Brand and the Government

Note: Finally getting around to my first real post on my new blog. They will be at least weekly. Will try and be Agile by keeping everything short and sweet. Topics will be the same as what came over from Lunch Buffet, but more blog style, and primarily on information design, interaction, user experience, art and design (generative, computational, installation), branding, software development, children’s museums, user interaction methods, design writing, and design education. Enjoy!

Author: Scott Bower
Source: Werkplace
We recently hired a new researcher at my day job (until corporate blog policies are made clear to me, I am going to avoid using names). She moved here from out-of-state, and was asking about my custom Blue Ridge Parkway license plate. I got it primarily for aesthetic reasons. I told her about North Carolina’s License Plate site, where we ordered it. She came in the next day having spent hours playing around with the site, much as I had done when I first moved here.

I decided to go back in and play around with it again, the results of which I screengrabbed and put below. The database is updated daily, so you can pick out your plate, put a customized message on it, and get a JPG back of how it will look. If someone else has already purchased that message for that plate, the system tells you. You can also easily order the plate from the application itself.

I am not sure if any other state does this, but I suspect not. There are nearly a 100 plate styles available, with a portion of the proceeds for each plate funding the organization it represents. Not only has the state come up with a very creative funding model, but the state of North Carolina itself is doing a hell of a job promoting themselves. Some of the plates, like ours, are simply beautiful pieces of art. Anytime we drive out of state we notice people tailgating and checking out our plate.

That alone is a great idea, but what really puts it over the top is the online application. Granted, it isn’t pretty, but that doesn’t matter. In fact, by not giving it a sexy interface, it gives users the impression that few tax dollars were spent on its development. It also makes government soft, accessible, and quite frankly, usable. I have tried applying for custom plates in other states, and you have to use paper mail-in forms. Typically, these forms have 8 entry lines and for writing variations of what you want in order of priority. There is no way for you to know if someone else has the plates already. You usually end of getting the short end of the stick with the government giving you something half way down your list.

So, kudos to North Carolina for giving us the taxpayers a fun and easy way to get license plates and promote our state so my property value can keep going up!

05.26.08 (0)

Goverment, IxD, Software, User Experience

PROJECTOR FUN

02.23.08 (1)

Typography

New Blog

I haven’t been active lately, and that is changing. I spent a few days hacking the Hemingway Wordpress theme after spending weeks looking for a template I liked. Coworker Ben Carey uses Grid Focus, which is one of the few I like, but you are not allowed to tweak it and I would have been copying. There is still some touch up I need to do with the code, and with the code on the Werkplace site which is almost 10 years old… before XHTML. But who has time for personal projects?

The old blog is a MS Spaces site that I got trapped into. I started playing around with it while ding project work for Microsoft. I started using it as a real blog. It was fun adopting a Microsoft tool that designers wouldn’t be caught dead using. That ended 2 years ago when a non-standards compliant release blocked my G4 from posting files. Of course, there was no wa for me to transfer information over to another tool.

Here is the link to the old site… RIP
Lunch Buffet

02.20.08 (1)

News

Helping Jake find Flow

Author: Scott Bower
(Note: This was posted in June 2008 but, for some reason, the datestamp was changed)
I recently finished reading “Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi after seeing it on the Carnegie Mellon graduate IxD (Interaction Design) reading list and having it highly recommended by Ben Carey . So i started and finished reading it the day my son Jake came home from the hospital, after being born. He laid on my chest the whole time. After I finished, I looked over and he had stopped breathing. It took us a minute, and, a trip to the hospital via ambulance to get him going again.

This book is the closest thing to a “religion” (which are memes really) that I have found. The Church of the SubGenius mocks “Flow” with the concept of “Slack“, but I digress.

It is the most important book I have ever read. Even though this would have done me alot of good if I had read it at 13, my particular life experience couldn’t have timed the exact moment I read this any better.

Essentially, “Flow” is a statistically proven and research backed observation that “living-in-the-moment” (my words, not his) and approaching life with passion and intensity is the most fulfilling way to experience life. It is without the cynicism we so often find around us. I think the quickest way to sum it up is his research on an assembly line worker who had achieved Flow. He was content with his life, even though what he did for a living was not what we would consider worthwhile. But the statistics prove it out. Everyday, he tried to improve the speed, accuracy, and quality of the repetitive process he was involved with. That’s it really. His coworkers spent their evenings in bars, drinking and complaining , while he was busy tinkering, learning, and mastering. I guess that’s why the most successful people I know from childhood are the skateboarders and snowboarders that stuck with it through college. We are all over-achievers.

Another important point, and this is key, is finding someone you truly love and starting a family. The smartest and happiest people he studied all had marriages that had stood the test of time. What is key is the commitment you make to help your spouse and your kids to reach their goals and live their dreams. It is balance, you are all in it together. I have treaded in the waters of obsession. I have seen designers and programmers so completely and utterly self-absorbed that their lives are as unhealthy as an alcoholic. Staying up all night for months at a time working on art projects isn’t Flow. Must remember that.

Tiger Woods has Flow. Sean White has Flow. William McDonough has Flow. Carlos Segura has Flow. Ben Fry has Flow. But it took me 34 years to get it. If only I had a mentor!

So back to Jake, these are the things I am going to teach him or learn with him. In my limited travels around the world, if he master’s any of these, he is going to turn out OK. So here is the “stake in the sand” so to speak.

1. Kung-Fu
It is the awareness of self that this gives you. It also means if he is caught in a fight in Chiba City, or stuck in an elevator with a Serial Killer, things will turn out OK.

2. Mandarin Chinese
My trips to India have taught me many things. Namely, that if one of the 30 engineering schools located in Bangalore gets 250,000 applicants per year and only excepts 2,500 of them, then the USA has already lost in the innovation department. Indians speak great English, Chinese, not so much. And the time is soon when China and India are buddies. I know people that have toured the research labs in China, the corporate towns (Motorola) that are replicas of the cities in Neuromancer. They own us.. it’s already over.

3. Kiteboarding
We live 2 hours from the best spot in the world. Hatteras will be underwater in our lifetimes, but all the snow will be gone, so snowboarding is out. Besides, he can make a great living as a consultant, with a waterproof laptop bag, he can island hop from internet cafe to internet cafe in the Caribbean with nothing but a MacBook Pro, his board, and his kite. Top programmers are going for $250 an hour these days. On his days off, he can cruize the beaches for rich Chinese women on holiday. The American women will be hold up in a cave somewhere.

4. Advanced Mathmatics
I am going to teach Jake to love Math through Art, which are the same thing. I am going to take him to see the work of Golan Levin, Marius Watz, and Jean Tinguely. I am going to teach him to program.

5. Passion for Learning
And I do not mean book or school learning here. I want him to read Henry Miller at the age of 13. I want him to have a thirst for reading, living, and experiencing new things.

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Tags: flow, jake, philosophy

12.31.69 (1)

Uncategorized