Jane McGonigal from the Institute of the Future at TED. I’d never considered that there were millions of gamers with a fully fledged education in skills that could hel save the real world… if it was more like a game.

10,000 hours

“The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games, by the age of 21. For children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.”

“So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcom Gladwell’s new book Outliers. So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It’s based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours at effortful study, at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we’re looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.”

What are they getting good at?
1) Urgent optimism
They believe that they are capable of changing the world – and ready to take action at a moment’s notice.

2) Weaving a tight social fabric
Gamers are masters at rapidly creating strong social bonds. Also, it’s interesting to note that we like people more after we’ve played with them.

3) Blissful productivity
Gaming exemplifies that we are happier working hard than relaxing if the work is structured right.

4) Epic meaning
Gamers love (and are used to) being attached to world changing stories.

Right now, we are using games to escape into virtual worlds, but it doesn’t have to be that way. These skills could apply to the real world if the real world was redesigned to work more like a game.
Just one example: World Without Oil

“We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real, and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil. So, when you come to the game you sign up, you tell us where you live. And then we give you real-time news videos data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what’s not available, how food supply is being affected,  how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if their is rioting. And you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. ”

“Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we are supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil.” This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive. Most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.”

She also talks about two others: Superstruct which asks gamers to come up with smart ideas to solve the world’s problems (she’s got 5,000 and counting) and Evoke, a crash course in social innovation.

Great stuff, and if you’re wondering what that might feel like on a more everyday level, watch this genius talk by Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University.

An recent article from the Economist made me think about how companies could learn from the distributed innovation of open source to find the great ideas within. The article is about InnoCentive, which helps connect problems with solutions:

[Innocentive] is based on a simple idea: if a firm cannot solve a problem on its own, why not use the reach of the internet to see if someone else can come up with the answer? Companies, which InnoCentive calls “seekers”, post their challenges on the firm’s website. “Solvers”, who number almost 180,000, compete to win cash “prizes” offered by the seekers. Around 900 challenges have been posted so far by some 150 firms including big multinationals such as Procter & Gamble and Dow Chemicals. More than 400 have been solved. InnoCentive reckons the approach can work for innovations in all sorts of fields, from chemistry to business processes and even economic development. It has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, a charity, to help solve problems posted by non-profits working in poor countries, with some initial success.

InnoCentive is now looking inwards with a new service called Innocentive @Work which “replicates the solver network inside a firm”:

Challenges are first offered to “seeker” companies’ own employees. Only if they cannot help is the outside network brought into play. “Companies often don’t know how much they already know,” says Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive’s chief. An early challenge at one firm was to find a source of some data, which, it turned out, had already been acquired by another division.

This is particularly interesting given that InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, a place for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to put out the problems it was failing to solve internally.

Right under their noses

The fact that InnoCentive is successfully being used to solve problems shows the power of setting up a structured framework for innovation. Why is this important? Let’s take a look at the open source software community and ask this: how can thousands of individual coders collaborate on something as huge as Linux or Android?

A large part is the framework in which contributors operate. Much of the coding that needs to be done is well defined and there is a solid framework for executing the solutions. Want to fix a bug? Go into the source code repository, download the project, work on your bit, test it and then upload it for community approval. All your contributions are tracked, and you can see who’s working on what and resolve conflicts. Because of this, a lone coder can quickly change just a single line of code (that’s what most do), while at the same time huge companies can put thousands of their people to task (for example, IBM has contributed 6.3% of Linux, and Sun is mostly responsible for Java).

What would happen if the strengths of this model were applied to business problems, which are a whole lot fuzzier? By what framework could a salesperson easily fix a bug in a large marketing campaign? Or an engineer contribute to an ethnographic study for a new vacuum cleaner? To be fair, programming has the particular advantage of being a granular, text based medium, but tools like Innocentive@Work could make problems visible within an organisation and give solutions a place to go (and the solvers to be rewarded).

InnoCentive is not the only service to link problems and solvers. In the same space are Hypios, InnovationXchange, NineSigma and Tekscout in US, PRESANS in France, Innoget in Spain, and Fellowforce. Moreover, this approach is not only for research and development in the traditional sense: just look at the success of Threadless in generating t-shirt designs, Fold.it for science (see NYT article) or the several dozen sites like TopCoder and ODesk which allow you to outsource self contained business problems, from coding to marketing.

As web based applications, these companies are essentially a testing ground for highly automated processes which allow people to contribute innovative solutions (or even just good work). Organisations should therefore keep a close on eye on the fittest of these services to see exactly what they do to make it easy to specify problems, maintain relationships with solvers and to communicate clearly.

Too often, innovation is forced to squeeze through bureaucracy. Implemented correctly, such automated frameworks could make it look a lot more meritocratic.

What do you think? Please comment below.

October’s DISCOVER magazine has a nice article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the colossal particle accelerator which amongst many other things may reveal the Higgs Boson and the secret of gravity. The LHC is 27km long and requires a frankly ridiculous amount of power to fulfill its single goal of making particles crash at high speeds. But how much is “a frankly ridiculous amount”? What exactly is a “high speed crash” in particle physics?

‘Just the facts’ is only enough if your audience can put them in context without your help

Wikipedia’s entry, likely updated by and for professionals with more than a passing knowledge of the field puts it as follows:

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent parallel beam pipes that intersect at four points, each containing a proton beam, which travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1,232 dipole magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 quadrupole magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1,600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at their operating temperature of 1.9 K, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature. Superconducting quadrupole electromagnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points, where interactions between accelerated protons will take place.

Once or twice a day, as the protons are accelerated from 450 GeV to 7 TeV, the field of the superconducting dipole magnets will be increased from 0.54 to 8.3 teslas (T). The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV (2.2 ?J). At this energy the protons have a Lorentz factor of about 7,500 and move at about 99.9999991% of the speed of light. It will take less than 90 microseconds (?s) for a proton to travel once around the main ring – a speed of about 11,000 revolutions per second. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be bunched together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 nanoseconds (ns) apart. However it will be operated with fewer bunches when it is first commissioned, giving it a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns.

[...] While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ (equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).

Technical, yes. Informative? Maybe, but only if you know enough about the field to make sense of the units of measurement presented. This is probably enough for a particle physicist. It likely doesn’t generate understanding in a layman.

If you need to, give useful contexts to the facts

DISCOVER’s Lisa Randall goes one step further in an attempt to translate for the reader:

“I learned more about the backstory [of the Large Hadron Collider] during my visit. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal for collisions is a center of mass energy of 14 TeV, or trillion electron volts. I realise these might be unfamiliar units, so to give some perspective, it is seven times the energy of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, which is presently the highest-energy machine, and 15,000 times the energy contained in the mass of a single proton at rest” Lisa Randall, ‘The Heart of the Matter’

The effort is laudable, but it falls short of really communicating what 14 trillion electron volts because it uses examples that are only meaningful to the kind of reader who most likely already understands that unit of measurement. The problem is that electron volts, Fermilab and the energy of a stationary proton are all part of the same language.

Know what language your audience is speaking

Description is not communication. You can’t deposit knowledge in a person’s head, just as you can’t stick new leaves directly onto a plant. Successful communication is about feeding your audience the right blend of facts, stories, examples and experiences so that their understanding of a topic can grow within what they already know.

In both cases, the comparisons given (“largest cryogenic facility”, “99.9999991% of the speed of light”, “seven times Fermilab”, “mass of a singe proton”) will not mean much without similar facts in their mind acting as ‘hooks’. But what if you put it in terms that made comparison easier?

• At their top speed, these protons will travel the 27km circuit (about 10 laps of a Nascar oval, or two thirds of a marathon), 3,500 in the time it takes to blink an eye
• Each of the 1,600 superconducting magnets arranged around the track (one every fifty feet on average) weighs about the same as two fully laden container trucks
• It takes 120 MW to run the LCH, approximately the power consumption of all the Canton State of Geneva where the LHC is located. That’s half a million people, about the population of Atlanta.

This kind of translation isn’t always necessary, but always make sure to speak the same language as your audience. It’s not what you say that matters, it’s what they understand.

I saw this today in Walgreens’ pharmacy section – a magnifying lens to help customers read text on drug packaging. It was right by products aimed at elderly people, so fading eyesight would definitely be an issue.

Helpful, right? Yes and no.

On one hand, this tool magnifies the problem of designs which squash instructions together in hard to read text. On the other hand, it helps the minority of people who literally cannot read the packaging but otherwise doesn’t get in the way. It’s not obvious whether this is satisfactory. How clearly does packaging need to be designed? What is the tradeoff between information and marketing?

Is it enough to help the user deal with a design problem, or should you attack the problem directly?

One company to have gone a step further is Target, which adopted the thesis project of a designer called Deborah Adler. According to her research, 60% of Americans don’t take their medication correctly, and she decided to do something about it when the same error put her grandmother in hospital.

Here is her design, which addressed the problems of the standard brown plastic tubes we’ve all come to know and, well, know. The main issues: inconsistent labeling, brand names taking priority over drug names, confusing numbers, poor color combinations, hard to read curved shape and tiny type. The redesign is covered in detail on the New York Magazine website.

It takes much more effort and money to make something like this work, and not just in designing the nicer package. Brandon Schauer at Adaptive Path points out that the bottle must be supported by an entire system to be effective:

“I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

Reframing

In my last post, I said that designers have the responsibility to make the most of each design opportunity. These two stories highlight the difficulty of doing so due to the variety of choices faced by any company or individual whose actions will impact those using its/his/her products. How far should you go to make things more usable? Whose responsibility is it? How much money should you spend on improving usability?

All this comes down to the fundamental question: what problem are we here to fix? Deborah Adler chose a much broader framing (“Making sure that people take the right drugs at the right time”) than Walgreens (“Helping some people to read the packaging”). Balancing the frame of action against the resources available is one of the most important tasks of a designer. Tricky.

So, did Walgreens go far enough? Did Target go far enough?

What do you think?

In their heyday, the existence of Native American Indians revolved around the buffalo. They used every part:

“The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped into it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women’s awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake–Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian–the real, natural, “wild” Indian” (John Fire Lame Deer)

Designers today have a great deal more to work with than the buffalo hunters. Our raw materials range from organic substances to toxic metals, and of course we need to use these as efficiently and with as little waste as possible. There is more, however, to consider.

Opportunity cost

Last night, a friend of mine handed over $20 dollars to catch a game of baseball, but that’s not how much the ticket cost him. The true price of those nine innings is everything that he did not do while he was there. Perhaps he could have been selling hot dogs outside, and by choosing not to gave up several hundred dollars. That’s a pretty expensive game!

This concept is absolutely fundamental to economics and goes by the name of opportunity cost: a.k.a. the value of the next best alternative forgone as the result of making a decision.

This is the standard that every new creation should be held to. What else could humanity be doing with the materials you’ve made your new toilet brush from? Or your new solar panel design?

Even more fundamentally, the new object occupies a physical space. Is it making the most of it? What if it did?

More than a road

Take roads for example. If you laid every lane of road in the USA end to end, you would get a highway 13.2 million kilometres long (source). That’s quite a road trip. If you set out on the first day of summer you’d have to drive at nearly 4,000 miles per hour to cover the distance before the leaves turned red. For comparison, the SR-71 Blackbird has been the fastest manned jet since the 6th March 1990, when it flew from Los Angeles to Washington DC in 64 minutes. It was travelling at (only) 2,190 miles per hour.

All this road covers about 22 million acres, close to the area of Portugal. It goes deep too.

Could this space be used for more than driving? Yes.

Why not build roads out of solar panels? On the 25 August, Solar Roadways was awarded $100,000 by the department of transportation to help develop its concept of prefabricated modules to replace the top layer of asphalt on our roads. Each 12 foot square would collect energy, store it, and act as display for road markings or other information. It would sense what was on it (imagine that stray deer at night) and heat the road to prevent snow buildup.

Israeli firm Innowattech is taking a different approach. Piezoelectric crystals beneath the road surface would convert the weight of passing cars into electricity at a cost equivalent to that of wind or coal power. More weight, more vehicles, more energy.

The companies estimate that for every mile of road using their solution, 400 to 500 homes could move off the grid.

There are obviously issues with both – they are untested, experimental and the economics not yet clear, but that’s not the point.

“The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.”
~Denis Hayes, International Chair of Earth Day

Designers need to consider the effect of their creations on the entire system they are placed in. This doesn’t just apply to large projects like road infrastructure. Mass manufacturing multiplies the impact of every new design, even the smallest.

“This we know – the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Chief Seattle mid-19th century

Designs should not just be judged by their impact on a past status quo, but also on how close they came to the limits of what was possible.

Everyone knows what happened to the buffalo. At the end of the 19th century they were practically wiped out by an American government keen to make space for cattle cultivation. Traditional Native American culture, caught in the crossfire, shrivelled and collapsed into reservations as its traditional resource dwindled.

Our civilisation still has physical reserves to draw on, and no one intentionally seeking to destroy them, so there is room for useful, classy, whimsical designs that make us happier. While we’re on the subject of reuse, this is an awesome concept. But even objects like these should be created with the same respect for what and where they come from that the Indians had for the buffalo.

Lack of foresight will be no excuse if we allow our civilisation’s resources to be depleted by designs which waste their potential.

Another thought provoking article from Malcolm Gladwell – how can you be completely outgunned, outmatched and outnumbered and still win? If you are willing to break with the unwritten rules of your business, your sport or even your social circles, you can beat opponents who are ten times more powerful than you.

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

However, taking a different path is usually incredibly hard work. Even worse, you may be ostracised, as those unwritten rules are also those which bind people together.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

In design, it’s always worth knowing the difference between a real barrier and one that so many people take for granted that it hasn’t been challenged. Take this example from the blog of Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital) on how Paypal managed to get acquired by eBay after beating their own payment service, Billpoint:

eBay understood everything that was needed to build a great payments product.  They were just unable to do so given the risks involved.  Specifically, I believe that PayPal had a better product than Billpoint because they were willing/able to take risks that Billpoint/eBay was not.  For example, when PayPal first launched, it was pretty clear that their product violated the operating rules for Visa, Mastercard and American Express — and violated banking regulations is more than 40 different states.

Man made rules are ripe for picking apart. Sometimes, the most important thing is knowing when to cast them aside.

As I’ve said before, games can do a lot more than just entertain. They can can make accounting fun, help kids learn, teach valuable lessons in design and suggest new interactions with the world around us.

In that context, here are two more examples of game design techniques in two of the least frivolous areas imaginable – health and wealth. Both from Raph Koster’s great blog (which is essential reading for people creating anything that another person will use/experience).

Games for Health

Coming up June 10-12th is the Fifth Games for Health conference which looks at all the ways that games can act as a positive disruptive force in healthcare. For example:

• games used for rehabilitation and therapy
• “exergaming” (exercise gaming) which exploded onto the scene with Wii Sports and is here to stay
• improving doctor patient communication by using virtual environments
• games to raise awareness of issues like STDs (“Catch the Sperm”)
• game environments to train surgeons and rapid response teams
• where games help kids to develop (and where they might be a problem)

Games have two things to offer healthcare. Firstly, they are engaging and can bring an addictive reward structure to just about anything. This is valuable for us all, as we tend to live our lives less healthily than we should due to the  of the delayed benefits. Using game mechanics to make the rewards more immediate could revolutionise our attitudes to our health.

Secondly, they can be very realistic simulations. Games can educate and train healthcare professionals in more engaging ways, which ultimately makes the learning more effective. They can also simulate things which are hard to otherwise experience (see Burn Center below).

Here are some of the sessions that caught my eye (full list of sessions announced so far is here):

Mindless Eating Challenge
In the game, players are tasked with caring for a virtual pet or plant, similar to the popular Tamgotchi.  Pet care requires the user to follow a variety of health and eating recommendations and verify their actions with photos taken with their phone’s camera.  For example, the recommendation “Eat a hot breakfast” would require the player to submit a photo of him/ herself eating a bowl of oatmeal.  Photos and compliance are then judged either by judges or peers.  Based on compliance to these recommendations, the pet or plant changes its appearance and gains features or accessories–a tree might grow taller or grow more leaves or fruit in response.  Alternatively, leaves might fall off if the player’s performance is poor.  A social portion of the game allows the user to see various depictions of their performance in comparison to the performance of others in their group, as well as of their group in comparison to other groups.

Case Study : Burn Center
This session covers the design, development, and rollout of Burn Center by 360ED an award winning training game covering a mass casualty burn-victim event. Burn Center not only provides the immersive experience of a full-scale, chaotic triage situation, but it also features an extensive resuscitation mode that follows patients over the course of 36 hours of treatment on an intensive care unit following a disaster event.

Case Study : The Skeleton Chase, A Healthy ARG
This session covers the development, rollout, and results of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) titled Skeleton Chase that was developed to serve as an intervention for college students who studies show routinely dial down their exercise activity upon arrival at college which in turn sows the seeds for bad health habits and outcomes later in life. (more at this link)

The Coming Age of Sensor Based Health Games
Increasingly, games are using a new generation of sensors that can detect movement, haptics, proximity, global position, light, audio, visuals, brain waves, emotional states, and physiological states, to name a few. These sensors often transmit their data to games without requiring players to transmit the data themselves, such as through an accelerometer attached to the player’s belt throughout the day, or a GPS system that inputs the player’s physical location into the game state.

Advances in sensor technologies and affordability are giving health game designers new gameplay options. This session will cite research findings and case-study examples to provide an overview of the many types of sensor systems that exist today or are just around the corner, and their potential integration into the research and design of games for health.

A Conversation with Richard S. Levine : Developer of Microsurgeon
One of the first games about health ever debuted for the Intellivision video console. Microsurgeon featured incredible graphics for its day and detailed gameplay where you guided a nanobot through a human patient helping them battle a variety of ailments from cholesterol build-up in arteries, to bacterial infections, kidney stones, tapeworms, and tar deposits from smoking.

The YouTube clip of this 1982 game is a must see.

Games for Money

Personal finance sites like Mint and Rudder have been springing up to help us save money and make sense of the hundreds of options out there. They have incredibly useful tools which aggregate all your accounts in one place (so you don’t get fooled by your own mental accounting) and allow you to set budgets and send reminders when you go over. Mint has been a great success, and now reports over a million users.

Despite the zillions of products out there to do this, we still managed to wheel, deal, and borrow ourselves into a financial crisis (that is still ongoing, though swine flu may be eclipsing it just now). Clearly, something was lacking in the appeal here, for if said product category were truly successful, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

Now, Mint is in closed beta on a feature that turns personal finance into a game, complete with points earned for doing things like socking away some cash into the savings account each month, or switching to a credit card with annual rewards. Get enough points in a sustained way, and you too can be a Financial Guru.

This seems like a fairly straightforward harnessing of game-style incentive systems towards a laudable goal (though I should note that said credit card with rewards is likely from one of Mint’s partners). But honestly — money is points anyway, isn’t it? Why is it that we value the cash less than the flat-screen TV?

Raph goes on to wonder at the kind of game mechanic that would nudge us to try and save as money in the same way that WoW players go nuts over experience points.

It may be that one reason why we used to be thriftier is simply because the money we hoarded was more tangible… gold coins trigger the brain’s systems in a way that a bank balance does not. This is what the Mint point system is designed to supplement: by creating a non-fungible point system, the game is giving you something other than real-world stuff onto which to displace your acquisitiveness, a “virtual stuff.” It would do even better, perhaps, if the points were gems or something else more “stuff-like” in terms of its representation.

Go read it the whole thing. It’s a powerful point. As with health, we save too little because the tangible reward comes in the future, and we massively understimate our future wants. Using game mechanics to bring that value forward can only help.

The first and most obvious sign of design in Lisbon, so a good one to start with in this series of daily posts on the snippets of good design caught in Lisbon this Easter.

On 6^th Dec 2005 a chunk of the Santos area to the West of the city centre was rebranded the Santos Design District giving a united front to the design stores which had been moving into the old industrial area since the 80s, local marketing and design agencies, and the nearly four thousand creative industry students at the IADE, UAL and ETIC.

The area is packed with design stores stocking classic design furniture (by names like Eames, Prouvé, Gehry and brands like Vitra and Herman Miller) and all the objects and books (Phaidon features heavily) that go with. Several have even joined together to create the SSD Smile Card, a common discount card and online store.

To name a few worth exploring: Paris-Sete (the driver behind the district according to Blue Design, a local design magazine), Domo, Ligne Roset and Steinwall. Start in this area.

So far, the district has helped to put Santos on the map as a hub for design and also organises events every few months, most recently to celebrate its third birthday, when shops stayed open late and offered special discounts. Good design has also trickled into the nightlife (from GoLisbon blog):

Following the new theme of the neighborhood, you’ll find places where the décor is just as interesting as the food. A favorite is Estado Liquido. Better known for it sushi, it also features a sleek minimalist space with some Asian touches, and it also doubles as a bar/lounge. If you’re not a fan of sushi and want to try something more local, head to Cop’3. It’s another tastefully designed space serving innovative versions of traditional Portuguese dishes. You’ll find it in Largo Vitorino Damasio, the same square where the bar Left is located. It’s a hip hangout that Wallpaper* magazine singled out for being “stylish and relaxed,” that’s also a great place for drinks to the sounds of the guest DJs.

This is what the main square looks like:

So what’s next? Gustavo Brito, founder of Paris-Sete, gave a few in his intereview with Blue Design: a “design lab” to incubate the experiments of the 4,000 local students, a “design shuttle bus” linking Lisbon’s art museums, free wi-fi in the area’s public spaces and a permanent space for a “design garage sale” of selected pieces.

It’s great to see a group of like minded individuals putting the infrastructure in place to help a community of designers and creatives thrive. It is not enough to be neighbours if you don’t also get to know each other.

Where else are similar associations happening?

Don’t discount the good old fashioned materials – sometimes they just need to be put together a little differently.

360 Paper Water Bottle

First off Brandimage’s smart re-imagining of the one-use bottle. The entire thing is made from sheets of whatever sustainable sheet stock is available, molded and stuck together:

“The package utilizes sustainable sheet stock of bamboo, palm leaves, etc. that is pressed into 2 halves to encapsulate a micro-thin PLA film that provides liquid/O2 barrier. The pressed material provides the form, graphical substrate and/or embellishment surface and structural integrity. It is shipped inverted and “pops open” upon filling through a conventional fill-portal at the base. The barrier material also acts as the means to fuse the 2 halves together. The top is torn off to access the liquid. To reseal, the removed component peels apart to expose a sanitary plug-fit side, and the remaining part gets tethered to the finger loop to eliminate litter. It changes the total experience of drinking water; from the way the container looks, feels and functions to the way it ends its usage.”

This design also removes the need for separate container to hold a six-pack of these bottles together:

“The 360 Paper Water Bottle is a single-serve container, but the windfall of how it is made enables the self-bundling of multiple containments to negate the use of separate “6-pack” carriers. The use of an all-natural structural board with vertical ends drastically reduces the material used in palletizing and shipping, and enables self-merchandising.”

In other words, they are stamped out six at a time and can be folded over into a structurally sound unit. As show in the top right of the picture above, four of these can then be held together with another strip of paper stock to create an easily transportable pallet.

Go to Brandimage’s site for more, there’s a PDF download that will tell all. I hope someone picks this design up and commercialises it, as I’d love to try one of these out.

Enthusem

A physical letter can still hold a hell of a lot of emotional appeal, but it’s a pain to do physical mailouts. Enthusem allows you to send paper mailers as easily as e-mail, which is interesting because it lets you get that emotional impact of paper without the pain of handling it. Moonpig meets marketing, if you will. In their own words, Enthusem is:

“An online service that makes sending postal mail (yea, the printed kind) super simple and seamlessly integrated with online content.”

“The service lets users send direct mailers one-at-a-time (or to a list of recipients) from a Web browser or through a set of web services. In addition, Enthusem mailers can include online attachments. The attachments link the printed communication to online content much like an attachment to an email message.”

“The www.enthusem.com website lets end users send Enthusem mailers while a set of web services let 3rd party applications send direct mail without all the complexities associated with your typical Web-to-print solution. So, for example, using the web services, a developer could create an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that would allow Outlook users to send direct mail in addition to email. ”

Just to highlight two of the smart touches.

Number 1: the letters come in a premium, translucent envelope – just to give the receiver that extra temptation to open it:

Number 2: it’s really easy to link it back to the online world. All the person has to do is enter the pickup code below…

…here, on the front page of the site, and the get taken to the attachment (which can essentially be anything on the web)

Cardapult

On a more light hearted note, this is just neat. Go make one at Instructables!

Video below:

Many public toilets across the country have been fitted with blue lights to make it hard for heroin users to see their veins. It works… just about, but has enoughs issues to illustrate of two basic rules of design:

Rule 1: Your design probably won’t have the desired effect on the behaviour you want to change

Case in point – it didn’t take long for addicts to work out that you could just mark your veins beforehand. The blue lights also make things worse for some:

“Blue lights make it more difficult to see superficial veins, such as those in the forearm. However, when people are injecting into deeper veins such as the femoral vein, the presence of blue lights is an ineffective deterrent. Groin injectors are not looking for a visible vein, and so can continue to inject in such bad lighting.”

“The provision of blue lights does not prevent or reduce injecting per se. Rather, it results in displacement of the problem from that arena to other arenas. Worse still, it is likely to mean that activity is moved from one specific location to a number of locations.”

Etc… more points here.

As Dan Lockton would say as part of his excellent Design With Intent, it’s a flawed architecture of control:

“So the blue lighting ‘works’, but is it really a good idea to increase the risk that an injection will be done wrongly – maybe multiple times? This is perhaps a similar argument to that surrounding delibrately reducing visibility at junctions: the architecture of control makes it more dangerous for the few users (and those their actions affect) who ignore or bypass the control. This seems to be an architecture of control with the potential to endanger life, although the actual stated intention behind it probably includes ’saving lives’.”

UPDATE 27 Mar 09 – Dan Lockton pointed out another flawed scheme yesterday: pink lighting to deter teenagers by highlighting their acne…

Rule 2: Your design will probably affect behaviours you didn’t want to change at all (!)

In economics there’s a great concept called an externality, which is when other people bear a cost (or receive a benefit) from things you did but didn’t pay (or get compensated) for. For example, when you drive your car you pollute, but don’t really take into account the full cost of the damage your exhaust fumes are causing. That cost to the environment which you don’t have to cover is the negative externality, or side effect.

Almost every design will have side effects where they affect areas which have nothing to do with the purpose of the design – a kind of design externality. The blue light is a good example of this too, spotted from an article about the town of Rugby which installed UV lighting in 2000, only to find that there were uninteded consequences:

Public toilets in Church Street, in Rugby town centre, were closed in February after a shocked cleaner discovered two people having sex inside. In a report to officers, Rugby borough council head of engineering and works David Johnson said the toilets were still suffering anti-social behaviour.

He said: “The lighting scheme has not achieved its aim. Drug users can mark their veins before entering the building.

“The subdued lighting encourages an atmosphere conducive to sexual activity, while it is off-putting to the public wishing to use the facilities.

“Another problem is that graffiti written in certain pens looks spectacular under UV lighting.”

Now council officers have suggested many of the toilet blocks in the town centre be knocked down and rebuilt from scratch to combat the problem.

Every non-trivial design will have unintended consequences – by being aware of this you can capture them and turn them to your advantage. This is particularly important when dealing with complex social issues.

The larger the gap between the simplicity of the solution and the complexity of the problem, the larger the potential for side effects.

This makes it extra important to put yourself in the shoes of your users (no pun intended) to work out what they need and iterate until you can provide it.