Last month we featured images from our travels to Austin, New York City and Dublin. This month we are looking much closer to home and finding ponderous interactions and objects within a few miles (and sometimes feet) of our front doors.

Why we can’t have nice things

My local cafe offers a small selection of lovely creams and lotions on the back of the toilet tank. I react thusly: “Ewwwww.” It’s one thing to put this in your home bathroom, or maybe in your office, where there’s a known and finite set of users. But this is a cafe along the highway. You don’t know who else has been using it, touching it, or not-washing-their-hands-and-touching-it! Or worse, I’ve seen some of the people that come in there and I do know who’s been touching it. Suffice to say that I do not want to be sharing cosmeceuticals with them! It’s the tragedy of the commons in the coffeeshop toilet.

Hooked on a feeling

The fitting rooms in Old Navy have labelled hooks to assist you in categorizing your prospective purchases. It’s what we do when trying on clothes anyway, and while it’s not a complete solution (e.g., where’s the place to put the clothes you are already wearing?), there’s something charming about how it acknowledges your process. Also, those arrows bring a real dynamic energy to a static aspect of the task. Small details, but fun.

Why use a wall?

There is not a lot of graffiti in the tiny town of Pacifica, CA where Portigal Consulting calls home. I passed this while walking from the office to the ocean one day and felt annoyed, but not because of the graffiti itself. I like to think I am an enlightened urbanite who appreciates the aesthetic enhancement, self-expression, and community color that street art affords. In this case, however, I was pissed off by the placement. See that ugly grey brick wall RIGHT BEHIND the fence? Yes, that’s the one; the unadorned, badly-in-need-of-anything-to-bring-it-to-life one. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the artist tagged the pretty white picket fence instead of the menacingly misfortunate wall.

Where’s my soul mate?

I spotted this sad scene on the sidewalk in front of our office. First I thought of the little girl who lost her shoe and would be upset, perhaps even scolded by her mom. And then I thought about the mother, recalling my own mothering moments of frustration realizing that my son or I had lost something of his along the way. And then I thought of the six word story penned by Hemingway, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” And then I waxed anthropomorphically about the shoe and her point of view. Yes, that little shoe looks like a lonely lady; one who has lost her sole mate.

In our work, we’re always looking a bit closer at what’s around us, and always trying to make sense of what we see. Of course, we won’t always have the answers, but we find a lot of value in at least asking the question. We hope you will as well.

This is not a door

When is a door not a door? When the sign on it clearly states “Do not Touch, Pull, or Use This Door. Thank You!” I came across this (not a) door during a recent fieldwork trip to New York City, where I found myself invariably studying every door I walked by because they all seemed to have great stories to tell. Sadly, this story is one of inability to fulfill one’s useful purpose. What is a door if it is not a portal to some other place; a threshold to cross? Now it is a wall, and a window. I wonder if it will be repaired or replaced or reframed as an aesthetic relic that will remain in its present location and state of dysfunction.

I wish I was flat

This television was hanging out on the sidewalk in the Mission, right here in San Francisco. I am curious who labeled this anthropomorphized electronic with feelings of inadequacy. It could have been added by a passerby; a reflective commentary on the choice by the TV’s previous owner to upgrade and abandon. In fact, a man passing me as I shot this picture told me “I love rich people, man! They throw away the greatest stuff. I got a vacuum cleaner last week that works perfect.” Or maybe the words were put there by the person who left that unsatisfying TV on the street. A “Dear John” letter from consumer to consumed: It’s not me, it’s you.

Irish fuel tanker

When visiting Dublin, I was prepared for (and delighted to experience) all Guinness, all the time. What I didn’t realize was the supporting infrastructure required to make that happen. They’ve got tanker trucks of the stuff rolling down the street to meet the demand.

Kony on the street

Just days after the Kony 2012 video went viral, hitting the national media, images of the dictator appeared as stencil art on the streets of Austin. From Facebook and YouTube, the story touched the activism (or some say slacktivism) nerve. But what meaning is implied or inferred when the medium changes? Stencil art is hip, ironic, anti-mainstream. The street art form has none of the outrage of the previous forms. Is the previously unknown Kony now accorded folk hero status?

Being open-minded when conducting user research is almost the definition of the activity. In reality many people find it difficult to fully conceal their hypotheses, and the way they both ask questions and listen to answers ultimately limits what they’re able to learn from the research. Recently we interviewed a young man who had moved back to the US from working overseas and was now back in school. My colleague asked a question that was based on the framework of “old Alex” and “new Alex.” But of course Alex (not his real name) hadn’t told us that he viewed his transition in those terms. And Alex didn’t dissuade us from that framework until I explicitly asked him if he thought of himself as having a new and old version. A lack of open-mindedness can also impact how research data is analyzed.

In the design process, there’s a tremendous need for open-mindedness when considering solutions.

For example, a few years ago we worked with a technology company that had done their own ethnographic research into how enterprise customers were purchasing technology. They organized their results according to their pre-existing purchase decision model, rather than allowing the findings themselves to shape the model. In both cases, the learning is skewed by these presumptions, and the ability to act in a new way is limited by them.

In the design process, there’s a tremendous need for open-mindedness when considering solutions. Although design projects invariably have constraints, we’ve found real power in suspending those constraints when ideating. Even if a team is developing a new website, rapidly brainstorming concepts that impact hardware, branding, marketing, and beyond is not a waste of time. If those concepts are outside the brief, they may better illustrate the qualities of an excellent solution that can then be brought back into the (say) website. And there’s always the possibility that a great idea will expand the brief. It’s always exciting to encourage a team to brainstorm beyond their nominal solution area and see an organization rally to support them: we’ve helped hardware teams identify software opportunities, and Internet services teams identify retail opportunities. And there’s typically someone in the meeting who’s empowered to run with these “extra” opportunities and see if they can’t be developed further.

Living With An Open Mind

Chatting over dinner with some colleagues recently, at one point I bought up The Hipster PDA. One of the younger people at the table hadn’t heard about this, and once we explained the concept (essentially a binder clip and a stack of Post-It notes) she shook her head in gentle disgust and said “People have too much time on their hands.” I felt stung, stymied, and frustrated. Reflecting later, my frustration was not in the dismissal of the idea (because there’s a lot of crappy ideas out there) but in the dismissal of the people who had come up with the idea; essentially, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I’m sure that we can each recall ideas (and the people that created them) that we’ve dismissed out of hand. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has led to the inappropriate fetishization of rapid assessments (take to heart Peter Merholz’s summary of the book: “Snap judgments are valuable. Except when they are not.”). In “Living In the Overlap” (interactions, September/October 2008) I argued for more a considered approach to how we dismiss what doesn’t appeal: “Here’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t tried: Project Runway, High School Musical, American Pie movies, robot wars, molecular gastronomy, Halo 3, Dancing With the Stars, Frisky Dingo, sudoku, biopics, House, Desperate Housewives, Portishead, Fifty Cent, Dane Cook, The Da Vinci Code, The Life of Pi, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones, Augusten Burroughs, and Mitch Albom. I’m mildly curious in some; intensely disinterested in others. A lot of it might make a “sophisticated” individual uncomfortable. But my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know of, and a little about, all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has led to the inappropriate fetishization of rapid assessments

Of course, open-mindedness and curiosity are essential for innovators: designers, researchers, people-who-make-stuff-for-others. But an open-minded discussion about our own open-mindedness may be hampered by two factors. First, we tend to frame open-mindedness and curiosity as character traits, something that’s baked into who we are and won’t significantly change (at least once we hit our mid-twenties and are less prone to self-redefinition). Second, who would acknowledge to themselves, or others, that they aren’t open-minded? No one thinks they are closed-minded, just like no one thinks they are racist. We place a cultural premium on our personal qualities and that can blind us from taking too close of a look at ourselves. While I’ll try not to get too therapy-y here, one way we can improve is to learn to hear those moments in ourselves when we aren’t open-minded.

Exercises to Open the Mind

Let’s instead consider open-mindedness and curiosity as skills that can be developed. One way to increase our openness to new ideas is through improv training, which emphasizes accepting offers. Many people are now familiar with improv’s “Yes, and…” philosophy. It’s become an icon for successful brainstorming, where the reaction to a new idea (an offer) is always yes (an acceptance). In improv training, there are a range drills to build a natural facility for acceptance. In one example, actors line up beside the stage. The first actor takes the stage, and the next actor enters the stage, states who they are, and pretends to give an object to the first actor. The first actor accepts this gift, and uses it to explain their exit. The next actor comes onstage and the drill proceeds. The drill might look something like this:

Actor 2 enters
Actor 2: Hi, I’m a baker. Here’s a loaf of bread.
Actor 1: Thanks, I’m going to go put this in the cupboard.
Actor 1 exits
Actor 3 enters
Actor 3: Hi, I’m a spaceman and I’ve brought you this moon rock.
Actor 2: Thanks, I’ll take this over to the Smithsonian.
Actor 2 exits
repeat

It’s not funny, but the goal is not entertainment; it’s to reinforce a crucial principal. The training builds from there, with more complex games that develop a broader set of skills, but the fundamental driver is being comfortable accepting any offer.

Getting Out of the Comfort Zone

A corollary to open-mindedness is our comfort zones. It’s important to learn to feel the edges of our own comfort zones. Only then are we empowered to make explicit choices about whether or not to venture outside that zone. In Amsterdam recently I walked into a cheese shop, stocked with an array of huge wheels of cheese, and I became overwhelmed, and felt unsure how to proceed. I just wanted to sample Dutch cheese, not do my weekly cheese shopping (as I imagined was the typical scenario). Suddenly this was too much to navigate, and as an introvert, I wasn’t up for asking for help if I didn’t even know what to ask, so I walked out. As I left, I realized that I was lletting the opportunity pass by and I returned to buy some cheese [You'll either recognize exactly the small intimidation I'm describing, or else think I'm crazy, in which case I suggest you read about introverted travel here.]

I asked for a recommendation. The cheese-man asked me one or two questions, then handed me a piece of Old cheese. The cheese, of course, was delicious, and so was the empowerment of overcoming discomfort. The awkwardness I felt was about the complexity of trying to perform a familiar task in an unfamiliar context, and with the myriad options that introduces. Once I realized that and chose to ask for help, I was able to stretch my comfort zone just that much more. And a few days later in Leuven, Belgium, I reused this new script and once again bought cheese (a Bruggian version of Gouda).

A few months earlier, however, I gazed at the edge of my comfort zone and decided not to cross: walking through Santa Monica we came upon the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony. Crowds of people were gathered, waiting for a glimpse of the stars. We found the serious autograph hounds who were there with portable plastic bins stuffed with headshots for signing (and reselling on eBay). It was a definite subculture: people filled each other in about the unspoken rules: what happens when a celeb approaches, when to use your Sharpie, how to hand it to them, and so on. I was fascinated but my obvious outsider/passerby status felt like a barrier. And then I saw a woman covered in tattoos, where each tattoo was a signature. I realized her particular shtick was to get autographs and then go directly to the tattoo parlor to have that autograph made permanent (the ultimate version of “I’ll never wash this hand again!”). I watched her and the group for a while, and thought about whether or not I would ask her for a picture. There was something slightly wild about her and I couldn’t figure out how to make the request. Sure, in the cold light of these pixels, it’s easy to think “What’s the worst that could happen?” but in the moment itself we may deal with it less rationally. I was actively taking pictures during my trip and I really wanted a picture of this woman but I was never able to do it. As with the cheese, I did step outside the experience for a moment, look at where I wanted to go, and decide whether I was able to cross that gulf. Here, I couldn’t.

While I’m disappointed with the result, I have to acknowledge my own human limitations, and point out that both were deliberate choices about how to deal with the edges of my comfort zone. Looking at both situations, I can see how the presence of a familiar “script” where each “actor” knew their role (i.e., man enters a cheese shop) made all the difference to me.

Being open-minded and curious is a journey, not a destination. There are always new opportunities to grow and develop our abilities in the course of everyday life and our work. And on that journey is a bounty of new adventures, new stories, and new ideas. I believe that developing skills in building and managing our own open-mindedness and curiosity in everyday life is the first place to start in our development.

Top image: nogoodreason