Physical Affection

The recent unveiling of Amazon’s marketplace for Android apps got me thinking about digital commerce and its seemingly steady march towards becoming a reflection of real-world commerce. Currently, you can only buy mobile apps in a few digital mega-stores, but this sparse landscape may eventually be filled with Ma and Pa app stores of all stripes, each one serving a specific demographic by offering a curated selection of apps. The prevailing trend towards more social computing all but guarantees it.

If you’re only familiar with the Apple’s iTunes App Store — the sole marketplace where an iPhone or iPad owner can purchase apps for their devices — you may not be aware that, while Google runs an official app marketplace for devices running their Android platform, there are several other marketplaces where Android device owners can buy apps. In fact, Google has structured Android, their mobile operating system, to allow users and mobile device manufacturers a great deal of freedom when it comes to applications. This ethos that values flexibility and customization allows device makers to pre-install their own apps and, more relevantly for most of us, allows users to download Android apps from anywhere on the Internet that they please.

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG

Like the iTunes app store, the official Google app marketplace has been widely criticized as being difficult to shop. The number of apps available for mobile devices has grown so large that the simple but simplistic shopping strategies employed in both of these marketplaces are now insufficient to connect users with the apps they seek — assuming a user even knows that an app they might want exists. Only the editorially featured and most popular apps are easily surfaced for the consumer. For everything else, word-of-mouth, blogging, and advertising are the only real hope for an app to find its audience. An overhaul of these nascent app shopping experiences is long overdue. (I’m looking at you, iTunes.)

Additionally, because Google doesn’t stringently vet applications as part of the approval process, the Google Android Market has become known as a sort of Wild West. Malicious, buggy, or misleading applications seem to find their way onto the phones of unsuspecting users all too often. Apple takes advantage of this supposed side-effect of freedom to justify their highly-restricted-but-safe “walled garden” system. However, I am fairly certain it is possible for freedom and safety to coexist within an online community if it is given the right tools.

THE FUTURE

Since they don’t happen to own an operating system, Amazon’s mere presence in the app business suggests that there is room for a variety of storefronts in the app business — that apps, like cans of Coke, should be available not just in a Walmart, but from any store that wishes to sell them. I bet the Internet is full of app connoisseurs who would gladly evangelize their favorite apps in exchange for a little cash or a reward of some kind.

In the future, given enough consumer demand and developer support, opening a curated gallery of digital experiences for sale could be as easy as installing WordPress. Instead of just recommending apps, Gizmodo, New York Times, or your local Girl Scout Troop could offer their favorite apps for sale. A free market for digital experiences would be totally cool, and it would shift the power of app recommendations into the hands of those that do it best — friends, family, and brands whose values the consumer already sympathizes with. These specialized app shops may not have the breadth of apps that a super-store like Apple, Google or Amazon would, but they would be able to offer a trusted sensibility and inspiring curation.

Superstores are mega-profitable and efficient entities, so it looks like they are here to stay. However, besides offering low prices, they are rarely identified as delightful shopping experiences. In the real world, it was a long, slow, profits-driven journey from the neighborhood corner store to the mega mart. In the world of appstores, it appears that journey will be precisely the opposite, the power of commerce moving down from the big companies and out into the hands of the little guy. I’m betting it will happen because people will always demand boutique shopping experiences. One could argue it is this same love of the boutique sensitivity to purpose that has made apps a more popular experience on mobile devices than the web browser.

SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM

I believe e-commerce, like most cultural experiences, is constantly seeking equilibrium between efficiency and authenticity. The engineers of today’s Internet have plied the system with a lot of the former, but not so much of the latter. The contemporary shift toward more ‘social’ digital experiences is the inevitable result of the system trying to balance itself. Entrepreneurs and engineers now building software platforms and tools that give more than lip service to this shift will surely ingratiate themselves into the hearts and wallets of today’s humanity-starved Internet goers.

Apple is setting itself up as the Starbucks of mobile app retailers, increasingly offering a safe and efficient retail model tuned to a mass market scale. They are sure to remain a successful business that will always have its place. However, I believe Google’s Android will eventually see massive returns on the truly social experiences that are sure to result from the openness of the platform and their business model. For true authenticity to be expressed, you must empower the people not just as consumers, but also as implicit owners of a culture on all levels.

The revolution is coming to the way we buy, sell, and trade apps.

Design, Digital, Ideas apps, appstore, ecommerce, future, technology

In promotion of their new (and pretty damn great) Cloud Drive streaming media service, Amazon was offering Lady Gaga’s new record Born This Way for just 99 cents. Now, I’ve never been the biggest fan of her music, but I thought I may as well own a complete record to give her a fair chance — you know, seeing as how she’s one of the most popular artists in the world.

Disappointingly, I wasn’t won over by this record. Instead, I found it even more cloyingly campy and difficult to listen to than I anticipated. It seems I’m just not cut out to be one of Gaga’s Little Monsters.

In disproportion to my interest in her actual music, it is telling that I have now written three posts on Gaga. In fact, I have always admired Lady Gaga as an art director and performer. I think that she and her team come up with some of the catchiest, strangest, most referentially brilliant props and performance conceits in modern memory (her meat dress and cigarette sunglasses come to mind). Now, I don’t find the becycled cover of Born This Way to be brilliant, exactly, but I was pleased that it recalled one of my favorite old pinball machines, Centaur. Back when I first saw the straight-out-of-the-80s Centaur machine at a bar in Seattle, I remember thinking the concept of a centaur being half-man and half-motorcycle was funny but strangely compelling. Would this form factor be a gift or a curse? It’s difficult to tell…

…and now I’m thinking the cover just might be kinda brilliant — an aptly odd metaphor for the whole pop-machine Gaga identity whirlwind… Damn! She got me again!

Perhaps the only question that remains is: who wore it better?

Art, Design, Music centaur, game, motorcycle, pinball, video

Facebook is fast becoming the ubiquitous form of both personal and social identification on the Internet and across connected devices. Unlike most of its earlier competition, Facebook has grown beyond it’s simple beginnings as a walled social network; it now powers the social features of numerous other digital experiences. Members can use their Facebook ID to sign into websites, challenge their friends from within video games, populate apps instantly with contacts, and spread feedback and comments all over the web. Heck, as we’ve recently seen, the site is even helping change history in its role in political revolution across the globe. In other words, Facebook is proving incredibly useful and nearly indispensable (gasp!) as the first widely accepted common denominator for personal identity and social features across numerous digital platforms.

So, as membership grows and the service weaves its way into more and more experiences, at what point does Facebook become too big to fail? It is projected that 50% of all Americans will be registered on Facebook by 2013. At this rate, does it begin to make sense that Facebook should become recognized as an integral part of our digital infrastructure, and its social databases regulated as a public resource? Should Facebook’s social web be commodified; becoming synonymous with ‘social network’ instead of merely being one example?

Though it’s the goal of most every startup, the true indispensability of a specific Internet service is a foreign concept; The Internet is simply too young, too unstable, and too marginalized as just one slice of everyday life. Our demands on this digital system are growing, however, and we can look for precedent in other industries and commodities, such as water. Clean and available drinking water is something that most of us see as a common right. It would would seem ridiculous if landowners were allowed to claim full rights over the water in a river that runs through their property, charging all those downstream for the right to drink. If a factory was allowed to pollute a river, harming everything and everyone later exposed to the water, most of us would agree the government should step in and stop them. While Facebook may not be as necessary to life as water (for a few of us, at least), at some point the availability of a free, secure, and universal source of social identity on the Internet will be necessary to create the meaningfully connected digital experiences we all dream of.

The transition of property from private to public resource is never a simple matter. We have a system of patent and copyright expiration for intellectual property, eventually allowing brilliant inventions like Mies Van Der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair or Pfizer’s Viagra (which goes generic in the US next year) to be made and sold by any manufacturer.  However, patent expiration and its terms are always bitterly debated by any affected parties. The digital industry most certainly sends lobbyists to Washington to make sure their concerns are heard on this and other relevant issues.

Of course, one of the primary hurdles for any unified social network is whether or not most people would actually want a singular online identity. Facebook offers complex permissions and groups settings, but personally I use LinkedIn for all my business connections and FourSquare to inform select friends of my partying whereabouts. Most of my other social dealings online are either borderline random or totally anonymous. It’s too tedious to keep recreating a new social network every time I join a new website. So, if the alternative to a unified system is that only three or four of my digital experiences are truly social, it strikes me that unification will eventually win. We’ll just have to figure out how to address best practices for permissions and privacy.

With no one new in the industry able to find a way to compete with Facebook in the social arena, there’s a lot of pressure to figure out how to best socialize new digital experiences. Promisingly, the not-quite-finished HTML5 standard lays the initial groundwork of a social web by including tags to identify the author of an article and of any linked pages. The more we live our lives digitally, the more we will need to continue to develop HTML in this direction. I believe the users of the Internet will eventually need a commodified social tool — a standardized, extensible, protected, and regulated personal identification and address book. With 600 million users (and growing), I am curious to see if Facebook will eventually offer itself (or part of itself) as a candidate for this standard before the government steps in and requests regulation on our behalf.

UPDATE: As I finished writing this article, the Obama administration announced a plan for a regulated marketplace of public and private Online identity providers — perhaps resulting in the very vision I just outlined. If this initiative goes forward, I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is counting on being the front-runner, thus cementing their place at the top of the social-web hill for the foreseeable future. Still, we have yet to discover whether people will trust any identification system officially sanctioned by the government.

Design, Ideas identity, networks, social media

Shortly after I published a previous article detailing the impact of my first visit to the sublime Bloedel Reserve, I received a lovely note from Ed Moydell, the reserve’s new Executive Director. It seems that he and I shared something in common — we were both deeply moved by our first impressions of Bloedel and we both wished that more people outside the gardening community knew about the place. In pursuit of the latter, Ed offered to take Sara and I on a behind the scenes tour of the grounds, where we took in the sights and smells of Fall as we discussed the past and, more importantly, the future of Bloedel Reserve.

Bloedel Reserve is luckier than most organizations and experiences that are vying for the attention of people these days in that not only is the place itself amazing, but it has an incredible history — a rich genesis story of family, love, art, forestry, and architecture that is fun to turn around in your head as you reflect on what the place means to you.

Narrative such as these offer an avenue for understanding and sympathy that, in turn, leads to deeply felt connection on a personal level. For instance, there’s a reason why a whole new crowd of people all of a sudden wanted to go see Prince live in concert after the semi-autobiographical film Purple Rain came out. The fact is, that once you give something a context — a framework for understanding — even the best experiences somehow seem better and more interesting. It’s a fact that concerts seem better when you know the words to the songs, but they seem doubly awesome when you feel like you know the performers themselves. More locally, one of the smallest, slowest towns around — Forks, WA — became a tourist destination just because it was the setting for vampire love in the Twilight book series. People naturally try to project a narrative onto everything they encounter, and they love it when that narrative already exists. Bloedel Reserve might not quite have vampires (or Prince), but the place does have a story to tell.

Bloedel does have challenges, though, as they try to start a conversation with a new group of would-be visitors. Even though they’ve got the charm and the pedigree, getting the word out to a new generation that may not exactly be open to hearing anything about a “garden” is a challenging project, to be sure. How do you make a place like Bloedel sound relevant to people before they experience it for themselves? How do you communicate the poignant environments, the history, the architecture, and the unmistakable feeling (energetically relaxed?) this place instills in you? Is this a brand you can deliver on with just history and a walk through the grounds, or do you have to add another layer or two to the experience? What are those other layers? Parties? Picnics? Concerts? Lectures? Interactive Video? How many layers can you add before you’re not telling the same story anymore?

You can’t shout a bedtime story, but there’s always a way to get more people to hear you without sacrificing the effect of what you’re saying. In today’s hyper-connected world, people are learning that they don’t necessarily have to talk louder to spread a story. Instead, they try to get the community to retell the story amongst themselves. Going viral is the new network TV. Fortunately for Bloedel, a good story is first ingredient in this elusive recipe.

Anyway, this challenge — of perception, appeal, and publicity — is one of the many things we discussed with Ed while we were on our walk. We also talked a lot about the recent improvements and future plans for the grounds at Bloedel.

A big draw of the Bloedel experience is the way that you almost feel like you’ve got the place to yourself as you explore its vast acreage. In order to increase the amount of visitors to the Reserve — and still retain this feeling of solitude — the park is on a trajectory to add even more pathways and open up more areas of the grounds to the public. One of the most exciting is called Fern Hill.

Fern Hill is on the eastern side of the grounds down the hill from the main house and close to the water. Once it is open, you will be able to enjoy numerous vistas overlooking Puget Sound as you wind your way through the ferns and giant trees of the forest. Adding more opportunities for ocean views highlights another unique and very ‘Northwestern’ aspect of Bloedel Reserve. When I think of this part of the country, the combination of water with lush green forests is very much at the front of my mind. This is a tiny slice of Puget Sound in its most elemental state.

At the end of our tour, Ed brought Sara and I into the guest house in the middle of the Japanese garden. A building tailor-made for hosting, this low-slung retreat is a nexus of glass, wood, and paper. If Mad Men’s Bert Cooper was looking for a vacation home on Bainbridge Island, this building would certainly do the trick. The place, designed by architect Paul Hayden Kirk, is amazing — possessing of a feeling of structure and openness that stems from the fact that none of the interior rooms are completely walled off. The open floor plan coupled with the 360 degree wrap-around porch makes this house the ultimate place to throw a soiree.

Outside, a zen rock garden calms the spot where the swimming pool used to be. Family friend and Pulitzer prize winning poet Theodore Roethke drowned here in 1963, the victim of a heart attack. The family ordered the pool filled in the very next day. There is no plaque, but the mysterious power of this hidden history lends this part of the garden a dark but redemptive essence.

In fact, it is easy to imagine that you are being accompanied by various spirits as you walk the grounds of the reserve. This is a place where people lived, and in many ways it feels occupied still. Perhaps Ed should set up a summer movie night where everyone can sit on the lawn and watch My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki’s lively ode to forest spirits, friendship, and family. This might be a fun way to introduce a whole new generation to the wonder and the magic that the natural world communicates to those that take the time to listen.

Bloedel Reserve is a truly a place for wonder and magic. Go Listen.

Design, Life, Photography architecture, bainbridge, bloedel reserve, Edward Moydell, gardens, japanese, northwest

In case you don’t already lust after Foursquare badges and spend hours trying to kill every zombie possible in Dead Rising long after you’ve beat the actual game, I’ll let you in on a secret — achievements are the next big thing in game design. Started quietly on the Xbox as a way to rack up your Gamer Score (translation: how badass of a video gamer you are), achievements were basically extra mini puzzles that you could solve just by playing the game a certain way. They weren’t a necessary part of the game, they were just there to award you for, say, playing long enough to kill 100,000 zombies.

Well, as it turns out, these little awards resulted almost immediately in a marked increase in the amount of time gamers spent playing a game. Without doing anything, really, game designers had managed to make their games many times more engaging to the player. Result: now you’ll find achievements everywhere.

In the location-based check-in application FourSquare, achievements such as the “I’m On A Boat” badge are awarded for, what else, checking into a location that happens to be a boat. Foursquare users actually will seek out certain locations just so they are awarded the badge. These badges don’t get the user anything except for whatever feeling of pride that comes with cultivating a collection of colorful badges. Yet, take them away and FourSquare loses a big part of its charm. Genius.

However, as with most things new under the sun — this same concept has been used before as a way to raise consumer consumption of a product. I refer, of course, to Panini Sticker Books — the addiction of my youth.

Panini stickers were sold in packs like baseball cards, except they came in practically every flavor of game and children’s movie franchise known to man. The special thing about these sticker cards, though, was that you were also supposed to buy a special book in which you pasted the stickers you collected. For each card in the set, an empty box with a description of the missing sticker taunted you until you managed to serendipitously purchase the sticker to fill it. You would keep buying these stupid little packs of stickers long after it started being repetitive and the fun was drained from the whole endeavor just so that you could fill all the empty spots in your book. As you see below, there were even large empty spaces that required you to find multiple stickers that added up to make a complete picture. This is the Panini equivalent of unlocking special levels in your video game after filling your badge collection.

Adding a compelling structure to inane and often repetitive collecting is basically ‘achievements’ in a nutshell.

What is questionable is that now achievements are being hailed as a legitimate way to gamify the world. Simple game mechanics like scoring and achievements are being tacked on to everything from websites to brushing your teeth (watch this great video of Jesse Schell at the DICE conference). There’s no question that it works, but it does start to seem psychologically manipulative. It might be the cheapest possible route to engagement, and, as such, is ripe for abuse. Experience designers should make sure that there are adequate rewards for engagement beyond obsessive collecting, or I think we risk creating disillusioned users and a real loss of fun. Time with our websites, apps, and devices is real time in real people’s lives that we’re borrowing to make a dollar. We should be careful we’re not imprisoning people inside the outmoded and lame parts of human nature.

If only we could get Foursquare badges to add up to a giant picture of Megatron… then we’d be just rosy.

Design, Gadgets, Ideas

This past weekend, Sara and I rode our bikes onto the ferry to Bainbridge Island and headed out to spend the afternoon exploring the peaceful acreage of Bloedel Reserve.

In the 80′s, Prentice and Virginia Bloedel opened their former home to the public as a collection of gardens. Like all gardens, it is a curated, supernatural experience of nature. As if listening to a ‘greatest hits’ record of natural beauty, walking the grounds was an inspired dialogue  for someone left, too often, without the time or patience to seek out these sublime combinations in the wilderness. Unlike most other gardens, however, Bloedel Reserve is big enough to come across like the real thing. It is at once both wild and tamed — anarchic and groomed. It manages to be represent both inspiration and artwork all rolled into one.

One has the suspicion that the unique flavor of Bloedel Reserve has its roots in the union of personalities that birthed it. Prentice and Virginia were possessed of two very different sensibilities when it came to the things they fancied. Prentice was part of the Bloedel family — owners of a far reaching timber empire. He was Yale educated and, as a young man, desired to teach, but he was lured back into the family business. The way that he took to the industry, however, suggests that it may have the been the job he was born to do. He pioneered the economical practice of using sawdust and other mill “wastes” as fuel as well as the practice of reforestation of lands that were logged by planting saplings as the land was cleared. Overall, one gets the impression that he loved nature, the woods, and promoted man’s responsible and economical use of natural resources. He was attracted to the grounds that became the reserve because of its large acreage and rugged beauty.

Virginia Bloedel, however, fell in love with the French-style main house that occupied the plot (the Bloedels purchased the land and main house in the early 1950′s). She was lover of beauty and order. She filled the house with art and Louis XVI style furniture. She passed her love of art on to her daughter (also named Virginia), who ended up collecting (with her husband Bagley Wright) the bulk of what is now the Modern collection of the Seattle Art Museum. All the parts of the estate that seem to have an ordered class and an European beauty I attribute to Ma Bloedel.

There is a reflecting pool (pictured top) in the center of the grounds. It was the Bloedel’s favorite place to hang out in the garden. A single bench sits at one end of the pool, and a vase of bright flowers sits at the other. It’s a surprising venue for quiet contemplation.

The large shallow pool was built with the guidance of landscape designer Thomas Church and was later reworked by Richard Haag, who added a tall rectangular hedge around the whole thing. In a way, this place encapsulates the spirit of the entire Reserve — the surprising presence of man’s mind and hand in the middle of wild forest.

Design, Life, Photography bloedel reserve, gardens, History, landscapes, nature, Photography, photos