text: Public Strategy: February 2006
  Understandable denial in the face of disruptive change
  Simon Waldman wonders why television schedulers don't seem to realise that their profession is about to become become completely redundant, and comes up with four reasons:
  The new game has begun, but the old game hasn't ended
  For those at the coal face, the most important thing is incremental improvements to the status quo
  In competitive markets, even in times of decline, someone will always have a good story to tell
  Late adopters will always provide comfort, geeks will always be deemed irrelevant
  His reasons - and his exposition of them - resonate well beyond the television and newspaper industries which are his primary concern. The question for us is which parts of our service delivery and business models are dead, without our having noticed their dying?
  Posted on 28 February 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
  Fun at work, fun as work
  Douglas Rushfoff doesn't think we should have fun at work. He thinks work should be fun - and that if it were, teeth-cloying, management-imposed 'fun' would be unnecessary:
  By making the "fun" at work extraneous - external and unrelated - to the boring and dull work that people are actually doing, it only exacerbates the problem. It's like giving kids dessert as a "reward" for finishing the main part of the meal. Why do they need a reward? Because the main meal tastes terrible!
  The reward just reinforces the notion that the work itself is not fun.
  But that, of course presupposes that work can be fun - which is in turn the more interesting challenge: how do we make work fun, and so not have to worry about compensating for the fact that it isn't?
  We have a head start. For all the quotidian irritations, what we do is a lot more like fun than what many others have to endure. The challenge for us is to find ways of building on that, rather than compensating for it in the ways Rushkoff rightly criticises.
  Brand X washes whiter
  As we agonise over the question of how many brands there should be for the department, for the government (for Europe, the galaxy and beyond...) we tend to overlook the thorny question of what any such overarching brand might be called. Luckily help is at hand in this rather splendid piece of puff from the heyday of dotcommery (you may need to sit through an ad to get to the article, but it's worth it). As one of the professional brand namers irrefutably puts it:
  "Let's put it this way," says Redhill. "Over the years, we have created and sustained many of the world's most durable brands. We make a lot more hits than companies who think up their own symbols and names. I'm not suggesting that a company couldn't get it right with a stroke of insight or genius or luck. But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?"
  Posted on 25 February 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
  A small prize for identifying what this is:
  Posted on 15 February 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)
  Things to do with the tube map, Part 3
  Potentially more useful than tube station anagrams, this map of the underground plots the history of 20th century music by genres and influences. The full version is here, with an explanation of how it was done here:
  I started out with a packet of coloured crayons, four sheets of A4 taped together and a big box of doubt, but the different character of each line quickly lent itself to a certain genre. Pop intersects with everything else, so that had to be the Circle Line; classical music for the most part occupies its own sphere, which made it perfect for the Docklands Light Railway
  Posted on 13 February 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
  Things to do with the tube map, Part 2
  Following Lara's contribution to the genre, here is a tube map with all the station names as anagrams of themselves. Perfect for handing out to tourists.
  Update: Now removed, apparently because TfL's lawyers don't like it. But it's hard to make things disappear on the internet.
  Posted on 10 February 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)
  Expenses, user interfaces - and Scott Adams
  My first go at doing my expenses on the new system failed totally. My claim was rejected for not having given home-to-office deductions, despite the fact that the question hadn't been asked and on looking at the claim again, there didn't seem to be anyway of entering them anyway.
  By coincidence I had been reading Bruce Tognazzini's latest column:
  the designer develops a "Design Model� of the software, communicates it through the "System Image�—the look, feel, and behavior of the interface. The user, in turn, attempts to recreate the Design Model through experiencing the software. This understanding then forms the user's assumptions, the filter through which they will interpret all further instructions.
  The explanation turns out to be that in the old system, home to office was indeed a deduction from a claim which was itself primarily organised by date. In the new system, home to office isn't a deduction in the same way at all - it's a potentially negative expense line in its own right (further complicated for those of us for whom it is always zero - the concept of a mandatory zero negative claim raising some curious conceptual questions). In other words, there is an assumption that users will immediately change their user model in response to a change in the design model expressed through the system image.
  They don't, of course. And if the RM people had thought this through, their communications might have been very different. On the whole the new system is pretty intuitive (where "intuitive" is not necessarily the opposite of "clunky") - if they had stopped to think which were the bits that might create some cognitive dissonance, the transition could have been supported much more effectively.