Ah hello, may we come in madam, it’s the police. I’m PC Smith and he’s PC Jones. Yes, you can take the chain off. Oh, and the other one, my that’s a big bolt. Thank you, cosy in here! Tea, don’t mind if I do. Don’t worry about the batons and body armour - standard issue. Anything wrong? Ha ha no no, quite the opposite in fact. But as it happens you may be able to help us with something…

You may have seen the news about the latest crime statistics. Yes, terrible those stabbings you read about in the paper, but the thing is that, overall, crime’s actually been going down. That’s right going down. Only we don’t seem to be getting credit where it’s due. Crime levels reduced 18% in the last four years, but satisfaction with the police is only up by 6%. That’s right Jones, hurtful isn’t it, ungrateful…

The thing is, the Home Secretary says that from now on we won’t be measured with top-down targets, and that’s a good thing - too much paperwork, not enough time out on the beat. Except for one target, from now on, she says, we’ll be measured on public confidence in the police. “Outcome-based metrics”, that’s the buzz word. And that’s where you come in madam…

Yes, you see our computer has identified your postcode area as one where the fear or crime is out of all proportion to the actual chances of being a victim. Yes Jones, it’s hard to believe. I mean it’s not exactly the Bronx round here is it, all these net curtains and privet hedges. Myself, I blame “A Touch of Frost”. But if we don’t do something our Chief Constable will have some explaining to do, madam, and that’s why we’ve come to ask you a little favour…

Well it’s like this. If a nice lady with a clipboard happens to stop you in the street, maybe she’ll say something about the British Crime Survey and ask you lots of questions. Well if that were to happen, my Chief would be ever so much obliged if you could say nice things about us. Like how quiet the neighbourhood is, and how safe it feels, what a great job your local boys and girls in blue are doing…

Oh no Madam we’re not asking you to fib, but let’s put it another way. That’s a lovely collection of porcelain you’ve got there. My colleague, PC Smith, he gets emotional sometimes. And then he can be clumsy with that big funny old side-handled baton. Be a shame if anything were to happen…

In the 21^st century, few consumer services follow a neat linear model of awareness, consideration, purchase and use. Instead we see a web of customer expectations and perceptions where little things can make a big difference.

It’s the job of service designers to cut through the mass of insight to find the decisive moments where you can make or break a customer relationship. And sometimes you can find those moments in unexpected places.

David Armano recounts a story from Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” that sums up one of these moments perfectly. You can read “Disney’s $100,000 Salt + Pepper Shaker” here.

To the RCA for Innovation Night, tied in with the college’s summer show. The evening included awards for students in the Helen Hamlyn Centre, which uses people-centred design to support independent living and working for ageing and diverse populations.

Focusing on the needs of people often ignored by mainstream business and design is obviously a Good Thing, and no matter how young and healthy we may be it comes with a dose of enlightened self-interest. Not for nothing are the awards titled “Design for our Future Selves”.

But designing for “extreme” users can also reveal truths and perspectives highly relevant to the rest of us. Consider, if you please, Matthew Holloway’s Virtual Breadcrumbs project, in collaboration with people with dementia. In the words of the awards website:

This experimental design proposal looked at the problem of memory loss and began to explore means in which information we collect through our lives could be summarised and communicated back in meaningful ways. From key findings visual outputs were designed, such as wallpaper that contained important events in a person’s life. Further experiments were also carried out with travel images reduced into a single strip and tested on people who had been involved in the travel to assess their ability to provoke memories.

… and in this case a picture is almost certainly worth 1000 words…

So it was a delight to see this theme come through again at an unrelated talk on Dopplr, hosted by the Information Design Association, this time for a different kind of extreme user - the business traveller.

Matts Jones and Biddulph gave us a fascinating insight into the design principles behind their elegant and useful website, where a key piece of the brand identity is the algorithmic use of colour to represent places. As a user builds up a history of travel, the places they’ve been displace Dopplr’s standard “sparklogo” colours. This…

… slowly becomes this…

Matt and Matt have stayed true to Dopplr’s laser-focused mission - not to replicate other more general social networking sites, but to be the best in their chosen niche, making the experience of travel more delightful with added serendipity, and helping people look back on their travels afterwards.

Far from making life boring, this clarity of purpose gives them the freedom to play, to make multiple ways of capturing our travel plans, to wallow in the giant ball pool of trips and coincidences that we create. Their enthusiasm for the data is infectious.

It would be easy with all this eye-candy for the human stories to go untold. While the Dopplr crew are painting a model of the world with MD5s and RGB values, their website is making real stuff happen. Coincidences are spotted, meetings are arranged, dinners are eaten, drinks are drunk, people have conversations, and who knows what more. Somewhere in the world, sometime soon (if not already) a Dopplr baby will be born.

What’s the colourful thread running through these two stories? Well I think it has to do with the dividends we all get when design focuses on the needs of a well-defined user-group, even if we’re not part of that group ourselves. Fortunately few of us suffer from dementia, but we’re all forgetful from time to time, and could all do with visual cues to link us back to past experiences. Fortunately few of us travel at the speed of a whippet, but most of us travel a bit, and those who don’t have friends who do.

Naturally there are risks in this: high tech businesses can fall into the trap of designing only for “power users.” But it does mean that only ever looking at the average customer will only ever yield average results. Sometimes it takes the people at the edges to show us the way.

Working for a company in a rapidly changing industry, it’s easy to overlook the contributions of the team members who deliver the goods day-in day-out. It’s important that these unsung heroes are recognised, and their milestones marked.

So when my coworkers spotted that the office coffee machine was approaching its 100,000th drink they decided it was worth a party. The good folks at Flavia obliged with supplies of chocolate to go with the centemillennial celebrations.

As the number on the LCD crept up, about 20 of us crowded into the narrow corridor where the coffee machine lives, ready to cheer its achievement.

Some people were hoping for some kind of crazy embedded software Easter egg, but the machine modestly just did its thing, exactly as it had for the other 99,999 drinks. The honoured recipient of the beige plastic cupful of “Smooth Roast” reported that it tasted “lovely”.

Here’s the machine quietly communicating the moment…

In their fascinating work, The Media Equation, Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass demonstrate how people instinctively relate to machines as if they were human, even if they have no outwardly human attributes. Their work focuses on individual interactions with computers and how we treat them with politeness and respect, not wanting to hurt their feelings.

The Flavia party takes this a step further. Not only is the coffee machine treated as sentient each time it dispenses a drink, but over the years (five, maybe?) it has become part of the team. It has certainly out-done many human employees in length of service.

Interestingly it was the count of “Total Drinks” that increased our emotional connection with the coffee machine. The counter feature was doubtless included as an aid to maintenance and service rather than for public consumption, yet it made us think differently about the machine’s role in the epic narrative of our corporate life. If we can get through that many hot beverages together, then we too must be heroes of a sort.

When its time finally comes to be “upgraded” or whatever indignity awaits, I hope we will treat the coffee machine with the deference accorded by Icelandic civil servants to their IBM 1401, as recorded here.

Oh, and the chocolate was lovely too.

Here’s the proof (geddit?) that the worlds of inky fingers and fat thumbs can coexist.

Last week I purchased a 1.5 inch type-high zinc block of the QR code for this blog, http://matt.me63.com. I wanted to see what happens when the beautifully tactile letterpress of my boyhood meets the amazing multimedia mobiles that I work with now. The answer, it seems, is they get on just fine.

That this works is a tribute to the staying power of Daler-Rowney’s Water Soluble Block Printing Colour, which survived 10 years in the loft to produce a perfect print first time, and to the amazing resiliance of the 2d barcode format and my Nokia N82’s 5 megapixel camera, which coped with all but the blurriest of my impressions.

And just listen to the sound of the roller transferring ink to the block - gorgeous :)

2d barcodes were everywhere on our recent trip to Japan, and seem to be gaining more attention here in the UK in some unexpected places. I recently downloaded Kaywa’s QR Code reader to my Z610i.

I find it really exciting that communications media have changed so much in my lifetime. At school I played with lead type and got inky fingers. Now I play with mobile phones and have one thumb bigger than the other. 2d barcodes bridge that divide, being printed in ink on paper yet offering an instant connection to the digital world.

What better way to reflect on the interface between old and new media than to get my QR code made up as a printing block. It had to be big enough across for a phone to read accurately - I went for 1.5 inches - and exactly type-high - that’s the 0.918 inch standard for lead type.

KPE Graphics of Kettering obliged - I mailed* them my artwork as a 1200dpi JPEG on Monday and the finished block arrived by post in a Jiffy bag today.

The photo above shows the block in its pristine state, but it won’t stay that way for long. Next step is to dig out my old printing kit from the loft and make a few proofs on paper.

* Postscript: I realised I meant e-mailed, of course.

At the weekend we went north to the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, the highlight of which is James Cox’s Silver Swan automaton.

Made in 1773, it was nearly 100 when Mark Twain wrote:

‘I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes - watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop - watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…’

And it still works, operated by museum staff twice at day at noon and 3pm. For 40 seconds, this 235-year-old exhibit comes to life, even holding the rapt attention of our Cbeebies-generation children.

It set me wondering: which of our early 21st Century delights will people still marvel at almost a quarter of a millennium from today?

Two recent news stories continue my theme that social media doesn’t so much change people’s behaviour, as expose pre-existing behaviours for all to see, often with unexpected consequences.

Exhibit 1: ‘Dumbest criminal’ records crimes

A Leeds man has been dubbed the city’s “dumbest criminal” by a councillor for posting videos of anti-social behaviour on the YouTube website.

Andrew Kellett, 23, from Stanks Drive, Swarcliffe, published 80 videos and was given an interim anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) by Leeds magistrates.

Kellett has been previously convicted of various offences but the Asbo stops him from boasting of his activities.

BBC News, 21 May 2008

This one’s fairly straightforward: people have been speeding, racing, dodging taxi fares and stealing petrol since the advent of the automobile. But even as some wring their hands over the spread of CCTV and enforcement cameras, others now bravely disintermediate the authorities altogether. Why wait for your crimes to be exposed when you can post them on the internet yourself?

Our legal system’s response? Stop, you’re making it too easy! Shooting fish in a barrel is one thing, but fish who voluntarily jump into the barrel and bob up to the surface with targets tattooed on their bellies - where’s the fun in that? So he gets an ASBO to stop him putting any more of his crimes on Youtube.

Exhibit 2: Students ‘had hints’ before exam

An exam board is investigating suggestions that some teachers gave students hints about what questions would be in an A-level biology exam.

Discussions in an online student forum ahead of OCR’s A2 biology practical identified key areas for revision.

OCR said it would watch the results to see if anyone had gained an advantage.

BBC News, 28 May 2008

Now, I reckon teachers with an inside track on the practical exam have always discretely “advised” pupils what to revise. Not to do so when you’ve shepherded a bunch of teenagers through the course material for the best part of two years would be almost inhuman, even without the pressure to perform in league tables. Exam boards must have long realised this conflict of interest.

It takes a bunch of students chatting in an online forum to force them to admit the situation and “monitor” results. The Facebook generation may be adept at negotiating the social intricacies of poking, but it seems some of them have totally failed to grasp the point of a nod and wink. And it only takes a few to spoil it for everyone.

People being people, much as they’ve always been: loving, creating, cheating and scheming in the same proportions as they always did. The new variable is visibility, and that changes everything.

… that the internet was ever tethered to wall sockets and floor boxes.

Now obviously the participants in a Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference are a self-selecting bunch of enthusiasts, but last week there was a distinct sense of confidence that our moment has arrived.

People who’ve spent the best part of a decade expounding the unique benefits of the mobile internet - ubiquity, identity, location, authentication, micro-billing and so on - only to be met with blank looks from their fixed net counterparts, now see the prospect of mass adoption just around the corner.

Some even go so far as to say that the fixed web we know today will come to be seen as an historical anomaly. Why “optimise” for home and office, Windows and Mac, IE and Firefox - such a narrow subset of contexts, computing devices and browsers - when there’s a whole big wide world out there? Some evidence here.

Thanks once again to Ludo for providing a cautionary image to illustrate this post. Satisfyingly, I realised this picture of my son using our home PC was taken on my mobile phone and uploaded to Flickr using Shozu - paper wraps stone!

Updates 29/05/2008:

• Si reports on We Love Mobile
• Slides from David Cushman of Bauer
• Slides fron Paul Golding

It’s taken me a while (and 83 more pages of Here Comes Everybody) to understand my unease with the “technology changes everything” discourse around social media, and now to reach an alternative hypothesis. In my last post I questioned whether the advent of the internet in the place of television could, as Clay Shirky suggests, awaken some kind of latent creativity and collaboration. Could the web really turn the tables on the mass media, humble big corporations and bring about revolutions?

Here Comes Everybody contains a number of such vignettes to back up the case for the technology-led societal shift: the phenomenal accumulation of quality volunteer-contributed content in Wikipedia, British students’ Facebook revolt against changes to their HSBC bank charges, Belarus “flash mob” protests, and so on. Nothing like these things could happen, the story goes, without new tools built on top of mobile phones and the internet.

Except that they could, and did. Because for every story of 21st Century people getting together to achieve something amazing using new technology, there’s a story from history of people who did much the same without the benefit of the world wide web. One of these even gets into Shirky’s book: the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and all that it stood for. But to that we might add any number of 20th Century educational movements such as the Workers’ Education Association, student boycotts of Barclays and Nestle in the 1980s, the demonstrations of May 1968 (the same year, by the way, that a contract was awarded to build something called the Arpanet).

These big things, of course, are just the tip of the iceberg. To these we must add countless more localised acts of collaboration and creativity: the village antiques society of which my grandmother was treasurer, the baby-sitting circle where my mum and dad traded nights out with other parents using curtain-rings as currency, countless fanzines photocopied and posted. Sure, it was a little harder to shift ideas around the world, but from what I can recall we mostly managed OK. After all, making and sharing stuff are two of the most defining characteristics of being human.

So how come it still feels like the internet is changing everything? I have a suggestion.

When Clay Shirky talks in his blog post about a massive television-related bender spanning the whole second half of the 20th Century, he’s half right. But it wasn’t the mass of the population that was rendered senseless by the broadcast media - no they kept on creating and collaborating much as people always have. Rather, the intoxication induced by television was mainly in the minds of big business and mass media. Broadcasters and brands became so drunk with the power of pushing content one-way into people’s living rooms that they forgot that their “audience” might be busy doing other things.

It was a wise executive who admitted “I know half my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half” because the mythical housewife never was waiting patiently for the television to tell her which brand of soap powder to buy. She was too busy chatting to her next-door neighbour while they scrubbed their doorsteps, or making bunting to string along the street on carnival day. But business, the media and government didn’t get that. It was their tragedy that there was no return path. Information flowed in only one direction - away from them - leaving them to revel in their own self-importance.

It’s my contention that the amount of collaboration and creativity in the world is not changing greatly as a result of new communications technologies. There may be a little incremental creation, but mostly it’s substitutional of other activities that have gone on in some shape or other for thousands of years. What has changed is that new technologies make those old activities more visible. All those conversations used to happen in drafty village halls, through the post and over the phone. Now they are on the web for all to search and to see. It’s no longer possible for the mass media and big businesses, or even governments, to imagine that they have it all their own way, because the curtain has been drawn back to reveal just how irrelevant some of them have become.

It’s not so much a case of “Here Comes Everybody”, as of “Everybody Was Here All Along”. People aren’t late to this party, technology and business are. Only by understanding that can traditional organisations have a chance of being welcomed into the conversation. If they come at this change from a technology point of view - thinking that they’re going to instantly enable incremental communications for an amazed and grateful populace - then they’ll likely fail to make the grade. But if they understand that it’s mainly substitutional then they’ll see why their customers set the bar so high.

People have been communicating and interacting for thousands of years without the help of mobile phones and computers. They have developed sophisticated ways of doing so. Social niceties and nuances make their collaborations highly efficient. If you or your business want to be a part of that you’d better first watch and learn. See how natural are the conversations, and how easily people negotiate complex issues of coordination and collaboration. Then try to design tools and talk in a language that matches that quality. Or to put it another way, Here Comes Technology, Late As Usual (but if you sit quietly at the back for a bit Everybody might let you join in).