The final speaker of the first day at the Encounter I am attending in Santiago, Chile is Senator Fernando Flores. As that Wikipedia page demonstrates, Flores has been very active in cognition, philosophy, and even human-computer interaction. He has become a huge advocate of blogs as a means for encouraging broader Chilean discourse.

Anyway, he just name-checked French philosopher/sociologist/intellectual Bruno Latour. And artificial-intelligence theorist Ray Kurzweil.

Why can’t the United States have geek senators who blog, who cite international intellectuals? Why do I think if a US senator were to do that, he’d be pilloried in the press as out of touch with the common person (see: Kerry, Gore). Flores is all about empowering the common person, through technology.

(Looking over his blog, he talks about, among other things, Second Life, MIT media theorist Henry Jenkins, MySpace and Youtube, Web 2.0…)

Anyway.

…introducing Day 2 from this most recent Adaptive Path’s UX Week, as a podcast from IT Conversations. You can download the presentation deck (PDF). The podcast cuts me off, as I was also introducing Michael Bierut, but you’ll see those slides in the PDF.

Stacy and I arrived yesterday at 6:30am in Santiago airport, after something like 16 hours on planes or in airports (Oakland –>(change planes) Los Angeles –> Lima (stay on plane) –> Santiago). We slept for shit — during the longest leg, from Los Angeles to Lima, we were in the same row as a voluble 2 and a half year old child.

So, when we landed, we were out of it. It was helped that our first sight in Chile was the immigration line:

We had been in the very back of the plane, and we had to pay for “reciprocity”, because, it seems, the US are dicks to visiting Chileans. Thus, we ended up at the very end of the immigration line, as you can see there.

We were picked up by Gabriela and Katya, and they drove us to the center of town to find breakfast. We met up with Jorge (it seems that most Chilean men are named Jorge or Javier), and wandered around. As it was only 8am, pretty much every place was closed — Chileans don’t go out for breakfast. We ended up at Emporio La Rosa (Spanish-language description, English-language description (scroll down)), a heladeria that also served pastries and coffee.

Our breakfast hosts took us to meet up with Javier at his office at Yahoo! Research. We dropped our bags off, met up with Jorge Arango and Peter Morville, and headed out for a walk around downtown Santiago. We were too tired to bother with museums — there was no way any information would sink in. So we stuck to the streets, eating mote con huesillo (sweet syrupy drink with peaches and barley), watching folk music in the plaza, and just taking in the hurly burly.

We ate at what our guide book called a “tourist trap”, Donde Augusto, in the Mercado Central. Mostly we wanted a comfortable place to sit and eat, and we were hungry for fish, so while things cost more than they would elsewhere, it was an easy meal. I ordered congrio frito, a fried, lightly-breaded white fish, served a lo pobre, which means topped with fried eggs, and with fries.

We needed to work off our meal, so we headed out and up Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill in the middle of the city upon which has been developed as a park with some fanciful architecture. This was probably the most touristy thing we did.

After this hike, we headed back to Emporio la Rosa, as Jorge had a strong jones for ice cream. I had a delightfully refreshing cone with frambuesa (raspberry) and vainilla. Oh, and some espresso, because Santiago is not known for its good coffee, and I’d learned in the morning that the brew here was solid.

This fortified us for our walk back to Yahoo! Research, by way of the Alameda (the main boulevard of Chile, for both autos and pedestrians), and a Paseo whose name I cannot find. Buses awaited to take us to Santa Cruz, about a 2 and a half hour drive south of Santiago, through the gorgeous Central Valley. Our destination was Hotel Santa Cruz, a remarkably well-designed kind of colonial Spanish space which is serving as the venue for the IA Retreat.

After a much-needed shower (remember: 16 hours of air travel, walking around downtown Santiago in ~80-degree heat), we enjoyed a pisco sour in the bar, and then a meat-filled dinner (grilled beef served in slabs, sausages, chicken, etc.) accompanied by bottomless vino. A couple hours of this, and I was exhausted. And slept for a solid 8 hours for the first time in many days.

In my talk Stop Designing Products, I cite the 1888 release of the Kodak Camera as possibly the start of what we now call consumer electronics. I say this knowing that the camera was wholly mechanical — no electricity, so no electronics. But it had the characteristics we associate with such devices — complexity that could be exposed or hidden; support of leisure (as opposed to work) activities; priced for home/individual use (though quite expensive to begin with); portable.

Typically, consumer electronics are believed to have begun with the radio. And while that might be technically correct, I think there’s value to be drawn from mechanical predecessors.

The only other devices I can think of that might be similarly considered predecessors are the typewriter and the calculator. But the calculator was not really a home device (as far as I can tell), and the first truly popular typewriter wasn’t really all that portable.

What are your thoughts? Apologies that comments aren’t available on my site — I never brought them back after being bombed with interminable comment spam. If you’ve got thoughts on this, please email me at peterme AT peterme DOT com.

Yesterday the Chronicle featured an article on “San Francisco Values,” as a response to all the San-Francisco-values bashing happening in this midterm election season (if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, representative from San Francisco, will likely become Speaker of the House).

Having lived in the Bay Area for almost all my adult life (apart from two years in New York), San Francisco Values are something I’ve thought about. When discussing such things, one can’t avoid oversimplification. Oh well.

One of the distinctions that so pleases me about San Francisco is that it is not a town of *ambition*. It might be a town of drive, passion, and spirit, but you don’t get the ladder-climbing, the achievement-at-all-costs that I saw in New York, and in elements of Los Angeles. People do what they want to do not because they want to “succeed,” but because it’s simply their passion that drives them.

As part of this, there’s a natural entrepreneurial bent in San Francisco. People are willing to try new things, and those around them are eager to support them. Even in a land of high rents and salaries, the number of small start-up businesses is pretty staggering.

Only San Francisco could have born Burning Man. There’s something about the mixture of art, technology, and spirituality that resonates with San Franciscans. In particular, San Franciscans are remarkably tolerant of differing spiritual paths.

Recently, I’ve seen San Francisco encourage misguided, if not abominable, values (also related to Burning Man, actually). San Franciscans value outre behavior for its own sake. Piercings! Tattoos! Sexual fluidity!

Hipsterism can lead to an unfortunate fetish on appearance and presentation that I’ve seen enocurage people to grow increasingly superficial. People who pay hundreds of dollars on hipster wear in some strange effort to buy happiness through acceptance by others.

And, of course, there’s the drugs. It’s very easy to find people who will support you in your drug taking, even if the behavior is destructive. Because, you know, drugs are fun (and dangerous! (outre!)), and your hipster friends will think your cool!

Any locale’s values will have it’s upsides and downsides. I love San Francisco, and find it resonates with my passion. But I’ve also seen the harm it can do.

Stacy and I are in active detailed planning mode for our Big Trip of the year. On Thursday 9 Nov we head to Santiago, Chile, from where we’ll be taking a bus to Santa Cruz for the first Latin American Information Architecture Retreat. On 13-14 Nov we’ll be in Santiago, where I will be speaking at 7th Annual Society and Information Technologies Encounter.

And then, from 15-27 November, we’re on a glorious vacation. We will be visiting Santiago and places around it (Valparaiso, Vina del Mar, maybe glorious Cajon del Maipo), and then hopping on a plane and heading up to Cuzco, Peru, from where we’ll hit up a bunch of Incan sites, including (of course) Machu Picchu.

If you’ve been in that region (or are in that region) and have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them! Just write me at peterme AT peterme DOT com.

This evening I attended an event at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto. I was looking forward to something similar to Yahoo’s Design Expo from a bit back — demonstrations of cool new mobile technology, things to play with, people to chat with.

Instead what I got was a ’99-era party with boatloads of free food (I stuffed myself on nigiri and dipping sweets in a chocolate fountain), all taking place in an overcrowded tent, populated mostly by Silicon Valley types with no soul. There were only three things being demonstrated (2 game thingies and a cameraphone picture service). It was utterly unclear to me what the point of the event was (and why I was invited). The buzz was that this was a recruiting event in disguise.

The most interesting thing for me was hearing the depression of various Yahoo employees who happened to be there. Supposedly the last all-hands earnings meeting was a remarkable downer (with good reason). If you’re looking to hire someone, and you know Yahoos, this might be a good time to give them a call. (Which is a little sad — there’s amazing talent there, but from what I can tell, there’s just swaths and swaths of unnecessary middle management getting in the way of getting things done. And no, I don’t know when my blog turned into a bland Valleywag.)

Written by Annie Haskell (one of the people Stacy is learning about in her dissertation work)

We, some of us, watched our baby lie, sick and feverish and heard with sinking heart the doctor say: “The child needs fresh air; the house is full of sewer gas; boil the water before drinking, it is a mass of microbes; boil the milk, there is danger of tuberculosis.” Then each month we dreaded the rent bill for the sewer-haunted house; we fled before the collector for the microbe water, and we worried about money to pay for the tuberculosis milk.
Kaweah Commonwealth, 2(8), page 2, January 10, 1891

The conference that I spent around 8 months planning, IDEA, transpired over the course of last Monday and Tuesday. In short, it went really well. Attendees seemed genuinely enthused — many went out of their way thank me. The speakers had a good time with one another and the audience. And, after I was able to come down off the epinephrine buzz of constantly being “on”, I realized that it all pretty much went off without a hitch.

And now, some remembrances, lessons learned, and other thoughts about the event.

On Being the Host

I’d never run a conference before. Having taught two-day workshops, I figured this would be easier, in that I would be doing very little speaking. Um, boy was I wrong. Someone running an event falls prey to continuous partial attention. You are constantly “scanning the periphery,” and, after 8-9 hours of this two days in a row, I was pretty spent. I also didn’t drink in the talks as much as I’d like, particularly David Guiney’s National Park Service discussions. By the second day I was better able to focus on the presentations, but still, let’s just say we didn’t record the event just for those who weren’t there…

Thematic Takeaways

The other thing about being the host is that you don’t have the element of surprise around the presentations that others do. You’ve been working with the speakers for months, and, even if you don’t know exactly what they’re going to say, you’ve got some pretty good notions. Typically, if I attend an event like this, I pull together emergent themes, often unintended by the conference organizers. I have no idea if such themes existed for IDEA — I had trouble seeing beyond the overarching “designing complex information spaces” theme to identify anything else that emerged.

And even though I shouldn’t play favorites with the sessions, some talks have really stuck with me:

(by the way, all presentation audio, and many of the slides, can be downloaded here.)

Dave Cronin – Art for the Public. I am a sucker for presentations where standard user-centered design methods (stakeholder interviews, user research, interaction design, prototyping) are used in novel environments, such as the design of a web, kiosk, and mobile system for supporting art appreciation at the Getty Center in L.A. It continues to provide evidence that such design isn’t special or otherworldly.

Fernanda Viegas – Democratizing Visualization. This might have been, for me, the single most exciting project discussed at IDEA (with the possible exception of StoryCorps). Fernanda gave a sneak peak at Many Eyes, a service soon to be released by IBM Research that allows people to visualize data — either their own, or publicly accessible data. It also turns these visualizations into social artifacts — people can comment on one another’s visualizations. There is so much potential for this — my glib take on it is “It’s Youtube for Data Viz!”

Dan Hill – The New Media. As Dan’s talk unfolded, I feared that he was going to wander off into esoterica, satisfied to show pretty pictures of buildings and musical notation. But he pulled it all together in the end, demonstrating how the experience of media, increasingly fractured across many different channels and at many different times, can use this discontinuity to create an effect where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote. It’s a thing of poetry. For a taste, read Bruce’s blog post of phrases taken from IDEA presentations.

The Venue: Seattle’s Central Library

I chose the Central Library because it is a space that embodies the theme of the event — it manages complex information across a physical and virtual realm, and really allows information to be a substrate of the architectural space. It’s also just a fun, weird, and interesting building to be in.

I also chose the Central Library because it was crazy cheap — the Microsoft Auditorium costs $1,000 a day, for a room that holds over 200 people, has up-to-date presentation facilities, and comfortable seating where everyone has a good view. It even includes a full-time A/V technician.

If you’re planning an event in Seattle, you’d be foolish not to consider the Central Library as a venue. It’s well-located, surrounded by hotels, a brief walk to Pike Place Market, excellent wi-fi coverage, and your attendees will just dig it.

Meals

Sarah Rice, who was essential to the success of the event, insisted that we serve breakfast and afternoon snacks, and she was right to do so. Attendees devoured the food we gave them, and never again will I consider NOT feeding and watering people coming to an event.

The first day, we experimented with having groups sign up to lunch together at nearby restaurants. It worked okay, though even when we extended lunch to 90 minutes (from 75), timing was still very tight to get people out of the library, to a restaurant, seated, ordered, served, fed, paid, and returned. Also, all the nearby restaurants were kinda pricey.

The second day we just sent people out on their own, and I headed over to the Public Market for a killer grilled cheese sandwich. If the weather is right, going to the market, and then to the park at the end of the market is probably the best way to have a quality Seattle experience.

So Will We Do It Again?

I suspect so. I haven’t talked about it with the IA Institute board yet. I know I cannot put in the time and energy I did this go around, but I don’t think I would have to. We’ve figured a bunch of stuff out.

We’re working to get all the presentations and audio up from IDEA.

But, in the meantime, I just want to point you all to the audio of Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote [12MB MP3]. It was amazing — he summarized the event brilliantly, and then exhorted the audience to do better.

He also drew a diagram.