Bobulate, for Intentional Organization

German researchers have found that ambient light modifies the subjective value of wine:

Drinkers’ brains are tricked into thinking a glass of white wine is better and more expensive tasting when exposed to the red or blue background lighting than those in rooms with green or white background lighting. … They found the same wine was perceived as being nearly one-and-a-half times sweeter in red light than in white or green light.

Leigh Caldwell, researcher in behavioral economics, comments on the study:

[M]y view is somewhat challenged by the fact that the experiment used opaque black wine glasses to eliminate the direct effect of the light on the wine’s colour.

So, instead:

It would be interesting to test the emotional/mood hypothesis by affecting mood with sound instead of colour. I think the effect of sound on mood is much stronger than that of colour, but as far as I’m aware there is no known effect of sound on subjective perception of taste.

The original paper is quite accessible and worth a read.

Charles Holland on collecting:

In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin described the act of collecting as one that gives life to objects, creating a frame for them to exist. “The acquisition of an old book”, he wrote, “is its rebirth”. Outside the collection objects have no meaning or, perhaps, only their everyday, quotidian meaning. We need the collection, Benjamin suggests, in order to see objects outside the blur of habit in which we use them. This is the justification of the collector, someone who breathes life into the things he or she collects.

Interesting in that this assumes that outside a collection, an object ceases to be useful, but it is this very state that we often observe and spot value or use in objects. We spot vintage Singers or Smith-Corona and there — in their isolation — see their meaning. If these objects were sitting alongside dozens of others, would we call them out as meaningful in the first place?

[Image: Architect Steven Holl’s library contains about 3,500 books and was manufactured by Knossos on a sketch and series of proportions by Holl himself. via]

Google launches Google Maps India, and now gives directions like a local:

We knew from previous studies in several countries that most people rely on landmarks — visual cues along the way — for successful navigation. But we needed to understand how people use those visual cues, and what makes a good landmark, in order to make our instructions more human and improve route descriptions. To get answers to these questions, we ran a user research study that focused specifically on how people give and get directions. We called businesses and asked how to get to their store; we recruited people to keep track of directions they gave or received and later interviewed them about their experiences; we asked people to draw us diagrams of routes to places unfamiliar to us; we even followed people around as they tried to find their way.

Why is using landmarks better?

We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name. Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out.

Growing up, I would like to tell people to turn right at the corner with the house that “looked like a castle,” not Adams Avenue. Admittedly, I just liked using “castle,” really. When I moved to Japan later on, I was baffled to find that streets didn’t have names and blocks had numbers. One had to retrieve directions via a combination of landmarks and public transportation stations with confidence (and a bit of body language).

Ben Hammersley on Mag+:

[W]hile BERG’s work, and other pieces like it, are beautiful to see, they leave me very frustrated. The client-side development is very exciting to do — especially the systems-thinking that you need to do to take the entire customer journey from browsing to buying to backing-up — but the harder work, the more fundamental work, isn’t done. I’m talking about the editorial workflow.

Later, on workflow:

[A] real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital. We already know much of this: you can take the lessons from blogging CMSs, add in photography handling from places like Photoshelter, combine metadata collection from sources like Google Maps and OpenCalais, and version control from Git, and you’re halfway there. Combine it with process changes, where you require writers to file direct to a system that forces them to add in metadata for example, and you’re closer still. Of course, in two sentences I’ve described a process that really encompasses the whole old-media crisis, but I do think it’s a challenge that can be met.

Perhaps the beautiful work BERG’s been doing with Bonnier will help bring some palpable urgency to tackling the editorial workflow issues as well.

[via]

This, from an Eames video, feels more like something out of Dreyfuss’ Designing for People:

We have been looking at one invention which began pretty purely out of the conception of a need. The hope: to change the person who takes pictures from a harried offstage observer into someone who’s a natural part of the event. … In the end, it links the inventors, the engineers, the workers, the distributors, into one chain of craftsmanship.

The user is the final link. … We hope the user will fully complete the chain, gaining as much fun, as much sense of self, and as clear participation and stream of human creativity as did Edwin Land and the team who first made SX-70.

Exactly.

The Polaroid SX-70 Promotional Film.

[via]

Violet Gray, a character in the Peanuts comic strip, was a bit of a snob:

She often looks down on people who fail to meet her social standards, especially Charlie Brown, to whom she once stated flatly, “It simply goes without saying that you are an inferior human being.” His adroit reply to that was, “If it goes without saying, why did you have to say it?!”

It goes without saying, a simple colloquial phrase is used to mean something should be generally understood, accepted. ”It goes without saying,” we say.

And most of the time, it just goes without saying, and we go on without looking, without watching, not noticing. It’s understood.

But what if it went with saying. We’d say instead, “it goes with saying.” And we’d mean it.

Vancouver’s downtown changed its dreary Main Street back from a one-way to a two-way street. After the city spent millions of dollars to revitalize the city, people were surprised at the simple success of the double-yellow stripe:

The merchants on Main Street had high hopes for this change. But none of them were prepared for what actually happened … In the midst of a severe recession, Main Street in Vancouver seemed to come back to life almost overnight. …. A year later, the success of the project is even more apparent. Twice as many cars drive down Main Street every day, without traffic jams or serious congestion.

Find out about the history of one-way streets, stemming from a post WWII-fear of a nuclear attack through mobility for suburban shoppers.

Frank Chimero (and hurry off right now for a while to enjoy reading some of his writing if you do not already) was interviewed on his design process for the making of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five poster.

What caught my eye was, when asked about his favorite part of the book, his attention went to process. That, and I felt as if I’d written this myself:

To be honest, I intensely love the parts of the book that are about writing the book. It operates on such a meta level, but it’s so satisfying. It sets up the book as a flawed story with flawed characters, written by a flawed man in a flawed way. It sets your expectations immediately, and there’s a sense of honesty in that, whether the occurrences at the beginning of the book actually happened or not. It’s Vonnegut dancing a dance for 30 pages that only he can do. It’s engrossing.

Whenever I read anything at all, I can’t help but use a kind of methods filter. I see mostly words, sentences, and paragraphs that show process, work, how people think, how people see. How do they write? What do they organize? When do they struggle? Where is it messy? Sometimes I see methods more than story.