Literary Map of Denver (Updated)

Amy Haimerl of Westword wrote to say that she and Kenny Be have updated the Literary Map of Denver. It’s available online on the Westword website. This is great stuff and well worth perusing. Here’s a quote from “On The Road” to tide you over:

Carlo and I went through rickety streets in the Denver night. The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream…

He read me his poetry. It was called “Denver Doldrums.” Carlo woke up in the morning and heard the “vulgar pigeons” yakking in the street outside his cell; he saw the “sad nightingales” nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother. A gray shroud fell over the city.

The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were “papier-mâché.” The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange…

IDE gets 13 Million from Gates


When I left Sapient (five years ago now) one of the commitments I made to myself is that I would do work for organizations dedicated to changing the world. I’ve been fortunate to work with several non-profit/NGO organizations that are engaged in socially progressive development. One of these is International Development Enterprises (IDE). IDE has done tremendous work in improving the lot of the world’s poorest people. They have brought millions of farmers out of poverty, mostly my improving irrigation techniques.

According to Paul Polak, founder of IDE, there are over a billion people in the world living on less than one dollar a day. In their case, getting out of poverty means moving from one dollar a day to two dollars a day. Their core product is a treadle pump, which allows human-powered irrigation, as well as a series of other, mostly related products.

IDE is an amazing organization, but not one that is particularly well known outside the development realm. For instance, they haven’t put the amount of energy that Heifer International (another group I’ve worked with) has into grass roots fundraising. So, it’s great news that IDE has received 13 million dollars from the Gates Foundation for their efforts. My understanding is that this will double the budget of IDE. Pretty incredible.

What is not clear to me is whether this is an ongoing commitment, or a one-time bequest. My hope is that IDE will take this as an opportunity to improve their awareness in the broader community so that this seed money can serve to establish a strong ongoing base of operations.

Here’s a picture of the treadle pump in action:

Dirty Old King Cole


The New York Times has an article today on the renovation of the bar at the St. Regis that houses the Maxfield Parrish painting of Old King Cole. It’s a great painting, and a favorite spot of mine to drop twenty bucks on a manhattan.

The last time I was there a guy told me the reason the page is snickering is because the Old King had just let one rip. Not an SBD, I’m assuming.

Made to Stick

The truth is that I usually get pretty bored with business books. Even books that offer helpful ideas (for instance, Good to Great and The Experience Economy) get tedious pretty quickly. I read the first chapter voraciously and then struggle to make it the rest of the way through. Maybe it’s just my own impatience, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of additional information past the ‘big idea’.

So, it’s with some trepidation that I approach “Made To Stick“, the latest in the long list of biz-help books. The authors, brothers Chip and Dan Heath, start wih a good idea (take the idea of stickiness as described in “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell), and turn it into a how-to manual. Can they really make it worth my time to spend the money and read the whole book? Honestly, I haven’t decided yet; even the Tipping Point (which I enjoyed) read better as a New Yorker feature than a standalone book.

I first encountered the book through Neil Takemoto at Cool Town Studios, who have been taking the six fundamental principles of “Made to Stick” and applying them to building cool places. It works pretty well, and of course I like it because it correlates well with my ideas on the use of story in the iterative design process.

Okay, so here are the six principles, excerpted from the “Made to Stick” website.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories.

Of course, I’m particularly interested in the sixth principle, and I believe that storytelling is really the core of how to make all these principles work together. Hey, maybe I’ll write a book. I wonder if anyone would read it? I wonder if even I would read more than the first chapter?

Calvin loves Alice

Calvin Trillin A year or so ago I read “Alice off the page” in the New Yorker, and thought it was the most moving work I’d read in a long time. I passed it on to my brother-in-law, John, who then sent it on to just about everyone else we know. Now it’s been turned into a short book (78 pages). There is a great article on Mr. Trillin, and on his book, in the Observer this week.

I’ve always been fond of Trillin’s work, and Hadley has always loved his articles in the New Yorker. She wants to move to Nova Scotia because of how his describes life on the island (I’m willing to go with her). This article is different, though I’m not quite sure why. There is an aspirational component to it, I’m sure. Calvin Trillin represents potential for the not-so-young man (and I am one of those); attentive, loyal, funny, and not so egotistical to misunderstand what matters in the world.

There are a few stories that have surprised me with my own tears in the past ten or so years; often they involve older men who can’t do what they used to do. This one is different though, as it got to me by bringing out what I should be doing. It gave me hope for my own future, but also a challenge.

The interviews I’ve read say that Mr. Trillin is surprised by the response to this work. Isn’t that just perfect. At our best we do work that resonates in ways we don’t expect. Calvin Trillin sets a top notch example, doesn’t he?

Designing for use

One of my obsessions is non-linear storytelling.

I enjoy the apparent contradictions contained in the idea. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end. They are built on plot, theme, and character. All put together more or less carefully by the author. Non-linear storytelling pulls the rug out from under this idea. Or at least it apparently does.

But more importantly, non-linear (is there a better word for this?) storytelling is useful in “designing for use“. In ‘real’ life, the plot, the meaning, the entry and exit points, and even the value of a particular experience vary widely based on the history of the individual experiencing it. Designing with characters in mind helps explore the idiosyncrasies that give depth and potential to the experience being created.

I often conduct this design process based on the finding of ethnographic research; engaging people in real-life situations offers insights that provide more clarity to the purpose and desired outcomes of the project. But I’ve also done successful work based on creating personas from the imagination and then building the interactions from there.

Variations of story-centered design are becoming more and more common, I believe. For instance, at the Image, Space, Object conference put on by Mike and Kathy McCoy and Fred Murrell at RMCAD we have used story-centered design for the past three years, with surprising results (and a lot of fun).

At the AIGA Aspen Design Summit last summer, the participants divided into teams to do prototype design for applied solutions to real societal problems. My team was included some superior designers (for instance, Margeigh Novatny of Smart Design, Robert Fabricant of Frog, and Adam French from the d school at Stanford), and we worked for Paul Polak and his company, IDE. The process wasn’t without its struggles, and we may have worked out teams a little hard (OK, really hard), but we did show that it worked.

In the past couple of years I’ve done story-centered prototyping for a number of clients, especially in the travel industry. For instance, I recently completed a project for the National Trust for Historic Preservation (through PhoCusWright) that included both research and design. It was strategically valuable to explore the specific opportunities for interaction between various characters who have (probably) never met.

Experience design is the practice of creating structure and developing content in a manner that will allow the one experiencing the design to create their own meaning. Control the experience too closely, and you risk imposing a reductive linearity on your audience. And, in our wiki world, you also take away the opportunity for the audience to become a partner.

On the other hand, designing for use doesn’t mean not creating content; the quality of the ultimate experience relies on the quality of the prototypical experience. Quality results require vision put into practice, and storytelling is a great way to express vision in an engaging manner.

On The Road for 50 years

I counted minutes and subtracted miles. Just ahead, over the rolling wheat fields all golden beneath the distant snows of Estes, I’d be seeing old Denver at last.
— Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The Denver Public Library is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of “On The Road” with an exhibition and various events over the course of the winter. As part of the exhibit, they will be presenting one of the original 120 foot teletype scrolls on which Kerouac wrote the novel. More information is available on the DPL website.

Update 4 January:
Westword has a fun read on the city of Denver in literature, cleverly called Paint the Town Read.