Its a common exercise in December to reflect back on the
about-to-expire year, but it can be particularly challenging to
identify the highlights in any category. Sure, cultural critics
produce a raft of best-of lists, but how easy is it for the rest
of us to look back?
We are all exposed to media (or information, or stories, or whatever term you'd like to use) at an enormous quantity and at a staggering rate, receiving content from TV, magazines, newspapers, advertising, blogs, music (radio, CDs,
and MP3s), email and more. So, it shouldn't be hard for me to come up with some 2004 list of something, right? After all, I read two daily papers, more than 125 blog feeds, and about 10 magazines. I manage two mailing lists (one
about the Rolling Stones and one about user research), participate in several others, as well as online discussion forums. I contribute to three different blogs. Ive got a handle on the zeitgeist, right?
Wrong. I cant remember a damn thing.
What the heck happened in 2004? I can remember the front-page stuff
(crimes, war, politics) but little else. So I decided to do an experiment:
I went to several online sourcesBoingBoing,
MetaFilter,
and Core77,
and skimmed their archives of two random 2004 months, February and
April. I used these sites as triggers for stories that seemed cool
when they broke but eluded my memory by the time December rolled
around.
Just those two months amounted to over 150,000 wordsand many,
many stories. Most I recognized with a hockey-card collector's nod"seen
it; seen it; seen it;" some I didnt notice at all at
the time (or if I did notice, made so little impact that I didnt
recognize them months later); and a few still seemed new and cool.
But a bunch of others stood out as important, had personal resonance
for me, and seemed, somehow, to be representative of the year. So
here we go:
February, 2004:
April, 2004
These are stories about design, technology, culture, politics,
media, and entertainment, all jammed togetherstories that
are probably familiar, but that most of us couldnt have listed
on our own without going back over some kind of archive. Anyone
who took Psychology 101 (not me) will know that there are different
types of memory. In this case were contrasting the memory
of recall with the memory of recognition. We might
not be able recall the names of all our high school teachers, but
we could probably recognize most of them by name or photo. (Of course,
there are some teachers who weve blocked from both recall
and recognition due to excessive traumabut I digress.)
Perhaps some of the items listed above provided a frisson of recognition,
a surprise of a forgotten incident, the pleasure of an interesting
experience from the past or a splash of perspective gained from
just a few months' distance. And you could do your own lists, using
the filter of what tripped your fancy or tickled your funny bone,
and that list might provide some fun for others around you, but
the parlor game would still hold: in this time of information overload,
we seem to need the stimulus to have the response. Why, if were
consuming so many cultural stories, is it so hard to recall them?
Again, those Psych 101 students will know about the Recency Effectour
inclination to add weight to the more recent items. (Film studios
plan release dates for award-likely movies based on this phenomenon;
Sideways, released in the fall, seems to have won a conspicuous
number of film awards.)
And the Recency Effect is markedly intense when we try to sum up
the cultural experiences of a large period of time, say a year.
Weve spent that time primarily consuming informationnot
accumulating knowledgethe zeitgeist database rapidly building,
each fresh item reshaping the slag heap, with the older pieces buried
ever deeper below. Try it yourself: you can probably recall last
month's cover of ID Magazine, but not the one before it.
The notion of consuming media, in a period of history that serves up so many choices, was recently addressed by Peter Merholz in his thoughts about "media
obesity." (Indeed, when does anyone have the time to listen to 40G of music?) Of course, the tag-team of marketing and technology are adding ever-more options, increasing the challenge of ever-keeping up: If you enjoyed
Seinfeld when it was originally on television, and then again when it was on reruns, you can now own it, so that you are able to watch at least once more. Oh, and then one more time after that with the commentary. So in addition
to all the new media experiences being generated from this moment forward, there are re-released and enhanced versions of media experiences from last year, from 5 years ago, or from 30 years ago. Were at a single point in
time with a stream of media bearing steadily down upon us like a NASCAR final lap, concerned all the while that if were not careful, were going to get pounded by the reverse commute of yesterdays content.
And if we consider design, specifically, we have to ask ourselves
whether our contribution to this congestion is unique in any way,
or simply more of the same. Designers are certainly in the consumption
business, and while design both creates and reflects the cultural
stories were considering here, the work is typically tangible.
Sure, the iPod sits in the zeitgeist somewhere near
Janet Jacksons breast, but Lindsay Lohans
iPod is a concrete, physical, experience-able, designed artifactespecially
for Lindsay herself. And maybe "design stories"or
"personal experiences with design" ratherare a kind
of story that is more memorable precisely because it's tied to an
artifact. These kinds of stories may be richer, individualized,
or recall-able on other levels (tactile, olfactory), making rapid
and effective connections with memories, emotions and experiences
in ways that that are palpableindeed, literally physicaland
have an upper hand in providing effective tour guides to both our
collective and individual stories.
So heres the corollary experiment: I was easily able to generate (mostly from recall, with little need for stimulus-recognition) a list of my own design-y experiences from this past yearexperiences that affected me
emotionally and intellectually (either positively or negatively):
It looks like design can impact an individuals stories, pushing
past the Recency Effect, lodging in whatever cranial fissures house
the items available for recall. And what a nice thought that is,
looking back at all we've been through and ahead at what's still
to come. Dylan wrote, She's an artist, she don't look back,
but he also wrote, "Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go."
Steve Portigal is a SF Bay Area consultant who uses ethnography
and other research techniques to help his clients discover and act
on new insights about how their customers work, play, shop, entertain,
eat, and live their lives around products and services. He writes
FreshMeat, a semi-regular email column about the relationships between
business, culture, technology, products, and consumers. Check out
his Musuem of Foreign
Groceries.
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