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!