Back in July of 2008, I stumbled upon this amazing book, "Project Vitra".

It was in a pile of new books I was processing at the Architecture and Design Library, and I immediately fell in love with the font, and the general layout of the book. The font used is "Bureau Grotesque Five-One".

Over the weekend, I found a copy at Arty Bees, a second-hand book store here in Wellington. It was in mint condition - it even came with it's dust-jacket. While the dust-jacket has pictures of Vitra locations and products, the cover of the book itself has all the information normally on the title page!

It is such a beautiful object, with such awesome type, and in great condition. I never thought I'd actually be lucky enough to actually own this book!

Popup had a "One Hour Sale" today for 7" DIY Munny dolls - a whole $20 off the regular price. My new Munny came with a hat, a ray gun, a lightning bolt, and a can (all blind-boxed, so you don't know what you're getting in advance). He's aweeeeeeesome. He came with a colouring book, too - and a name badge.

I had a bit of a talk with Jem about what to do with him, as it would be cool to use her illustrative talents to make him look really cool. "He" might become a "she", and have a monster join her - as part of Jem's girls+monsters project.

The cool illustrator guy who owns the store told me about new exciting stuff coming along in the Munny range, including a party - but swore me to secrecy about the exact details!

Today I visited Provoke for the "Wellington Usability Lunch" meetup. I don't usually go because I'm too busy, but this time I'm kind of procrastinating working on my course material for INFO561, so I thought I'd go. Also, they were talking about "Lo-fi prototyping methods" which, at only a slight stretch, could be pretty useful for students taking the paper next trimester, when they're working on their first assignment.

Anyway, the ominous BNZ/State tower on Willis Street has the most interesting and yet unsettling elevator system I've encountered in a while. I've tried to draw a little diagram above.

There's a directory stand in the lobby, presumably on the side of the building you're supposed to enter from (I came in through the 'back', though, so I had to ask the Mojo staff how to use the lift). The directory lists the businesses and their floor numbers, and there's a keypad at each side. Here, you enter the number of the floor you want, and the display changes to give you the letter of the correct lift to take, and an arrow pointing you in the direction of the location that lift is arriving.

I probably wouldn't have figured this out if I hadn't spent five minutes staring blankly at the lifts themselves and waving my hands in front of them trying to "call" them, and noticed then that they had letters above them. (What does it say about me that I expect motion-sensitive, mind-reading lifts?)

You walk around to the left (or the right) depending on your arrow and get into your lift. Once you’re in the lift, there are no buttons, just tiny numbers on the side of the door showing which floors this lift has been called for, one of which – if you got into the right lift – is your floor.

The idea of ‘optimizing traffic flow’ really appeals to the geek in me – but it seems to me that the lifts have potential to really cause problems for users for a few reasons:

The cost of a mistake is (perceptually) pretty high, and there are a lot of steps where things could go wrong – if you press the wrong number, you’ve called an unnecessary lift. If you don’t realise, or if you get into the wrong lift, you’re stuck on a lift going to the wrong floor. Then (I think) you’d have to get out and call a separate lift to get back on track.

Most peoples’ (i.e. my) mental model for using a lift, formed through experience with other lifts in the past is quite different to the model needed to operate this lift. There are lots of little normal practices involved with lift-taking that aren’t available to me here, so I’m left feeling quite unsettled.

One thing I really noticed was that there’s no “progress bar” of lift movement in the usual place above the doors, instead, there’s a list of the floors the lift plans to stop at down the side of the doors (based on selections of the people sharing the lift). Usually you look at this bar while you wait, to avoid intimate-space eye-contact, but both on the way up and on the way down we all talked about how strange the lift was!

As we were leaving, it just said “G” as we were all heading to the ground floor. However, the lift kept stopping, and we would every time start to get out – but this was just the lift stopping to let on more people heading to the ground floor.

Having said this, after I was told what to do, I was able to use the lift without a hitch (I still complained!). Maybe I was just lucky? I’d be really interested to know what the experience is like for someone who uses the lifts regularly.

Considering that most of the people using the lifts are working in the building, and would quickly become expert users – and probably companies like Provoke don’t want just anyone uninvited wandering into their offices – a initially confusing but ‘smart’ lift system could have dual bonus of speeding up people-through-put and also discouraging the riff raff.

I gave my friend Anna the "Wreck this" journal for her birthday... but... before we posted it down, my friend Jem and I decided to "break the ice" for her: We burnt a page, and poked holes in it, and I wore it. We also traced our hands in, and wrote a secret message. I hope she likes it and will post more of her own journal-mangle-ings soon!

Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" is over 20 years old, but it's still fascinating to read - and really cool to see some of the ideas anticipate future software and design developments.

I laughed when I saw him wishing for "a pocket size device that reminded you of each appointment and daily event" - he predicted the pocket organizer "in imperfect form in five years, possibly in perfect form in ten" - we're still trying to get it right!

I was particularly impressed when I read about their clever system to avoid user 'slips' when throwing away paper notes - a waste paper basket for each day of the week - so users could 'delete' items without fear of losing important information.

"Eliminate irreversible actions" is a concept that's been taken on board today - in everything from email to video game design!

LBP level design session ~ week one: Brock, Jem and Timothy spend an evening listening to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry explaining the intricacies of Little Big Planet level design. This video is the result of several hours concentration, and too many snickers-puffs.

Tom Revill drew a picture of the “scuttle bugs” that featured in Phil’s “Global Hockets” project. They were awesome, controlled by performers hidden above the stage, they interact with each other on stage.

There’s a clear case on top of wheels (so you can see the workings). The speaker on the top emitted sounds of night animals.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’m at the Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium (ada2009), which is being held at Victoria’s School of Architecture and Design.

ADA is a charitable trust (”We finally became charitable this April” says Zita, the chair) that has formed out of an email discussion list and a distributed support network populated by a group of digital artists here in New Zealand. The yearly ADA symposium is now in its 6th year. It helps keep build and nourish this “uncomfortably small but cozy community” (says Zita: “I don’t mean ‘uncomfortably small’ in a really uncomfortable way”) by facilitating a face-to-face get together of folks who are otherwise perfectly happy to converse and collaborate virtually.

The symposium also helps bring in new people to this community (like myself!), and they try to be as open as possible to new ideas and conversations. The three signature elements of the event seem to be: The free lunch (nom!), friendly and open events, conversational approach.

This ‘conversational model’  seems to me to be quite similar to what I’ve seen at several recent conferences – a growing trend towards interactive, participatory, short presentation sessions – encouraging as many people to get up and speak as possible. It can be challenging to compress your ideas down into 5 minute talk, but it also narrows the focus of talks down to the most important elements, and lowers the barrier of entry to those who might not otherwise feel like they can prepare for a full session.

The feel of the conference is very grass roots and comfortable (and I loved how the plates and mugs for lunch have been sourced from a local thrift store), and everyone is very friendly and happy to help. I went to workshop sessions yesterday on Arduino and Quartz Composer, and despite being such a newbie – there were great people to give me tips and get me started!

It’s still possible to just drop in on the conference (which still has today, tonight, and tomorrow left to go) for a very small fee – so check out the programme and see if anything takes your interest! (You can follow our conversations on twitter).

I love Aro Video and – as an Aro Valley resident myself – regularly borrow films from their store. However, I’m concerned that their recent campaign for censorship reform is cloaking what is primarily an economic challenge for small New Zealand businesses in social/moral rhetoric and emotive language.

Maybe that’s too harsh, I’m sure that is not their intent – but I do think it is interesting to see how economic and social issues collide (jostle for position?) around this issue.

Here’s what I understand, in simple terms:

• Films must display a New Zealand classification to be sold here.
• Films are classified in New Zealand when, before they are supplied to the public, “someone” submits it to the OFLC and pays a fee.
• Most of the time, this “someone” is a big fancy distributor to whom $1100 is not much more than a drop in the bucket. (When you’re looking at millions in Kill Bill sales, $1100 is nothing to get an R18 classification and sticker for your ultra-violent film so that sensible adults can buy it in New Zealand.)
• But big distributors only tend to import and stock what the “mainstream” watch and play. So when it comes to alternative titles – media consumed by smaller groups of the New Zealand population – noone is there to pay this fee.
• Because there are also less people to buy these alternative titles, less units are likely to be sold in New Zealand, meaning that the amount of profit to made from stocking these titles is far less, especially when you take into account that you’ll also have to foot the bill for $1100 to stock it in the first place.
• When you are a small store like Aro Video, and you have built your reputation on being able to find ‘just about anything’ for your customers, this can pose a bit of a problem. If you have to pay a classification fee on top of the cost of importing just one copy of a DVD for a keen customer, you are likely to lose money, not make it. Aro says they provide “a comprehensive choice of contemporary, classic and curious cinema including a significant selection of exclusive titles” – they trade off this reputation.

Now, here is where it starts to get interesting:

It isn’t illegal to own, and have in your own home, media that hasn’t been classified yet in New Zealand (as long as it’s not got content considered to be “objectionable” under NZ law). This means that, if you’re unable to find what you are looking for at a local retailer, you are able to go online and buy from online retailers located overseas, and have the item shipped here – direct to you.

The second interesting thing, I think, is that this is essentially what Aro Video was doing in the first place – in the past, when you asked them to find something you couldn’t find anywhere else in New Zealand, they would contact their overseas suppliers and purchase the item… but they would then sell it to you (with NZ label) over the counter.

These days, Aro Video finds itself getting “scooped” by online retailers like Amazon, because consumers can go direct to overseas suppliers, via sophisticated tools that aggregate together a great many of these different suppliers at once.

Thanks to the internet – everyone is suddenly able to see this network of suppliers, and import whatever we want to watch in our own homes!

So, this issue seems – at least to me – to be, not actually about “shortening the ‘long tail’ of consumer choice”… but rather about how free international trade is impacting on small New Zealand businesses…

It is also interesting to note that Aro Video is making money this way as well, their website states that they “also welcome international orders, so no matter where you are in the world, you can order (and even pre-order) films to buy from the website”.

It does seem to me that it might be easier for Aro Video to blame New Zealand Censorship law for being unable to obtain material, than to admit that they can’t afford to acquire and process everything that their ‘long tail’ customers ask for.

Perhaps part of the business model of an ‘alternative’ video store involves taking a financial hit on the import of rare titles in order to keep a reputation of being able to ‘find anything’. How much can you pass these expenses on to the customer? (After all, Aro Video is only $1 more expensive for a ‘general release’  than Video Ezy Wellington – would we pay more for a wider range of local rentals?)

Furthermore, it’s not quite as devastating as it sounds:

• This economic problem only applies to a very small section of films. A lot of ‘non-mainstream’ titles are traditionally brought into NZ through film festivals. Film festivals get a waiver of up to 75% of the classification fee, and this fee is fronted by the film festival organizers (this may be why film festival tickets are slightly more expensive than ordinary cinema tickets), not by retailers/rental stores.
• Much of the films brought into New Zealand may be cross-rated from Australia and the UK, meaning they don’t have to go through the OFLC, and may just ‘adopt’ our stickers. (Cross rating isn’t the be-all and end-all: if we’d followed Australia’s classification system to the letter, we’d have censored a lot more video games last year. Thankfully, our censors still look at the higher rated items, to classify them R18 so Adults can still access them even if Australia or the UK bans them).
• Many of the items Aro Video lists as unavailable actually have been previously classified in New Zealand, and are in fact available for import. Some of the list are banned due to objectionable content.

In a recent article in the Capital Times, Bill Hastings (New Zealand’s Cheif Censor) spoke about some of the issues. I was interested in his call to the video rental industry: “I would say New Zealand is missing out because the video shop industry is not being sufficiently creative in being co-operative… Why don’t these guys get together and jointly pay the waived classification fee for the title of a DVD, and then they can import as many as they want – they’d just have to pay the small amount for the classification sticker on each DVD.”

I can see, though, why this would be difficult to implement. Why would video stores, currently in competition with each other for customers, agree to collaborate? If other stores start stocking these hard-to-get items, won’t Aro Video lose its great reputation?

As a librarian, my personal view is that the onus is instead on cultural heritage institutions (particularly university libraries, where ‘works of cultural merit’ are concerned, but also public libraries) to band together and bear some of the cost of classification on the part of the public. I was quite surprised to see several Victoria University Librarians complaining, in the comments of the Lumiere blog post, that classification was “prohibitive” to their collections. (My recollection was that Victoria was considering collaborating with other university libraries to get their collections classified.)

I think that librarians (and New Zealand retailers too) have an obligation, as people who care about creative media, to promote public awareness, and support the process of classification… in order to protect access to these materials and future creative works. I think we’re fortunate to have an established system in New Zealand that looks independently and critically at what the appropriate audience is for material, as opposed to just banning it outright based on moral panic.

I believe that storytelling is one of the most important things we can do as human beings. Jonathan Harris – capturing stories told by ordinary people, making them collide and interact – is totally my hero.

I admire so much of his practice – from personally collecting ephemera and found objects to digitally harvesting public, yet profoundly intimate, tales.

One day, when I grow up, I’d love to play a similar role as a curator of everyday storytelling.