Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Robert Faludi, Digi International: Liking the Guests”.
All right, i am uh rob faluti. Thank you dale very much, and this is liking the guests. So this is a talk with pirates, princesses apes, taxidermy, a man and a mouse, and it’s about why we’re all here and it starts with a critical moment in 2011. I started a class called sensitive buildings and we put sensor networks in a 300 unit apartment building on central park south in manhattan. Wireless i’m fully prepared to teach, but i don’t know anything really about building engineering.
So i needed to get a textbook. Barnes and noble. Has a whole section on architectural engineering and i plowed through several in the bookstores in fact, there’s one called mechanical electrical equipment. That is 1792 pages long, but there are many others and a thin orange book happened to catch my eye, and that was the critical moment. A month earlier i met some pirates and a cartoon princess on a trip to the mouse, so disneyland is striking in so many ways: it’s commercial, it’s squeaky, clean and every single light bulb works, no matter what your age is or your outlook. The experience is totally comprehensive and coherent sure, there’s crowds and lines and the food is maybe modest at best, but people are having fun and they’re happy.
The orange book was called designing disney and it’s been a guy named john hench about creating disneyland uh chapters included. Color characters story, but i opened first to a section that was titled liking. The guests liking liking is a design principle. Well, you know, i know about white space and symmetry and composition, but what about liking somehow seeing it expressed, and especially in the unexpected context of disneyland popped it to universality? In my mind and a chill went down my spine, i think my neurons kind of instantly reorganized around this as a design theme. Hence wrote liking.
The guests is key to everything we do and he goes on to say, to build effective story, environments and ensure guest comfort. We realize that we always need to assume the guest position and their point of view, just as walt did and take the guests interest to heart and defend them when others didn’t think it mattered. There’S really nothing new about all this, but i’ve been working in a world of requirements, documents and minimum viable products and managed expectations and and then walt disney kind of reached out to me from the void. Let me tell you why this matters liking, the guests, is more than theater and it’s more than just simple usability. It’S really about details, story, engagement, forgiveness, it’s about compassion, and these things aren’t new, of course, they’re old, but we need to renew them constantly in our everyday lives.
When we like someone, we cooperate with them and when you like your users, you travel together with them towards a common goal. So later that week after i found the book, i happened to catch an episode of nova called ape genius and it turns out that apes, our closest relative, mostly can’t do this. They don’t cooperate, but people can and it’s one of the things that makes us unique as humans. In fact, facilitation, encouragement, reciprocity. These are the basis of teaching and animals, don’t teach in fact they don’t want to teach humans. Do the cooperation the teaching? It turns us on so liking. The guests is fun, but it’s also really feels good to us. When we like the guests, we give them experiences that are sensual and complete and we pave the cow paths and we give details.
You know maybe a little texture on a knob or a notch that helps you open the airline peanuts, an extra screenshot in the instructions we test things and we fix them and we engage and engaging is. Actually. I always tell my students pretty easy. I’Ve got a list here, that’s compiled from student suggestions and it’s like a toolbox for luring humans.
In doing any of these, things will be a way to connect with another human being through your product or your project. In fact, it’s even simpler than that john hench said disney aimed to enrich people’s lives with experiences that would stimulate their imagination. This means it’s not all about control, it’s also about leaving room for the guests, another key concept, leaving them room so there’s a whole spectrum. Really of ways to like the guests and i’ll start on one side which is ikea, they think of everything ikea works by totally getting into your head. You have children, they have child care, you need extra parts, they have extra parts, you’re confused, there’s a helpline. They have twine ready, they have credit available, there’s parking whatever it takes, all the barriers are removed and ikea is compassionate and complete. But of course it’s with a very clear business purpose or on the other end of the spectrum. Here’S jill hafila’s circadian squirrel, a project.
She did at the itp program in new york. This is a taxidermied squirrel that slowly removes its head and replaces it to mark the passage of time, which is weird, and it opens questions. Where did it come from? Why did she make it? What does it mean? It totally stimulates the imagination and it’s impossible, i think, to look at circadian squirrel and not sense that you’re communicating with someone who wants to entangle your imagination, it’s a totally different way of liking the guests. Here’S a couple other examples that i think are closer in from the extremes: there’s an initiative at google called data liberation and it aims to ensure that you can always download all your information. So it’s not trapped up there in the cloud now the google loves data and i suppose they feel that if you love something, maybe you could set it free, but on one level this runs totally counter to their business.
Yet on another, it’s all about embracing the users uh. Finally, we have another favorite of mine. This is tom, gerhart’s mud tub and it’s an organic sensual interface that buffers between the physical and the digital.
Basically, you mess around in the mud and that controls a computer. You know you can think of it as a as a very dirty mouse um, it’s much more purposeful than the squirrel, but in no way is it about business and it’s fun. So there’s room for everyone in this concept of liking, the guests from ikea who’s, focusing on your needs to run a business all the way over to circadian squirrel, who exists purely to stimulate your sense of wonder and there’s payoffs for us. The makers, no matter where you are on the scale user, loyalty reciprocity, joining your users uh in their new ventures. They will give you their suspended, disbelief they’re more likely to forgive your mistakes and plus you’re doing something worthwhile, and that feels terrific. So why are we all here? We didn’t really come here to show schematics or code or discuss the intricacies of licensing or just to theorize, or even only to hear ourselves talk.
I hope, but we’re here for all other kinds of reasons, only a few of which come up on this slide. But the point is that you are in a room full of people who give a damn because liking the guests is key to everything we do, and i want to thank you for being my guests. You .