Notice that the subject is “Opt-out Functionality”, so presumably they’re testing some system functionality related to users opting out of their newsletters.

From reading the text, it seems they’re testing the passage of data from one organization (Omniture) to another (Responsys) with the purpose of what? re-marketing!

We had the opportunity to have lunch there today — a delicious couscous (OK, not Paleo, but today was my cheat day!) — after which they gave us a tour of the center, which basically amounts to a huge old, restored Andalucian home with the following facilities:

• An arts and crafts workshop
• A carpentry workshop
• A pottery shop
• An industrial kitchen, where artesanal olive oil, honey and jams are made
• An artesanal museum
• A large living area
• A large, rural accommodations area where guests can come for a relaxing weekend in the countryside

The center operates an attached store, called Arte de Mis Manos (“My Handmade Art”), where they sell basically all of the products produced in the center, including woodworks, pottery, food products, teas, you name it! The store is open for three hours each morning during the week, and can be opened on request for visitors arriving during the weekend.

It’s a great center, working for a great cause, and producing some of the best quality products in the regions. What they need now is marketing! :-) So if you’re reading this, and live in the area, be sure to plan a visit soon. It’s worth your while! Here’s a couple links to the location, followed by a video and some photos:

• Arte de Mis Manos | Google Map | Center Website

Here’s a video of Pascual (who lives with his wife and children at the center), giving us a demonstration of his pottery skills. The stuff he makes is amazing!

And here are some photos we took during the visit.

I’d heard about the internet, and supposedly we had it, but via an email gateway called Bitnet. To “FTP” something, we’d send an email, and get back several encoded file chunks, requiring a terminal emulation program to download for offline reassembling.

Curious one day, I downloaded, assembled and launched John Norstad’s usenet reader. I’ll never forget that day; the moment I realized I had graphical access to the internet, and a door opened to a brand new world.

Soon I was following several newsgroups, and before long I experienced the first feelings that we’re probably all familiar with these days — that a huge amount of possibly useful information was being continually exchanged, and that missing even a day of it could leave one hopelessly behind. There was a larger social audience than accessible in my real-life world. There were those who were considered authorities, and getting their attention felt like an elevating accomplishment.

Little by little, my productivity began to suffer. Somehow I found myself having difficulty focusing and getting as deeply involved in my projects. The furtherest suspicion on my mind was that it might have something to do with the energy I was expending in following the newsgroups. After some time, I decided that perhaps it was the calling of the internet and the bursting horizon of opportunities, and I left to start a business. Looking back, it was probably a bit of both.

Rewind back even a bit further, to the decade covering my university studies, and first couple of professional years.

Somehow, without access to social media, I managed to identify some of the key areas that would later prove central and valuable in my life. I discovered that design is something everybody can benefit from understanding, and Robin William’s, “The Mac is not a Typewriter” forever changed my written communications. I discovered that engineering is about trade-offs, and Frederic Brooks’s, “The Mythical Man Month” taught me that there are no silver bullets. Stephen Covey taught me that it’s critical to understand the difference between “urgent” and “important”. Michael Gerber taught me that being good at something doesn’t always translate to being good at the business of that something. Roger Black showed me the beauty of black, white & red. Jan Tschichold helped me understand why I cozy up to some books, and not others. David Ogilvy taught me why I bought things.

These were, for me, profound and valuable lessons learned, over the period of about a decade, from a relatively few, but accomplished, individuals.

Fast forward to today, 2011. I read my RSS feed over breakfast, and then catch up on Twitter over coffee. Twitter stays active all day long, continually grabbing my attention.

I start to notice that even while concentrating, pauses in thought — for example, hitting a conflict while defining some project specifications — seems to trigger a desire to switch into Twitter, almost like it’s a relief to active thinking and problem-solving.

And at the end of the day, I have a feeling of uneasiness, of dissatisfaction, a little anxious. Rather than engage in reflection, though, I check my feeds. And Facebook. And Twitter, again.

I also begin to wonder whether the reasons I communicate, in the online context, have changed. Do I really have something to say, or am I just trying to have something to say? Why am I reaching to jump into that conversation? Is because they’re influentials, and I want to be seen a part of their conversation? Why did I reply to that person’s comment to me, but not the other’s? Is it because I know people are looking? Am I becoming influenced by the superficial pull of status? Are we really socially interacting, or are we more like living window mannequins, maintaining a carefully crafted expression, position and always seeking notice of those passing by?

For some reason, which I haven’t yet identified, several weeks ago I simply thought, “Enough is enough.” And since then, I’ve only opened Twitter to tweet (and that was relatively infrequent), and respond to the people who’ve contacted me. No Twitter consumption at all. Nor Facebook. I’ve only caught up on RSS one day per week, usually on Saturday afternoon.

It has felt wonderful.

I’ve enjoyed a sense of calm I’d forgotten I was capable of. I found myself intellectually and analytically engaged in my life’s important activities, and haven’t felt those activities any longer to be overwhelming.

Although there have been times in the past when I cut back on social-media consumption, this time, for some reason, it has been different. This time, I’ve had the sort of “eureka” sensation I had after studying about the Paleo diet, and somehow knowing that I’d made a change that’s going to stick with me permanently.

Reflection

I find it interesting to reflect on my life before 1996, and after. If I visualize pre-1996, I see a relatively open and sparse world, in which based on nothing more than my own pursuits and limited social interactions, I identified and learned about a small handful of things that would prove of lifelong value to me.

Post-1996 — the online period — looks, by comparison, like a noisy television screen, tuned to a channel that’s signed off the air. Literally thousands of topics have appeared on my radar, raised by people I don’t know, but whose social weighting, rather than their accomplishments, have caused me to at least mentally flag the matters as potentially important to understand. File them to Delicious, tag them, Instapaper, Readability, a quick Amazon Kindle purchase, and add the author to some Twitter list.

And rather than a select, few individuals, my inflated and distorted perception of expertise has extended to hundreds, if not thousands. 10,000 twitter followers? He must know what he’s talking about.

As I look back on the past 15 years, and try to identify what I’ve learned in consuming social media, what has proven really valuable in my life, I come up empty. And that’s, I think, profoundly disappointing, considering the number of information pieces that I temporarily found interesting; of course, bookmarked and tagged for later reference. Can it really be true there was nothing there of comparable value to the visualization lessons I learned from Eduard Tufte, or the principles of investing I learned from Harry Browne?

And what I also see, looking at pre- and post-1996, is a difference in independent intellectual engagement. And I prefer the “pre” period, during which I would spend long periods of time just thinking. Just observing. Just reflecting. And, most importantly, I’d piece things together on my own, that would result in meaningful personal progress, and identification of what’s really important to me.

Affects of virtual societies

In his book in on mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos discusses (among many other things) some not-so-obvious affects of global media. In our everyday lives, we’re exposed to a gaussian-like distribution of events, with extremities like murders and natural disasters being so statistically rare that if exposed only to local news, we’d hardly ever hear of them. Most of us in the developed world would perceive life as relatively tranquil.

But national and global daily news have the effect of artificially compressing the distribution, making rare events seem far more common, and this has the disturbing effect of distorting our perceptions and views. We tend to see the world as a far more hostile place than it really is.

It seems logical to me that social media would have similar distortional effects, perhaps in other, non-obvious dimensions, since the characteristics of these virtual contexts are so radically different.

Our social circles are much larger, but contain far less mutual inter-connections. We can develop artificial senses of belonging, and false impressions of relationships, where none really exists. The conversations are usually one to many, and originate in different motivations than real-life discourse. Why we communicate changes. Influence tends to derive from status, rather than accomplishment. Our susceptibilities to pride and status seem amplified in these scaled environments.

My new social media and information diet

How social media and the explosion of information affect individuals and societies is the subject of a lot of study and research today. As with most major technological shifts in history, there’s certainly benefits and drawbacks. What I tend to conclude, though, about myself at least, is that without discipline, patterns can develop that affect productivity, and without careful awareness, perceptions can be distorted. And above all, I simply don’t want to waste time!

My intent is the following:

• Blogs For the time being, I’ll continue to read the blogs I like, but I’ll set strict boundaries; for example, only on weekends.

• Social Media I’ll also limit Twitter (which is really the only social network that’s stuck with me) to weekends, but will make an additional change as well. Rather than follow a private curated list, whose members are based on perceived status, influence, or likelihood of saying something valuable to me, it will be based on relationships; mostly containing people I know (personally and virtually), who I want to keep up with.

I have a feeling this represents an important new phase in my life; a phase in which my social media consumption will get dramatically reduced in the same way the Paleo diet led to the dramatic reduction of carbs in my diet. (And just as with the Paleo diet’s “cheat day”, it’s not really about complete abstinence, but rather reduction and discipline.) Hopefully this represents a phase in which I’ll return as captain of the ship, determining what’s important through independent thought and experience; less affected by the biases and influences of the emergent online social contexts.

(As an end-note, I do recognize the irony of expressing all this in a blog post — and one that concludes with a “follow me on twitter” link! But for the time being, I’ll continue blogging, and tweeting, since writing, for me, is a great way to consolidate and distill vague ideas into some form of coherence.)

I’ve never known who’s behind the app until today, having stumbled across a great interview with its author, Zachary Schneirov.

Having read the interview, the following thoughts came to mind:

• Schneirov is one of those super-talented individuals hidden away, working in obscurity and under the radar of mainstream social media. (In @makalu, we often talk about how that’s where most of the people we’d want working with us are located, and how hard it is to discover them!)

• I really admire and envy his ability to apply such discipline to making decisions. Whether it’s taking donations, or adding a new feature, the interview gives an insight into how carefully he weights the consequences. You can tell he’s a man who says “No” far more often than “Yes”.

• That the application is so fast, efficient, elegant and solid can almost go unnoticed; the ironic and unfortunate fate of great design and engineering effort. The interview illustrates just how great the design and engineering is behind this product! (And, it makes me want to rush out to pick-up Jeff Raskin’s, “Humane Interfaces” book…)

• Apple’s development environment provides a lot of great frameworks. But the general purpose nature of those frameworks will mean they are sub-optimal for a lot of specific application contexts. To make the best application possible, an engineer needs to deeply understand both the framework, and the problem he’s solving, in order to know when it’d be better to roll his own solution. In the article, Schneirov discusses some of the interesting areas in which he decided not to use Apple’s solutions.

Grab a coffee, and spend some quality time reading the full interview.

In competition, I’ve managed to achieve some good results, including three gold medals at the European Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships, and I think that’s a direct reflection of the quality of these instructors.

About a month ago, an opportunity presented itself to assume the leadership of our local academy — Draculino Team Marbella — here in Marbella, Spain. I was sad to see our previous instructor return to Brazil, but at the same time, excited at the chance to try out some ideas that’d been brewing in my mind for some time.

Where can we innovate?

What I’ve always found fascinating about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, is the extent to which it relies on strategy, tactic and technique. It really is like a human form of chess. There are setups, sequences, attacks, counter-attacks, and forced transitions.

So what leads to success in BJJ? In competition, factors like physical conditioning, and experience play a part. But the most important factor is technical execution — recognizing what to do when, and knowing precisely how to do it.

The key to success is knowledge retention, in which “knowledge” extends beyond simple awareness, to execution.

• Knowledge. You must first recognize what a particular situation calls for. Which technique leads to the highest probability of success? What are the risks in attempting that technique?

• Understanding. Then you must understand the technique in depth. What are the steps involved? Why is each step important? What are the mechanics? Where is the force required?

• Practice. Finally, you must have mastered the execution. You have to have developed a feeling for proper positioning, and the movements and adjustments made in response to a defending opponent.

Success in jiu-jitsu lies in knowledge retention, which comes from both instruction and practice, and this has been on my mind for several years. Are we training in a way that best leads to knowledge retention?

The traditional pattern in BJJ class structure in BJJ begins with a warmup, followed by the teacher demonstrating one or two techniques, which the students then pair off to practice, and then concludes with live sparring.

The techniques selected for teaching often come from a school-specific syllabus, and attempt to cover all the major positions during, say, the course of a year. In other schools, a written syllabus doesn’t exist, and the techniques are selected ad-hoc.

For some time, I’ve suspected there’s room for innovation in our teaching techniques, building on the success of the traditional methods. Some specific questions we can ask are:

1. How can or should we vary the class structure?

2. How should we go about selecting the specific techniques for instruction, and the sequence in which they are taught?

3. What should trigger us to move from one position or technique on to the other? A calendar?

4. How can we help students remember what they’ve been taught?

5. Are there ways we can improve the effectiveness of live sparring, in the learning process?

Experimenting

At the time I began instructing the Marbella academy, we had nine weeks of time before the 2012 European Championships. I decided this would be a good test-bed period to try out some ideas.

• Return to the fundamentals. There are five basic positions in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — the guard, the mount, side control, the back, and the half guard. (There are many other positions, but these are the most common.) We mapped out a nine-week plan covering the basics for each of these positions — proper defense & positioning, a couple of attacks, defenses to the most common attacks, and a couple of transitions (sweeps).

  The objective here was that when we arrive in Lisbon, each of our students will be able to immediately articulate our preferred strategies and techniques from each of the basic positions. The hope is that in the competition, they’ll put these basics in practice instinctively. The best success we’ve had as a team at the European’s was the year in which we focused exclusively on the basics — an we hope to repeat that in January of 2012.

  At first glance, I thought nine-weeks might be too long to cover just the basics, but I was ever wrong! One realizes quickly that even the basics include a surprising number of details — each one critical. Getting to a point where the students know the techniques so well they react instinctively takes a lot of time!

• Think in terms of probabilities. Even at the level of basics, we’ve tried to give priority to those positions and techniques that our students are most likely to encounter in the competition. For example, we’ve spent a lot more time in mastering side control, the mount position, and the closed guard, than, say, stand-up or the back position. And for the back position, we’re focusing on defense, rather than offense.

  The reason is that the majority of our competitors will be white and blue belts, and we’ve got limited time available to us. I think our students will likely find themselves in the guard, and if they can get to side control and/or the mount, I’m confident they’re going to win. I believe it’s less likely they’ll find themselves offensively in the back position. Again, we’re not saying getting the back isn’t important, just that it’s a less frequent position for white and blue belts to find themselves (offensively) than other positions.

• The devil is in the details. We commonly talk about how important the details are to the proper execution of technique, yet it’s still relatively rare to see precise execution techniques. I personally believe we often lack appreciation for just how critical technique really is in BJJ.

  Perhaps one way to increase awareness is to insist on the students understanding the reason and mechanics behind the techniques. One thing is to see an attack, and another is to deeply understand why it works. And understanding why it works is a tremendous help in understanding how to defend against it!

  Consider just the side control position. We covered four basic side control variations — for each understanding whether it’s offensive or defensive, and when to transition into and away from it. Those four variations resulted in a total of about 16 important details. We insisted that each student be able to articulate the purpose of each detail — e.g. what is the purpose of keeping our hips down, or what is the purpose of a high-body position in the third variation? What do we anticipate our opponent to do in this variation? What’s the highest probability attack from here, and how to we set it up and execute it with minimum chance of getting swept?

  As another example, I’ve been insisting that when applying any choke, the focus word that comes to mind is lever. Nearly every choke in BJJ is based on the principle of the lever — a force applied at a distance from a fulcrum, resulting in a stronger force applied somewhere else. Often, when demonstrating chokes, we’ll stop to analyze where the fulcrum is, where the force being applied is, and where resulting choke force ends up. When seen from this view, it’s easier to understand why the work in the collar choke comes from the wrists, not the forearms, and why the elbows should go in, not out (which is the instinctive direction.)

  Only once the students began to understand the details enough to quickly articulate their purpose and function, did I begin to observe the students actually applying the positioning correctly when sparring.

• Spend time on a single position. We spent one or two entire weeks on a single position, looking at all the basic technique variations — defenses, attacks and sweeps — around it. In addition, we were willing to extend that time, as necessary until we felt the basics were sufficiently assimilated. Often, the second day after presenting a set of techniques, the students would have forgotten some details. But after three or four days of doing the same things, the knowledge began to internalize.

• Professor involvement. Generally, after a technique is demonstrated in class, the students pair off to practice. We made a slight modification to this protocol, in that before pairing off, each student applies the technique to either the professor, or one of the other high-ranking (e.g. brown belt) students. I believe this is one of the most important teaching elements we’ve introduced.

  Only a high-level practitioner can detect small problems with position, weight distribution, sequence and technique. And it’s these small details that lead to bad habits, and ultimately ineffective application of technique.

  We found this teaching modification to be tremendously beneficial! On many occasions, students had that light-bulb “Ah ha!” moment, expressing something like, “I’d never realized I was making that small weight distribution mistake.”

  Only after students had performed the techniques on the teacher (or another high-level student) were they then allowed to pair off and practice together.

• In the long run, the house always wins. With literally thousands of technique available to teach, how does a teacher select among them? Our approach has been based on probability — probability that an technique’s execution will be successful, and probably of not losing position during its application.

  For example, for the Europeans preparation, we didn’t focus at all on dropping back from the guard into a foot lock, since if unsuccessful there’s a good risk of losing position. I don’t even want our students thinking about that during a fight. We focused instead on things like double-attacks from the guard, collar chokes from north-south, and the head-arm triangle from the mount, for example — high-probability, multi-option positions, with little risk of losing position.

• Specific sparring. Although all students like the live sparring part of class, we insisted on spending more time in specific sparring. For example, during the weeks in which we focused on the mount, we spent a lot of time doing live fighting from the mount, in which the fight is over (and resets again) if a submission or sweep happens.

  This isn’t particular innovative, as specific sparring is a part of most academies. Perhaps what’s different in our recent experience is the increased focus on this aspect. (I understand that world champion Roger Gracie spends tremendous amounts of time in specific training.)

Results

So far, I’m really pleased with the results. As I walk around the mat watching the students fight, I’m seeing real, objective improvement, and made at a pace that’s very exciting. As we talk about techniques and strategies, I see students gaining a real and deep understanding of the art. And the students are recognizing in themselves real progress, and from this, their enthusiasm for continued learning grows.

Resources & inspiration

It’s always good to have mentors and inspiration, and here are a couple of mine.

• Vinicius “Draculino” Magalhães. Draculino was one of the founding fathers of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, from the Gracie-Barra lineage. From Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and today from Austin, Texas, he has probably produced as many champions in BJJ, grappling and MMA as any other teacher in the sport. I’m proud to have received my black belt from his lineage, and to carry his name at the academy.

  Something I like about Draculino, is that he’s very analytical. Trained as a lawyer, he’s always taken a systematic approach to teaching and developing techniques. In this respect, people like Draculino have inspired my own way of approaching the art.

  Draculino also happens to run one of the best online academies on the web, offering both an extensive video library of techniques (each recorded from three angles) as well as a yearly curriculum for running a school. I use this resource to help structure our curriculum, and I’m constantly referring to it to clarify technical details. It’s the best $40 I could spend each month!

• Eddie Bravo. Although it will certainly be controversial to a lot of people reading this, for me, Eddie is the “Mozart” of modern Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He has systematically studied the best, from the best, and then innovated — notably including MMA’s most effective guard (the “rubber guard”), the twister, and a lockdown-based half-guard game — to develop his “10th Planet” system.

  Eddie is controversial because of his viewpoints on a number of issues both related and unrelated to jiu-jitsu (like the use of marijuana), but I believe it is precisely the frank openness to examine issues critically, that has led to the advancements he’s made in the sport.

  The more I follow Eddie, the more I’m impressed. A goal I have in 2012 is to travel to his school in California to meet and train with him.

The design process attempts to address objectives, within a multi-dimensional space of constraints. Within the particular dimension of any given constraint, there may exist an optimal solution. But within a multi-dimensional space, the design solution will sit at some (hopefully optimal) intersection.

It’s highly improbable that that intersection will coincide with the optimal solution in every constraint dimension, and so the design solution in the multi-dimensional space implies compromise in each individual constraint dimension.

So in the sense of “trade-offs”, compromise is already inherent in any non-trivial design activity.

To complicate matters, the relative arrangement of these constraint dimensions are not assured to be static, as they can be influenced by priorities, and priorities can shift throughout the lifecycle of a design activity. In response to these shifts, we must be prepared to accept compromise, in the sense of “negotiation and agreement”, as part of the process as well.

And we can’t wait to tell you about it!

The background

In 2007, Makalu was engaged by The Ecology Center of Berkeley, California to design and build a website that would provide American consumers with an effective tool to combat the growing number of unwanted catalogs they receive in the mail. The website — CatalogChoice.org — was launched, and quickly received the attention of nearly every large media channel in the United States, including a focus spot on “Good Morning America”.

Within one year, the service signed up more than one million members.

When Catalog Choice members receive an unwanted catalog, they login to their account, search for the catalog they received, and register an “opt-out” request. At that point, the Catalog Choice system acts as a powerful agent on behalf of the consumer to get request processed by the sending merchant. In this way, the consumer saves the effort of having to interact with individual companies, and benefits from the effectiveness the influential service has in getting their requests honored.

Through use of Catalog Choice, consumers reduce clutter and simplify their lives. And on the collective scale of millions, the service is helping the environment by considerably reducing the natural resources used in the production of unwanted catalogs.

Re-engaging with our friends

After Catalog Choice’s first year, when it was clear that a market existed for the service, a dedicated non-profit was formed, at which point The Ecology Center and Makalu handed the project over to the team that was established to manage and operate the service moving forward.

Five years later, we’ve re-engaged with our friends at Catalog Choice to:

1. Redesign the website, harmonizing the contextual changes and features that have evolved over the past half-decade, and to

2. Design and develop an iPhone app, which is the first in a suite of premium products known as, MailStop.

We’ll first take a look at the website redesign, and then look at the iPhone app.

Catalog Choice website redesign

Over the years, the service has expanded beyond catalogs, allowing consumers to opt-out of all types of unwanted mail — everything from credit card offers, to phone books. In addition, the service has established special relationships with local communities and townships throughout the United States, which are reflected in various ways throughout the site. Accommodating these changes, along with the introduction of a set of premium services, necessitated a fresh look at the overall site architecture and design.

The service is preparing to launch the new design, which so far has addressed the home page, and the purchase workflow related to the new MailStop products. We focused on simplification, higher sign-up conversion, and clearer communication of the service’s message.

We’re thrilled to show you three sneak-peek screenshots of the new look:

We’re really happy about the design, and looking forward to seeing its launch, and extended implementation throughout the site.

The MailStop iPhone App

The MailStop suite was conceived as a set of premium add-on services that both extend the ways in which consumers can be protected, and make using the existed Catalog Choice services even easier.

In that regard, Makalu was engaged to design and develop an iPhone app that saves consumers the effort of even having to login to the website. Having purchased opt-out credits (as an in-app purchase), users of the service can simply capture the relevant information related to their unwanted mail in images, and submit them directly to the service. Catalog Choice takes it from there.

With the MailStop iPhone app, it couldn’t be easier to opt-out of unwanted mail!

The design process

The experience of RaceSplitter and Rebalance (still ongoing) has taught us that it’s far more time consuming and expensive to change app code than design mockups (when, for example, you realized you’ve gone in a wrong direction), and so with the MailStop app, we went much further into the UI design than we have in the past, before starting the development.

The results were good. We found that a reasonable level of discussion and review were, in fact, possible around just a set of mock-ups, as opposed to playing with a working prototype. On the other hand, it wasn’t perfect. Although it was possible to satisfy all the requirements and constraints in abstract design, once the product came to life in the form of a prototype, we realized that no matter how careful you are, you can never completely appreciate the subtle interactions and frictions that make themselves apparent when actually using a product.

For example, during the design process we iterated six times on the workflow in which a user captures “up to” three images to capture three critical pieces of information (the catalog name, mailing label, and merchant data.) How do you efficiently communicate to the user that they can take up to three images, but that one is often sufficient? Given that they are to capture three pieces of information, the risk is that they assume they must take three photos.

As you can see in our screenshots below, our solution feels more described than direct, and that’s an important disctinction. The designed solution works, but it’s not perfect. We’ll take the opportunity in version 2 to design something which feels more direct and intuitive, and better avoids the potential correlation in the user’s mind of the number of photos available, and the number of information pieces we need.

The design and development process, however, was definitely an improvement over the experience we had with RaceSplitter (in which we built prototypes too early). We’re pleased with the results, but we didn’t yet hit the sweet spot; and so there’s process improvements still to be discovered.

A visual tour of the app

And with that, we’d love to show you the app, with this 10-image tour.

Look interesting? Why not give it a try right now? It’s free, and available today on the App Store!

Pour a cognac, put on some Vivaldi, and spend some quality time soaking in the inspiration:

Grupo Setex designer, Juan Ive, speaking at the 2011 Lowest Bidder conference explained in an authoritive-sounding Spanish/British accent:

When we looked carefully at the common parking meter, we thought, “It’s just too simple. People aren’t spending enough time truly getting to know it.” Thinking outside the box, and inspired by Microsoft, we worked hard to obscure the inherent simplicity, through carefully crafted layers of complexity.

Our use of five colors, seven font sizes, obscure symbols (even we can’t remember what that thing next to the “1″ label is), repeating sets of plus/minus controls, and the mysterious “A/1″ button, work together to ensure that no user will get a ticket out of this device in less than ten minutes (if at all).

We’ve heard it’s the talk of the town — I think we nailed it!

Since they installed these monstrosities around Marbella, I’ve been watching, and I’ve never seen a single device able to produce such a fast and consistent response among its users — The Contorted Face of Confusion.

Although not design related, the kicker is the pricing — 30 minutes for 30 cents or, get this, an hour for 70 cents. Think about that. And, finally, what I just discovered today — these machines will happily take your money on Sunday, without advising you that Sunday is free parking day in Marbella. Brilliant.

WaterField Designs iPhone Wallet

I’ve been using a trusty leather WaterField Designs zippered wallet for ages (the black one, shown above in the middle). Inside, I’ve always kept about eight to 10 cards, and a bit of cash.

What I noticed, though, over the past few years is a tendency to also keep my iPhone inside the wallet as well. This presented one problem: The iPhone fits so tightly, that when I pull it out, any cash bills I have inside tend to come out with it.

Apparently WaterField owner, Gary WaterField, had the same problem, and was in the fortunate position to do something about it — creating the WaterField iPhone Wallet (pictured above on the left).

Just slightly bigger than its predecessor, the new wallet solves the pulling-the-cash-out problem by including a felt divider that sits between the iPhone and the cash.

Additionally, the wallet has a clear plastic siding that allows the face of the iPhone to be viewed and manipulated without removal.

All in all, very nice upgrade!

The Timbuk2 Mission Cycling Wallet

When out cycling, I’ve always carried my WaterField wallet (with iPhone inside) in the back pocket of my jersey. This wasn’t ideal:

• One tends to sweat a lot in this hot Spanish climate, and I hated the thought of getting my nice leather wallet all icky. And wrapping it in bag or cover was clunky.

• Second, pulling the phone out presented a couple problems, including the cash falling out, and potentially dropping it with sweaty hands.

So I was also excited to see the new Timbuk2 Mission Cycling Wallet (above, right) arrive in the mail today.

The wallet is made for cycling, and seems to be mostly sweat-proof. It tightly holds the iPhone inside (even with my incase Snap hard-shell cover attached). Addtionally, like the new WaterField wallet, it has a clear plastic siding that allows you to use the phone without removing it. That’s going to be handy! (Except, of course, when I want to take photos. Which, as it happens, is a lot!)

Finally, it’s got three slots on the outside, providing just enough capacity to carry my ID card, a debit card, and a bit of cash.

But, as with all things, there’s still room for improvement.

Frequently, in our three-year-old “Cube” coffee maker, the previously-used capsule remains stuck in the capsule chamber. About the only way we’ve seen to get it out, is to start the coffee process, and open the chamber while the high-pressure water is flowing, which usually results in the old capsule being ejected and cleared away.

Sometimes, though, we put in a new capsule without having noticed that the previous capsule is stuck. At this point, you can’t close the chamber. Removing the new capsule involves removing the used-capsule container, and with a finger inserted from beneath, trying to pop the new capsule out the top (and catching it in the air before it falls back in!)

Hopefully, Nespresso will solve these problems in their future models.