Hippo Dignity

For a “oh, that’s where they are now! no surprise there” moment for the Old Hats in the house, check out this news update:

The Weekly Standard’s Reliable Sources

No further comment is needed, I think.  Though Lord knows it’s tempting.

Breaking a too-long radio silence born of work stress…

Anyhow, leading indicator: SMSes in the office.  Intra-office SMSing.  Why?  You may step away from your computer, but you always have your phone with you.

(Other contributory factors: European coworkers, large enough office to make running all over looking for someone a drag, smartphones assigned to all senior managers.  But give it five three years, you’ll be doing it too.)

In the quite literally mind-bending Devorah Sperber exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, in front of “After Picasso (Gertrude Stein).” Dramatis personæ: two older women, part of the First Saturday crowd.

Woman #1: Do you think she made that herself?
Woman #2: The artist?
Woman #1: Gertrude Stein.
Woman #2: (a bit nonplussed) No, that’s not… Anyway, isn’t she dead?
Woman #1: That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have made this.

At this point, I had to walk away.

In my almost-nonexistent standing as a Stein Expert, or at least a person who has read more Gertrude Stein than most, I think she would like the piece, as long as she saw it as a celebration of Picasso rather than a critique of him. I don’t think the work necessarily takes a stand on Picasso either way. But I do that that Sperber’s use of spools of sewing thread, the tools of a feminized craft, to revisit masterworks of the western art canon is a form of feminist critique about a billion times subtler and more interesting than most of what I saw in the Global Feminisms exhibit, which felt almost unbearably obvious and dated. (The Kara Walker wall being a notable exception - I always forget how tremendous her work is in person. Remind me next time, will you?)

This weekend, I was honored to be an invited speaker at the IDSA North-east Division’s regional conference, which was held at the Rhode Island School of Design. Woot! It’s always nice to revisit College Hill — I went to Brown, so I get all nostalgic about my theory-head SGML-coding 21-year-old self, who I think would be surprised but not disappointed to learn that the SGML has turned out to be at least as important in my life as the theory.

Highlights of the bits of the conference I was able to attend:

• Hearing Jon Kolko tell an audience of industrial designers and ID students that the really cool new design job to aim for was something called “information architect.” I am so telling all my ID colleagues.
• Allen Chochinov of Core77’s line “if you’re as smart as you bill you are,” which I am, I warn you all now, stealing.
• The conversation I had with three-fourths of the IxDA lunchtime panel members on the ride up, which was at least as enlightening as their pretty terrific panel was.

It was all really interesting, and it would have been nice to stay, but it was, I have to admit, even nicer to have an excuse to visit Harry and his fantastic crew in their New England digs. I was treated to a performance of Mona’s “Peter Rabbit” musical (”Stunning!” - The New York Times) and a trip to the town fair. Isabel even demanded to sit next to me at dinner, which I hope means we are no longer archnemesises.

But that was not the high point. Oh, no. The high point was, after a twelve-year battle over which was the correct version of the song, getting to sing “Little Rabbit Foo-Foo” with Mona Teasley as her dad weakly attempted to insist that it was supposed to be “Bunny.”

“You are wrong, Daddy,” said Mona.

“This just gets better and better,” said Harry.

“And Michele is right. Girls rock, and boys do not.”

She’s a genius, I tell you. A genius.

When I was in college, and working as a temp in midtown over the summer, I would take lunches sometimes in the public space in the ground floor of the Philip Morris building.  There was a gallery associated with some New York museum, I forget which, though I remember the Laurie Anderson retrospective that was hung there.  The space also had a nice set of steps well-proportioned for sitting and reading, and tables where one could sit and eat. I think the space is still open to the public, although it’s now the Altria Group building, you could go check it out for yourself.

Anyway, I worked a series of lame temp jobs in that general area, and would go there for lunch whenever I could, so I can’t tell you exactly when this happened.  But one day, my head was still half in the book I’d been reading as I walked towards the stairs and the door, and I didn’t notice the guy sitting on the steps until I’d tripped over his foot.

“Oh!” I said when I recovered.  “I’m –”

And then I stopped.  Because I realized I’d tripped over Kurt Vonnegut.

Now, when you trip over some random man’s foot in the lobby of the Philip Morris building, you don’t expect it to be the author whose books you collected in a series of matched trade paperbacks through high school and into college.  And when you’re as lousy at face recognition as I am, you certainly don’t expect to know that person on sight.

I was struck utterly dumb.  He smiled, did one of those “don’t worry about it” nod things, and I walked off on my way.  I spent most of the rest of the day alternating between wishing I’d said something more and knowing that perhaps that wouldn’t have been the right moment to say anything anyhow.

What strikes me now, mumblety-odd years on and not having thought of that story in years, is not just the sweetly New York oddity of authors being so thick on the ground that one is tripping over them, but how nice he was about the whole thing, the getting overlooked and then the starstruck silence.  He was a mensch, take him all in all.  I still have a couple of those trade paperbacks, too.

1.  The strip is designed to keep you inside casinos.  Inside my hotel (the Flamingo, because we information architects like to kick it old-school), every path you can take is designed to take you through or into a casino.  The rooms don’t even have those terrible hotel-room coffee makers, which I presume is to get you downstairs, near where you could spend money, without caffeine.   It’s bizarrely fascinating.

2.  The keynote speaker at the conference has an office literally down the block from where I work.  I walk past his building at least a couple of times a week.  And yet I don’t think I would ever have just walked in to say hello.  Now we’ve exchanged cards, and I’m hoping he or someone from his firm will come address our brown-bag series in the works.
3. Steven, in comments to my last post, directed me to the geeky story behind the Bellagio water display, which has made me unreasonably happy.  Thank you, Steven!

4. I’ve seen the room where I’m presenting.  I’m definitely going to need to run for a presentation-clicker.  (I bought one in New York, which is… um, I think still on my bed at home.)

If I had to choose, I don’t think my first viewing of the Las Vegas strip would have been jet-lagged and stomach-achey from a turbulent flight.  Still, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have been overwhelming anyway.  And this from a woman who functions at her best in New York.

The Bellagio water spectacle, so beautifully captured at the end of Ocean’s 11, is even more impressive visually in person, but it’s spoiled by being choreographed to “I’m Proud to Be An American.”  I have been reminded more than once on this trip so far how different New York is from most of the rest of the country, but I’m in the sort of mood where that seems pretty all right.

I may end up posting some notes from the conference here: apologies in advance if your geekiness doesn’t intersect with mine.

Our office hosted a discussion on designing for the body tonight , featuring the founders and presidents of two design companies — one that makes sex toys, one that makes body armor. It was an interesting discussion; the similarities of the stories of starting the businesses and the design challenges they faced was actually thought-provoking in itself. And the discussion of how the things we carry, or the things we use on our bodies, become extensions of our selves tied into some other things I’ve been thinking about, and is going to rattle around in my head for a while.

There were samples of both firms’ work out in the studio for us, and later the event attendees, to see. It made for an interesting late afternoon. Luckily, only the body armor was ever tried on.

Bulletproof Boss
Originally uploaded by ianonymous.

(Seriously, I’m told that vest can stop rifle fire.)

My flashback to the old Lingua Franca site on first laying eyes on the new New Yorker site now makes even more sense — I discovered, via Emdashes, that both were designed by the same people.

Though it’s amazing how much more design you can get out of a 1024 screen and a Condé Nast budget…

So the first big news out of SXSW Interactive this year seems to be that Twitter has hit some sort of adoption tipping point: In Ross Mayfield’s phrase, it’s “tipped the tuna.”

Twitter is a presence publisher: it asks you “what are you doing now?” and you tell it. It, in turn, tells your friends, or the whole world, if you make your posts public. Your friends can receive your Twitter posts via IM, SMS, web, or my preferred method, the Mac-only Twitterific app.

When I’ve been asked to describe Twitter, I call it “Dodgeball for people who don’t go out.” (And the fact that I can use that description tells you something about the tech-nerd quotient of the people asking the question.) Dodgeball is all about the ephemeral moment: we’re here now, come join us. Twitter is a bit more stateful: it could be Dodgeball-esque, but the people on my friends list use mostly for less pressing things — for updates on their moods, to describe a sky, and even for advice and a sort of asynchronous group chat.

However, Twitter is also apparently very useful as a Dodgeball-type app at a conference like SXSW, even though there is a Dodgeball Austin, and I wonder in fact if the long lagtime as Dodgeball has gotten integrated into Google will end up working against it: I’m not sure why it left the space for Twitter to move into.

I tried getting Twitter on my phone, on the Dodgeball model, and had to turn it off: it was making me crazy. I need to know that Clive is at his local New York bar right now: I do not need to be interrupted on the street to know that Emily in LA is packing for a trip. (Sorry, honey.) Having Twitter on my desktop makes a lot more sense — it provides a light-weight, low-cost way to check in with the world outside my workspace.

Liz Lawley, a bigger Twitter fan than I am, says:

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage–personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages–into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

I’m not sure about either brilliant or fascinating there, myself, but I know this much: despite all the other presence indicators available to me, I haven’t turned it off yet. For the rest, I’ll have to see.

Note: I’m michelet on Twitter if you’re interested, or want to add me as a friend. I’m not a hugely active poster, as you might have guessed from the above, but reading my previous “twitters” did remind me I still haven’t posted here about The Coast of Utopia. Maybe when I start procrastinating tomorrow, which I’ve taken off to finish my IA Summit talk…