Mike Kruzeniski's blog

The Talented Mr. Bleecker

2007-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

Brilliant ideas excerpted from lunch with Julian yesterday:

American/Japanese crossover restaurants
American food served like sushi. Tiny little burgers, pizzas and apple pies.
Sushi served 'american' style: big, and eaten with two hands. Imagine a 10oz Toro patty on rice buns.

Improving search
The Google search algorithm should really take into account birth order and your bench press. (i kind of get annoyed when my little brother occasionally pops to the top of a 'Kruzeniski' query)

Apple Tax

2007-11-30T10:28:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I posted a photo on Flickr of my less than modest iPod collection, which prompted a question from my French ~~Canadian~~ colleague Raphael:

I didn’t want to know, but that’s usually a good sign that I probably should. So, here goes:

I started buying music from iTunes in late 2005, and since then have spent $820.38. I started buying TV shows about a year ago and have since dropped $205.74 on 5 series season passes, a set of 15 Daily Show episodes, and other odd shows here and there. That brings my iTunes total to $1,026.12.

Now, devices. I bought my first iPod in the summer of 2003 (when I was interning at Microsoft – hey, the Zune wasn’t out yet!). Otherwise, the rest of the following were bought in the last 24 months. I’ve listed them in order of purchase.

15GB 3rd Gen iPod = $400
Power PC iMac = $1200
512MB 1st Gen iShuffle = $99
1GB 2nd Gen iShuffle = ~~$99~~ (it was a gift, so it doesn’t count)
8GB 2nd Gen iPod Nano = $250
Apple TV = $300
8GB iPhone = ~~$600~~ (paid for by my company, so again, doesn’t count)

And while it’s obviously not a device, but since I don’t really buy much Apple software, let’s throw OSX Leopard on the devices/product list.

OSX Leopard = $140 - $100 = $40 (I used my $100 iPhone rebate!)

That brings my devices total to $2,289. Add my iTunes bills and my grand Apple expenses total comes to $3,315.13

Now, if we divide that by the 3 years that I’ve been a customer, I on average send Apple $92.08 every month. This might seem like a lot, but my Apple “investment” really started growing when I cut off my Adelphia (now TimeWarner) cable TV. My cable bill, including $45 for internet, started off just shy of $100 a month but steadily increased to around $130 before I killed it. If I add my monthly Apple charge of $92.08 to my internet bill, I spend $137.08 monthly for my entire web & media content and players system.

A more fair comparison would really be to contrast just my iTunes TV content bills ($165.75 / 24 months = $8.57 per month!) to my old cable TV costs, but the players infrastructure I’ve bought to host the content isn’t insignificant. Even so, at worst, being an "early adopter" costs me extra $7.08 a month.

The Petrol Pump Problem

2007-10-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

The "petrol pump problem" emerged from a conversation with Jones a while back, and stems from a stupid error I found myself making at some gas stations.

Compare the pump above to the pump interface below, found at other stations:

The difference is small but significant. The first has large labels with smaller buttons above to select the petrol grade. The second example has large labels that are the buttons. The problem I was experiencing with the first example is not a positioning and/or manipulation problem familiar to common industrial ergonomics. By ergonomic measure the buttons are appropriately positioned on the pump. For the most part, they fit to me. The problem is that the label and button are separate. I want to them to be the same; I keep trying to press the label. The problem is one more familiar to software usability, and reminds me of the shift that has occurred on the web where the label is now usually the target. It's been a while since I've seen "for this, click here". "this" is generally the link itself. Indirect to direct manipulation.

The proliferation of touch in to personal devices and public interfaces is pushing that model out to the physical world. Perhaps its a sign that I spend too much time on the internet, but this is a shift I feel I've internalized and suspect others are as well: There are no more buttons, we expect everything to be its own button.

Do mobile phones dream of networked sheep?

2007-10-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not a morning person, and in that gradual stage between sleep and awake my mind messes with me. Monday morning I was particularly unexcited to wake up, so I reached over to the passenger side pillow and mashed the keys of my phone to see what time it was. The display of my phone took an unusual amount of time to wake up...in fact, it just didn't. The display lit up soft black, the keys backlit, but the UI graphics wouldn't appear. I found myself whispering to my phone "come on, it's time to get up", but it just lied there. Like me, not quite sleeping, not quite awake. I gave up, and we both went back to sleep.

That morning, when I got in to work, my colleague just happened to slip me this passage from Design Noir:

"When objects dream...

Electronics are not only 'smart', they 'dream' - in the sense that they leak radiation into the space and objects surrounding them, including our bodies. Despite the images of control and efficiency conveyed through a beige visual language of intelligibility and smartness, electronic objects, it might be imagined, are irrational - or at least they allow their thoughts to wander. Thinking of them in dreaminess rather than smartness opens them up to more interesting interpretations."

Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Dunne & Raby, p.8

I think the universe is messing with me too.

Creativity is like Sudoku

2007-10-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

“…it’s like Sudoku” is a phrase I'm told I’ve been using somewhat often recently. Oddly, I don’t even play Sudoku. The point is, it’s a problem that can’t be solved all at once; you just have to start. Somewhere, anywhere. And have your eraser handy. The phrase comes from a zefrank video, which is easily one of my favorite descriptions and analogies for the creative process:

I’m interested in this…confidence to start things, because I look at creative projects like they were Sudoku puzzles: you can stare at them as long as you like but you won’t suddenly see all the numbers. You have to start. You have to find one box to fill in, and from that, another one reveals itself. You might not be able to solve all of them, but as long as you know its possible, you’ll keep trying. And no matter how many you solve, each new one begins with a bunch of empty spaces. [02:24-02:50]

If you haven’t seen it, the entire video is really a great listen.

I got thinking about the video again recently after hearing Mitchell Resnick, from the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT, speak about the work they are doing to help children grow their creative mind. He stated “At the root of creative thinking is the ability to create”. I believe this was in the spirit of what zefrank is saying, but I wanted to exchange the word ‘ability’ in favor of ‘willingness’. The sort of research on creativity that zefrank points to in his monologue emphasizes the importance of self-motivation in creative acts:

“…the intrinsically motivated state is essential for high levels of creativity…” Teresa Amabile, Creativity in Context, p. 102

Further, not only does external motivation not help, it can even have the opposite effect.

While a person’s natural capacity for divergent thinking surely has an effect on the level of originality, when comes at least to basic creativity it seems that the belief that one is – or is not - creative is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You just have to be willing to try, to start.

I'm supposed to be creative for a living. But it's impossible to be motivated every moment of everyday. Motivation can easily be swayed by disinterest in projects, personal distractions, mood, weather... Reflecting on my own moments of creative ebb at work, lack of motivation, not muse, is really at the heart. I've found that the best way to cheat this is to create artificial project deadlines, or promptly schedule work sessions with team members. Basically, force myself to start. Yes, technically it's an external motivation to begin, but I know that at least once I start, solutions will appear and the satisfaction in making new things and ideas will slowly impel real internal motivation, obsession. Start.

Energy Flow

2007-10-15T23:08:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to visit the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge last week, and among the many inspiring things I saw was this beautiful information graphic - albeit not for its content - illustrating the total energy flow in and out of the U.S. in 2005. (Click to enlarge - Energy in Quadrillion Btu). The image was used in a presentation on sustainable architecture by Kent Larson.

Two things to notice in the illustration are the overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels, and that nearly two thirds of all petroleum/crude oil consumed is imported. When looking for the image, I came across several other equally powerful visualizations of energy use, such as the one below which illustrates the shocking amount of energy lost when converting fossil fuels to electricity.

It felt appropriate to post this on Blog Action Day.

Button lust

2007-10-12T16:56:00.000-07:00

In one of my first interaction design classes 5 years ago at the Umeå Institute of Design, I introduced myself "My name is Mike Kruzeniski, I'm from Canada, and I really really like buttons". I think Dan Saffer feels much the same - I really really like No Ideas But In Things.

A bit of our work

2007-07-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

...has found its way onto the web. These are actually a couple examples of the products from the View of the Future project we released on YouTube earlier in the year. I like the description:

"What will you get if you take Nokia 7380 L’Amour collection phone, mix it with the design of LG SV280 “Banana” and add the “slimming” technologies applied in Ultra Edition II sliders like Samsung U700?

Well, you could get something really awful.

But if you are a talented enterprising designer, you can come up with the next generation Nokia 7480 fashion phone concept"

Blackle update

2007-07-26T22:38:00.000-07:00

An update on my Blackle post from yesterday. Sadly, a little more digging suggests that (unfortunately) this will only make a difference for CRT monitors, which consume 74 Watts to display a white screen versus 59 Watts to display a black screen. The power consumption of LCDs is not affected by the colors displayed on screen. Changing the display brightness seems to be the only way to conserve energy on an LCD. On a positive note, while Blackle won't help LCD users save power, LCDs are significantly more energy efficient than CRT's overall.

Help

2007-07-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

What public spaces might learn from the internet:

I landed at Washington Dulles International Airport Monday evening at about 8:50PM. The flights bags were taking longer than usual to come down the carousel than normal, but when I found myself still standing waiting at 10PM I decided it was time to assume that my bag wasn't going to be showing up. But where was the airline baggage desk? Where were the airline representatives? Fortunately, there was an information desk just near the carousel. Unfortunately, no one was there. There were no signs, explicit or otherwise, suggesting when someone would return, or if anyone would return at all. Since I was already in the presence of an information desk, the airport signage was absent of any suggestions where another desk might be. For some reason, this scenario reminded me of the claustrophobic feeling I get all too often with software help tools: the help is there, which is reassuring, but my questions remain unanswered. For even the most complete help index, it's difficult for a software provider to know every question their thousands of user might have. The internet provides an elegant solution in the form of help groups, discussion forums, etc. The smartest software makers organize and empower these groups to pick up where they leave off, linking directly to them. "Did we answer your question? No? Try here."

How does a service like this organize itself in the physical world? How could the airport help me find those knowledgeable souls that could answer my question amongst the other similarly lost tourists? Eventually, like refining a Google query, I found someone to help me out.

In the end, it turned out that the information desk was indeed closed for the night, and while most of the flight's bags came out on the announced carousel, many came out on another. I'm not too impressed with Dulles airport.

Considerate advertising

2007-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

A couple years back Jan Chipchase wrote about a hotel nightlight that was most likely designed to be stolen and taken home. It's a cheap form of 'physical' viral marketing.

I was in Washington this week and found myself in a familiar situation: I needed to do some work but the desk in my room had a glass top. Unfortunately, my optical mouse and glass top tables do not play well together. My magazine-mousepad improvisation wasn't much better.

I understand that if hotels were to supply mousepads, they're likely to be stolen. But what if it was designed to be taken home? Would it remind me of how considerate Hotel X was to my business traveler needs? I don't usually invite advertising upon myself, but I think I'd appreciate this sort of gesture much more than the usual free soaps and facial lotions.

Blackle

2007-07-25T16:22:00.000-07:00

Update on this post here.

Speaking of energy savings, particularly small changes that can make a big difference, Blackle is a take on the Google search but completely in black. Why? Because it takes more power to display a white screen than a black one. Multiply one screen by millions and the savings become very significant. The idea is based on a quick study from earlier this year showing that if Google was black, 750 Megawatt-hours could be saved per year. So far, by the site's estimate, 113,772.351 Watt hours have been saved.

Spread the word, use it instead of the Google homepage. Little differences add up.

via Raph.

Simple reminders

2007-07-22T14:09:00.001-07:00

I bought this charger for my phone back in February, after my bags had been lost on a flight through Paris.

For a while, I thought it was a bit of a waste to have an LED light up whenever the charger is plugged in. LED's don't consume a significant amount of power, but over time, electronics left on standby or mobile phone chargers left plugged in to the wall drain up to 10% of a households total energy. This little red LED was yet another tip of the energy iceberg in my apartment. After some time however, that turned out to be a good thing. The red light serves as a reminder that the charger is still drawing power and, if I'm not currently charging my phone, I should pull it out. The LED's consumption turned out to be a tiny price for a much greater savings.

All-you-can-eat 3G

2006-11-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

The UK mobile operator 3 launched X-Series today, which is basically a flat rate for unlimited mobile 3G service (like broadband for your phone). I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time - so many of the best services that we concept and already offer in Nokia devices require a fat and constant internet connection for the ideal experience. Unfortunately data connections are usually frighteningly expensive even if you were to use even occasionally.

X-series comes bundled with Skype for free calls, Windows Live Messenger for free instant messaging, and most interesting(!), a partnership with SlingMedia allows you to stream your TV to your mobile phone wherever you are (it all starts to make a lot of sense).

It's only available in the UK (come December) for now, with more European and Asian countries to follow in 2007. Hopefully this kind of thing really starts to catch on...

One Laptop Per Child out of the box

2006-11-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

Ten years from now, the Wii's and PS3's will mostly be a memory. But this, this is going to change the world.

Follow the link for a gallery of photos of the first OLPC off the production line being unpacked.

Payback is a mother, honey

2006-11-16T20:31:00.000-08:00

This is a fantastic description of a Wii first impression. I can't wait to get one (I'm holding out until the Christmas credit card bills are paid)

I wasn't going to let the fact that I was her father get in the way of my chance to get revenge. I pounded away furiously, sending a jab to her head that knocked her to the ground. The referee started counting, but she was out cold. I finally won a game against her! The simplicity and intuitiveness of the controller had leveled the playing field between my daughter and me. Her days of treating me like one of those TV commercial idiot dads were over.

Link

BusinessWeek's D-school list

2006-11-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

A recent BusinessWeek article lists their top design & "innovation" schools around the world. As can be expected a lot of U.S. schools make the list, but almost half are overseas. Two nice things about the article: they didn't try give a number ranking to each school, and the articles describe the kind of education prospective design students should be looking for by describing the 'innovation' skills that employers are looking for (very much Tim Brown's T people). Nice to see that Umea made the list.

Top Innovation & Design Schools (collection of articles)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/06_41/B40040641dschool.htm

The Talent Hunt (article)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_41/b4004401.htm

D-schools list (in alphabetical order)
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/dschools/2006/

"To gather our list, we created a 24-person advisory board. They include people from corporations such as Whirlpool, Siemens, and BMW who hire the new design thinking talent; faculty at both D-schools and B-schools such as Art Center, IIT, Northwestern, and Stanford; recruiters such as RitaSue Siegel; and design and innovation consultants such as Yves Béhar at fuseproject and Tamara Giltsoff at London-based Live/Work. They recommended programs from which they hire and where they referred students. We then conducted 200-plus interviews to narrow our picks to the best 60 global programs."

The members are of the advisory board are listed here: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2006/id20061005_756744.htm

Power-Aware Cable and The Element

2005-12-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

My friend Magnus had some work up on We-Make-Money-Not-Art yesterday. Nice.

Designing for '99

2005-11-30T12:59:00.000-08:00

I was a little surprised to see that Wired's new online store is built entirely in....Flash? What!? So then: no deep linking, no text searches, and I can't use my back button or scrollwheel (at least the way they've scripted it). I love Flash, it's a great tool, but when it comes to the web, Flash is always better in moderation. I thought the idea (or at least the trend) for Flash in our Web 2.0 world was that it would be used to enhance HTML, not replace it. I figured Wired would know better.

ABB Powerwall at DUX

2005-11-06T13:28:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to say that the ABB Powerall [PDF] seemed to be quite well received at DUX yesterday. Daniel, did a great job presenting the project, he's a comedy genious.

For anyone interested, the extended version of the Powerwall demo video we showed at the conference is available here (warning: 14mb)

DUX 2005

2005-11-01T22:34:00.000-08:00

I'm in San Francisco for the rest of the week for the Design for User eXperience conference. Daniel Fallman will be presenting the ABB Powerwall project (PDF of the paper here) that Mattias Andersson and I designed while Mattias and I were in our last year at Umeå (almost two years ago now, where has the time gone?).

I'll also be taking in Steve Portigal's tutorial on participant-observer user research titled Whose Line is it Anyway: Innovation, Ethnography and Improv.

Contextual Memory

2005-07-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

There were just too many great projects at this year's Umea Insitute of Design grad show to mention all of them, but one of my favorites was Paula Guntaur's E-MEM, a self-described "time and context based file management" system.

Paula's concept is a companion to the Smartphones, PDA's, or Notebooks of today (and tomorrow). It is a calendar with an integrated camera and projector that allows its user to locate files based on when and in which context the data was created. When flipping through the calendar, information such as file names, events, and email transactions from that day are all listed alongside the notes and appointments that the user has transcribed into the physical book. The device itself has a limited memory, as it is meant to reference data existing on other nearby devices, such as a Smartphone or Notebook.

Paula did some excellent ethnographic work during the research phase of her project, which really helps to support her final design. She has some very mature and well-considered thoughts and ideas surrounding context-based file management, and the execution is excellent. The industrial design isn't completely resolved (though that is understandable in a research and concept heavy project like this - there is only so much time), but the information design is very nice.

Paula designed the project in collaboration with Microsoft. You can check out the description of Paula's project on the Umea school site here, or Paula's personal site here.

Crash and Burn

2005-07-14T19:39:00.000-07:00

Wow, nearly two months past since my last post. Since then I've spent a couple weeks hopping around London and Copenhagen, then took a week off to go back to Sweden. While there I got to see this year's Umea Insitute of Design graduation show. Check out the school site to see this year's work, it gets better every year :)

When I got back to LA, I had the pleasure of having my computer crash. And it crashed hard. After running some diagnostics, turns out the hard drive failed. That's a first for me. Luckily I had nearly everything backed up, and I still had a couple months left on the warrantee. The nice people over at Dell set me up with a brand new hard disk and CPU fan, and now I'm back up and running. I have to admit, I was kind of hoping the death of my computer would be a good justification for buying a new Mac. I guess I'll have to wait a while yet before making 'The Switch'. A newly formatted computer is a nice opportunity customize my computer, and in the spirit of really wanting a Mac, I've managed to get XP working quite convincingly like OSX quite well using WindowBlinds, ObjectDock, and Konfabulator. Now if I use my computer in the dark, I can pretend it's a Mac.

Unfortunately while I've been out of commission, visits to my site seemed to have increased fairly dramatically, all due to the "XBOX Sucks (In)" post; a lot of people searching "XBOX Sucks" are finding my site. As a point of fact, I wasn't saying that the new XBOX 360 sucked, it was in reference to the J.Hayes quote about the new XBOX design gesture. Sorry to dissapoint.

Human-Chicken Interaction

2005-05-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

"We understand the perceived eccentricity of developing a system for
humans to interact with poultry remotely, but this work has a much
wider significance."

Interesting quote.

XBOX sucks (in)

2005-05-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

So tonight was the big star-studded unveiling of the new XBOX 360 (though images of it have been leaking out for a long time now). Looks...ok. Much better than the first one I think. The specs and features are looking very nice in any case. I wonder if it the design appeals the hard core game crowd as much as the first, though I'm sure they're trying a lot harder to appeal to the mainstream (what with the MTV launch) and women. The swapable covers is a nice feature, catering to PC modders, the Alienware crowd, and teenage girls alike. Pimp my XBOX.

Microsoft has done a great job of promoting its designers on their website, and included in the XBOX 360 promotional video is a pseudo-interview with Jonathan Hayes, the XBOX design director. Also look to the XBOX site for a more extensive interview and a shot of Hayes sketching his new gaming icon: "In contrast to the current console—which is about energy exploding outward—Xbox 360's concave shape is about the inhale. It's about the moment before the explosion, when energy is gathered. Think of a runner in the blocks before a sprint, or a martial artist taking in a breath of air before a kick."

The design community has already started to weigh in on the new look, and so far it seems somewhat neutral. I still prefer the look of the PS, so I'm looking forward to see what Sony reveals this week at E3.