Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, on planning for the long-term:

‘I mean, there’s no way I could do a plan for this company and say, “What’s this place going to be like by 2020?” I have no idea. I just know that since we’re running out of petroleum, we better stop being dependent on making polyester underwear out of virgin petroleum.

And so that’s why we’ve teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we’re going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you’re done with it, you can give it back to us and we’ll make more shirts and pants out of it.

Which is a different idea about consuming. Right now the world runs on consuming and discarding, and we’re saying that we’re taking responsibility for our products from birth to birth. Can you imagine if a computer company said, “When you’re done with your computer, we’ll buy it back from you and make more computers out of it.” Instead, they sell you computer and you can’t even get service from them!

It’s a different way of accepting responsibility.’

I’m a fan of Patagonia for this simple reason: they take responsibility for their actions on this planet. And, if you haven’t read or heard of Yvon’s book Let my people go surfing, it is a wonderful book unlike any business book you’ve ever read. (It’s full of stuff like the quote above).

While I’m just a single person working alone at the moment, and like Yvon I don’t know what my future holds, I’m going to both keep a watch out for people who take this kind of responsibility as well as try to hold that mindset myself.

Life is too short, and the world is too beautiful, to accept anything less.

Continue Reading: Taking Responsibility

Continue Reading: Comic: MySpace Ads

People like me features are one of the most promising ways to help people find content that is interesting to them.

Jason Kottke points to a study in which researchers found evidence that the brain reacts differently to people who seem like us.

This isn’t surprising, of course. We do tend to react differently when we feel like we’re around a like-minded person.

But how can this help inform design?

Continue Reading: The Importance of “People like Me” features

Thomas Vander Wal makes a good point in response to my post: Why I’m excited about Google’s Social Graph API. He’s concerned that by exposing social relationship information (social graphs), we’re inviting hackers to mine that information and use it in bad ways:

“I do have great trepidation as this is exactly the tool social engineering hackers have been hoping for and working toward.

Most hacks of organizations (most are populated with 98% of people not like us that are more open to social engineering hacks) that have been hacked (been through more than a few of these meetings after the fact) are done through some clever individual using social engineering to convince somebody to trust the hacker. The identification of connections (usually best approached with weak ties) is a great starting point (this is the major reason why most organizations no longer have their employee list or full-contact list posted on their websites).

The Google SocialGraph API is exposing everybody who has not thought through their privacy or exposing of their connections.

This is an excellent point that needs to be considered.

An example of what Thomas describes might be…

Continue Reading: The danger of social markers made public (more on the Social Graph API)

The Google Social Graph API is a new programming API that allows developers to expose social relationships embedded in web sites. What does this mean for regular folks like you and me? Read on.

Do you ever feel like your personal information is spread across the web in a whole bunch of separate places? An account here, a profile there? A friends list here and a friends list there? All your information, but in all different places all incomplete at the same time?

The Social Graph API helps solve this “silos of information” problem by allowing people to write software that understands who your friends are. It does this by reading your web site or blog and making connections between the social profiles you have across the web.

For example, imagine you have a blog, which is your home on the web. You also have an Amazon profile, a Twitter profile, and a Facebook profile. So you have four profiles spread across the web, seemingly unconnected. Amazon has no idea who your friends on Facebook or Twitter are, and vice-versa, and this is a good thing from a privacy standpoint. These sites shouldn’t be able to find out everything about you with you giving them permission.

But what if you wanted these sites to know a bit about each other? What if you want to combine your Amazon book history with your friends lists at Facebook so that you can see what your friends are reading and let Amazon give you recommendations based on your similarity with them? Or, perhaps you just joined Twitter and want to know which of your Facebook friends are already there so you don’t have to go hunting for them? (see video) Here we see real-world examples of how cross-pollinating your personal information between these sites can not only be efficient, but desirable…

Continue Reading: Why I’m excited about the Google Social Graph API

Bill Cammack over at the Fast Company blog makes an interesting assertion:

“While I agree that (social media) CAN…(make us more social) How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social interaction, for YOU? …I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL. (In Real Life)”

Bill says that because people are always a click away, he actually has become less social (face-to-face).

I’m interested to know if others feel this same way: has social interaction through software had the same effect on you?

And, if so, has the increased social interaction through software been for the better, or for the worse?

Continue Reading: Does social software make us less social?

For those of you who listen to podcasts and are interested in social design, here’s an option: Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger (the Bungee Connect folks) recently interviewed me about my take on social design. Long-time Bokardoans might remember me doing a series of podcasts a couple years ago with Alex, who was at Microsoft at the time. I’m happy to say that he’s now even more into podcasting. He always was a great host…ready at a moment’s notice with an insightful question.

Here’s the show post.

Here’s the RSS Feed (love the name of it) The Bungee Line.

Here’s the mp3: Social Design Interview (47min, 22MB)

The interview was part of a series that Ted and Alex are doing for Bungee Labs. They’re stretching out the role of the new community manager, who serves to not only help out with the community but also helps to lead the discussion in and around it. I think this will become a common model going forward.

Anyway, I’m honored to be part of their series…

Continue Reading: Intro to Social Design Podcast

I often visit blogs and wish there was more information about the blogger there. Some blogs don’t even have a picture of the person writing! (hint: you can’t go wrong with a picture of yourself smiling). Even so, I don’t have much about myself here on Bokardo. So in the spirit of making up for that, I’m picking up on a meme sent to me by Leisa. Here are 8 things you didn’t know about me. I’m going to add them to my about page when I’m done.

So here they are…

Continue Reading: 8 Things you didn’t know about me

Wy wife and I were recently doing some online shopping together. We were looking for lamps for our living room. My wife was the one at the controls, and at one point she got frustrated and said “This web site really sucks. I can’t even look at their furniture.”

I had mixed feelings about my wife’s comment. My shopper side was completely with her. The web site did suck. It was hard to look at furniture. My designer side, however, felt a pang of empathy for the poor designers who probably worked really hard building this.

This situation reminded me of the reality TV shows where they do house makeovers. On one that I remember watching, a couple was having a hard time selling their house. They had open house after open house, yet nobody was making an offer.

So the crafty real estate agent (as part of the show) decided to video tape the next open house. They taped people as they walked through the house, catching all the little comments that couples make to each other out of earshot of the realtor. This was just like the comments my wife and I were making to each other about the web site.

The raw comments were astounding. “This room is fugly”. “I hate these curtains…what a horrible sense of style”. Not only did people attack the style of the house, they attacked the people who were responsible, the house owners!

Continue Reading: The Power of a Bruised Ego

Yesterday’s piece on personas wasn’t really about personas as much as it was about tools. Every tool you use has benefits and drawbacks and as a designer you need to choose the best tool for the job.

It turns out that lots of designers choose to use personas to help them communicate their research with other members of the project. Even if personas aren’t optimal (and I think its safe to say they’re not optimal, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this discussion) they can still be a world of good in certain situations.

But some designers might never use them, and still be successful. I personally don’t use personas, but I can imagine a day when I might need them. That’s the way with tools. Some cabinet makers might plane their cabinet faces with a hand planer, while others might use the huge electric floor planer. Some might go back and forth depending on the situation. Either way, the cabinet face gets planed and the job finished.

Obviously, though, the discussion about personas is pretty heated. Why is that? Well, I think its because as designers we always have doubt that the way we’re doing research might not be the best way…there is always more we can learn about the people we design for. I think we simply have to accept that, and prioritize our research so that we are at least confident we’re hitting the main pain points in our design.

I’ve found in general that if we think about things as tools that its easier to take our emotion out of it. If we think about software as a tool to get stuff done, it’s a lot easier to design because we can objectively say whether or not it is succeeding.

So the answer to the personas business is that if your design turned out well with personas, then you should try them again. If it turned out well without personas, then that’s good too. It’s very possible that your cabinet will still hold glasses, no matter how you built it.

Continue Reading: Personas as Tools