…and, on a much lighter note, a video that finally reveals what all of post-Enlightenment culture has been leading up to, had we but known it: a combination Roomba/animatronic chimp ape.
As my coworker Josh put it, this makes you want to run out and buy both of them, together.
Their own contemporaries
In the past week, I have had both an MRI and a CAT scan (both for entirely unthreatening conditions, worry not). So I feel qualified to tell you that if you have a choice between the two, choose a CAT scan — it’s faster, quieter, and you get to ride back and forth on the little exam table inside something that strongly resembles a donut.
The MRI machine, on the other hand, is loud, oppressively small, and takes a lot longer. It did, however, give me time to think about Gertrude Stein.
In Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein talks about flying all over America during the book tour for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and looking down from the plane.
Quarter sections make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line of Masson was there the mixed line of Picasso coming and coming again and following itself into a beginning was there and the simple solution of Braque was there…. [I] always wanted the front seat so I could look down and what is the use, the earth does look like that and even if none of them had seen it and they had not very likely had not but since every one was going to see it they had to see it like that.Or, as she put it in an earlier lecture, “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.” Why was I thinking about this? Well, the MRI is, as I said, loud. But it was loud in a particular way — a persistent thunk thunk thunk, with a ch-ch-ch-ch-ch bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp layered on top of it at irregular intervals and varying pitches for the bomp. That is, it sounded a lot like a minimalist composition. It wasn’t a particularly good minimalist piece of music: it was more like a first draft by a novice composer. But it brought home to me how much Reich and Glass and all the rest were completely of their time, in all the ways Stein was talking about. And in the same way that when Stein looked down from an airplane and could see art where others saw an incomprehensible otherness, I owe the hours I’ve spent with Glass and Reich for the ability to find beauty while lying utterly still in a magnetic-resonance imaging chamber for half an hour as my arms and legs slowly fell asleep.
Product launch
Here is how crazy last week was — there was something even better than seeing the Pogues live in concert.
And that was the launch of the IQ MAX, the new turret (a specialized financial trading-floor communication system) from IPC. I was lucky enough to be part of the team of industrial and interaction designers at frog who spent most of 2005 working with IPC to understand and design for the intense communication needs of financial traders. The whole frog team was invited to the launch party, which was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in the Time-Warner building, and everyone who we’d worked with on the IPC side was there as well. (Missing in action were the extremely flattering David, who was lured west by the call of the open road and new information visualization problems to solve, and Ian, who was en route to a meeting on another continent.)
It’s a rush to finish a project and see the final result go live. It turns out that it’s even more of a rush to see a final physical product: the difference between an appearance model and the final object is so much stronger. It’s three times the rush to be at a fancy party, listening to salespeople touting the improved user interface as a sales point.
(The Hats reading this will be amused to know that one of the sample names on the prototypes we produced was Ewan Kirk, Goldman Sachs. Which reminds me, I owe him an email.)
IPC’s user-centered development process, and their work with frog, is already getting press: Businessweek Online interviewed Michael Speranza from IPC and frog creative director Robert Fabricant for a piece that went live the day the turret launched. A white paper on our internal process is, I know, being written, and if it’s made public I’ll post the URL here as well.
What’s my job again?
For the “please come up with a name for my profession” files, from a posting to the NYCCHI list: “whether you call yourself an information architect, experience planner, interaction designer, or customer anthropologist, we’ve probably got a position that would fit you well.”
Sadly, I probably could make an argument for all of those as separate positions in the right sort of organization, though I hope I never, ever use the title “customer anthropologist” unironically.
The Pogues, New York 3/16
The Pogues, New York 3/16 I had a seriously bipolar week last week — some ridiculously high highs and some nastily low lows — but one of the highest points of all was getting to attend the first New York show of the reunited Pogues’ tour. (Well, not quite all the Pogues reunited. My college friend Kenji would say that the Pogues without Cait O’Riordan is just a bunch of drunk Irish guys, and much as it pains me to admit it, he has a point, except for the part where they’re not all Irish.) Shane MacGowan is heavier now, and has longer hair — he looks kind of like Bono’s older brother, if Bono’s older brother was a toothless alcoholic. I could understand maybe half of what he was saying, and I was doing better than most of the people around me. But he is still a rock star: you couldn’t take your eyes off him when he was on stage. And he can still sing, and he still has that banshee howl. And the band was playing fierce and hard, and they were all happy to be there, and when the audience howled for “Fairytale of New York” Jem Finer’s daughter came out to sing the female part, and she and Shane danced across the stage together while fake snow fell in the Nokia Theater. It was nostalgia, and celebration, and bacchanal and sadness all mixed in together, the way the Pogues have always been, and it was wonderful to be a part of it, even fifteen years later.