PR go-to person. She made a couple of minor edits, and then said, “OK, you don’t want to mention your job, but don’t you want to talk about what you do?”

I said, “I did! It’s right there in the first sentence! ‘Michele Tepper is a digital interaction designer and usability expert.’”

She said, “Yeah. I don’t really know what that means, and I’ve been listening to you talk about it for years.”

This is an interesting problem — sure, good design is (usually) invisible, but if you don’t know what sort of design it is that you need, how can know how to ask for it? No one but my sister goes to the legal site she told me about, where she consistently chooses the wrong button because of where it’s placed, and thinks, “what this site needs is an interaction designer.” Also, I think “interaction design” sounds too much like “dancing about architecture,” to be honest. But what are the better options? My current job title, “design analyst,” sounds like I have coffee makers in once a week to obsess about why they aren’t better liked. “Information architecture” is a little ponderous and not, in this age of rich internet applications, fully descriptive of what I do anymore — sorry, Lou. “User experience designer” sounds like marketing. My mom once bragged that I was her “interface guru,” but as much as I loved that, I don’t think it’ll catch on.*

So I was intrigued by Alex Ross (the critic, not the artist, you nerds) and his attempt last year to rebrand classical music as awesome music. How excellent is that? It’s even finally gotten some traction, with this weekend’s Awesome Music Live concert. Don’t worry, newcomers! It’s not boring, it’s not incomprehensible: it’s awesome! I think when talking to non-technical audiences, I’m going to try referring to what I do as “awesome design” — it won’t be any more misunderstood than anything else, and it might lead to some good and fruitful conversations.

*And yes, I am aware of the irony of the group of people charged with making things easier to use and understand being unable to decide what to call themselves as a group, but I think that’s actually a condition of having a large group of people who care deeply about the nuances of labeling: something like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, except without all that math.

I don’t know what it says about me that I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt for the Steamfitters Union and misread it as the Spamfilters Union. But I know it can’t be good.

So, my timing in posting about changing distribution models turned out to be pretty good after all, because today Steve Jobs announced the iTunes integration deal with Starbucks.

Once again, Maura is right: this is a super-smart deal. First, Apple and Starbucks are aiming for much the same middle-class, style-and-status-conscious audience, and they are both trying to sell that audience music. Second, both the iTunes store and Starbucks have gotten into the business of not just selling music, but packaging up music on their own — the “iTunes exclusives” for ITMS, and the Hear Music label for Starbucks. Integrate the two, and you’ve got a fairly healthy, easy-to-use distribution channel that totally sidesteps the majors — and which will make Starbucks’s Hear Music label only more appealing to the sort of former Top 10 stars the labels hideously call “legacy artists.” (The sort of people who buy legacy artists tend o be older, and also, therefore less likely to be comfortable with tools like BitTorrent.)

New distribution channels, new models, new ways of thinking about selling music. You knew they were going to have to come from outsiders, but I didn’t expect them to come with my double tall soy latte.

ObDisclaimer: GE, NBCU’s parent company, is a client of my employer’s, but my opinions are my own, and not those of anyone I work for or with.

It’s an interesting coincidence that two stories about big changes at media companies happened to hit at just about the same time. Lynn Hirschberg’s profile of Rick Rubin must have been in the works at the NYT magazine for quite literally months — they can’t have known that NBCUniversal would sever its relationship with iTunes at the very same time their story hit the streets. But it’s a sweet coincidence, because both of these stories are, in a way, about the same thing: the failure of the big media conglomerates to know how to deal with the way digital distribution is ripping a hole in their traditional profit model.
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Apologies to anyone getting spammed by my testing out of Word Press 2.2 themes: I can’t find a way to browse options without installing them. Next on the plate is getting the del.icio.us, last.fm, and twitter widgets up, for all your stalkery needs.