I get obsessed with various online subcultures. Usually they surround some well designed, niche product. Things like duct tape, shoe goo, bespoke suits, gold coins, and headphones. Often I find my way into little communities of people I would never be able to engage otherwise.

I recently was shopping for a new bag and stumbled into the world of one-bag carry-ons. It is a world of frequent flyers, retirees and business travelers, engineers, and IT folks. People talking about their body sizes, made in the USA production, toiletries, laptops, and synthetic pants. Friendly folks with above average incomes and educations. They have something in common with the ultra-light campers but with a very different aesthetic.

If you want to follow me down the path here is the map. A lot happens in the comments and reviews.

Start here: http://www.onebag.com

http://www.consumersearch.com/luggage-reviews
http://www.1bag1world.com/

http://www.redoxx.com/Airline-Carry-On-Luggage/Air-Boss/91018-Air%20Boss/100/Product
http://www.tombihn.com
http://www.toughtraveler.com/lug/carryon.asp
http://www.meipacks.com/TravelPacks01.html
http://www.briggs-riley.com/category/productDetail.aspx?id=Convertible-Cabin-Bag_224&sec=travel
http://www.ebags.com/product/ebags/weekender-etech-convertible/15026?productid=56582
http://www.flyertalk.com/

On the other hand it might be best to stay away if you don't have some money and time to burn.

In a previous post I mentioned my exploration of the notion of design patterns and speculated on the possiblity of using a patterns approach to creating better live experiences and events.

I sketch one out as a first stab.

--

Name – Rapid, Auto-Forward Presentation

Problem – Presentations are poor ways to communicate information when more efficient methods that allow the receiver to consume information on their own time, in a formate that is most convenient (such as email, wiki, video, etc). Some people are poor presenters and go on for too long. Powerpoint presentations, specifically, are often badly designed and executed, which bores and/or overwhelms the consumer with too much information. There are not enough resources (money, time, space, contenct) to execute a full length presentation.

Context – There is the opportunity to present a limited amount of information in a novel way.

There is the technological capacity to present a Powerpoint presentation.

Presenters should be willing to prepare and rehearse the format or their struggles may become more engaging than the information they are trying to convey.

There are limited resources (time, money, space, experience, content, etc)

Forces (influencing the design) – Need to present information to live audience.

Expectation that an event feature a speaker.

Not every presenter has appropriate content knowledge or is an engaging performer.

Audience is bored with typical presentation formats, is looking for novelty, and/or wants to have fun while they learn.

Limit on amount of time to present because of costs.

Desire to use Powerpoint technology.

Solution – Limit the presenter to set number of slides, which will auto-forward after a set amount of time. The auto-forward feature is standard to Powerpoint-type presentation software.

Set up video projector and screen. Connect projector to laptop with presentation software and the specific presentation loaded onto the hard-drive. Setting up the laptop off stage, away from the presenter will discourage the presenter from fooling with the presentation during the presentation (ie. backing up).

Set up lights and mic/speakers for the presenter if they need it to be seen/heard.

Have someone at the laptop start the presentation, and load the next when it is done.

Often a series of these presentations are presented together.

Introductions between presenters is discouraged because it drags out the event and is contrary to notion of rapid advancement.

Too many presentations grouped together can exhaust the audience just as quickly as a single long presentation.

Examples – Two popular methods at the 20 slides for twenty seconds each (20x20 or Petcha Kucha) and the Ignite format.

Resulting Context – A satisfying amount of information can be quickly transmitted to a live audience. Presenters are relieved to have gotten through the experience. Audience may be interested to learn more and to talk with presenter further. Presents enough information to form the basis of further conversation and debate. Entertainment. Provides concise experience for audience to relate to friends as stories.

I am an alumnus of 2 schools. My post-graduation relationship with both institutions has often been underwhelming...call me an underwhelmed alumnus.

Not that I gave much thought to my post-college alumni community when I was in school. I made some friends, people who shared my interests and are still close even as we have scattered around the globe, and I also made a lot more acquaintances, people who I enjoyed talking with while we shared a class but with who I never developed a deeper connection and lost track of after graduation.

Certainly I could have been more strategic about cultivating connections and maintaining more superficial relationships but that is something I have always had to work at and really has even made sense as I have gotten older. I suppose what may have seemed like empty, instrumental relationship building in the past now seems more like that kind of social economy that many communities like NYC thrive on. I suppose that is why I am not a politician. I also think I am rather typical in this regard.

But then there was the alumni office. I have a foggy memory that they made a point to introduce themselves at the graduation ceremony, to inform me that I was not leaving school but becoming an alumni. They must tell everyone that...I would. But what does it mean to be an alumni...and what would I want it to mean?

In the 6 years since my last degree here is what it has turned out the mean: I have fielded periodic outreach programs, often just asking for money, but also including the occasional one-off gatherings, and perhaps a periodic glossy mag. I have often have a vague sense there may be some online tools out there, and I occasionally check, but frankly they seem like just another mistaken attempt to recreate Facebook.

I have developed a stance of avoiding requests for money, and making a good-faith effort to show up at mixers when they are offered. I know that someday I might give some money if I can, but I know today, for sure, that mixers are often awkward affairs. I am certainly not being given the context to built significant new relationships.

Now why the hell would I give money to a school when I am still paying off school loans? It is nonsensical demographic profiling for sure but it is not what leaves me an underwhelmed alumnus...my underwhelmth (I can make up words as a college graduate) is deeper than that.

• What has the school done for me since graduating?
• Beyond my immediate cohort of friends, am I engaged with my fellow alumni?
• When I am moving to a new city, traveling, looking for a job, looking for advice...can I reach out to alumni to find help?
• In an age of online communities, social media, fast-to-market start-ups, and open working methods doesn't seem odd that schools are having such a hard time creating alumni community?

Perhaps this is not a fair description of your school. I know many ivy league schools for instance have alumni programs that are well funded marvels. But for context, my own experience is with two different scales of institutions with somewhat different profiles. One is a small, public, liberal arts college with a radically interdisciplinary curriculum located in a small town in Washington State, and the other is one is a large, prestigious, private, art school in a major city. Up to about a year ago I had about the same relationship with both of their alumni programs...we are riding on fumes.

In the last year things have changed. I have had the opportunity to look a bit more closely at the problems with alumni outreach. About 8 months ago, I joined one of my college's alumni board of directors and have been seeing how this system works.

I don't have a case yet where we have shown solutions for creating better outreach, but I believe I am starting to see what some of the problems are and starting to shift from being an underwhelmed alumnus to a impatient alumnus board member. The solutions are already out their in most cases, but as always, implementation is the challenge.

Here is the short list:

• The alumni office is often seen as a loss-leader...and so is often the first spot to see budget cuts.

• Short-sighted strategy. Alumni are too often seen as donation-cows to be milked without taking the time to build relationships.

• Too much focus on cultivating relationships with just VIP alumni rather than utilizing contemporary tools/strategies to connect all alumni.

• Alumni contributions are often too narrowly focused on financial donations rather than other contributions of things like time, skills, connections, passions, etc.

• The alumni network is too often seen as a network centered around the school institution rather than relationships among people...including alumni, current students, and the staff of the school.

• Different agendas of the school and alumni often conflict and power struggles ensue rather than efforts to dovetail agendas to create positive incentives for group action.

There are also a number of common small group organizational issues that are common in any small organization that utilizes volunteers. Here is a bit of what I have seen:

• Incentives and expectations are out of line.

• There is a misunderstanding of the impact of number of members on workgroup productivity...the alumni board I am on is simply too big to effectively work as a single unit, which brings on the need for additional management efforts by an already stretched staff.

• Volunteers are too busy or just don't keep their commitments.

• Lack of technology literacy to sufficient to use communication tools.

• Tardiness is rampant.

• Volunteers are asked to take on work in areas where they lack experience...and get in over their heads.

• Endless debates without action plans.

• Time is stolen from strategic planning to manage immediate issues.

• Meetings are run ineffectively.

• Too much focus on process and not enough on action.

There are plenty of solutions out there to the organizational issues (though, again, they have to be implemented), but the strategy stuff, especially the vision of the kind of relationship that need to be cultivated among alumni, really has to have buy-in all the way up (to the school president in this case). It is difficult for the alumni director or volunteer alumni to work with a bad institutional strategy

Being the director of an alumni office must be one of the most difficult administrative jobs out there. You are stuck between the college's constant need to raise funds, a dispersed and perhaps disenchanted alumni population, the need to corral alumni volunteers away from busy personal lives, and the reality of having to work with notoriously small budgets. Ugh. And the money pressures are even more intense and short-sighted in this difficult economy.

At the moment though the biggest issue in my mind is that alumni are too often seen as a cow to be milked.

Alumni need to be seen as community to be cultivated and nurtured...not just milked for donations. The relationships need to be built first before folks are going to see a reason to contribute (this should be obvious to all you social networking gurus). Means of contribution is often seen narrowly as simply money and need to be expanded. The alumni network is often only seen as an asset to the school rather than a mutually beneficial relationship.

Being an alumni could mean being a part of a community of folks ready to lend each other a hand. I am curious to see if we get anywhere close to that while I have the time and interest to contribute.

I have been fascinated by the notion and culture of "design patterns" of late. For those of you late to the game like me design patterns is the notion of capturing and communicating contextually relevant rules-of-thumb about a field of knowledge.

Rather than a set of abstract principles, best practices, or things like style guides...the key difference in the approach is that a design pattern is a typical solution to a specific, recurring problem.

It also seems to me that it is a great way to capture bodies of knowledge that are infused with a decent degree of subjectivity and complexity. It is also theorized that a bunch of patterns might fit together not just as a set of data but make up the units of a language for communicating a kind of design thinking.

Here is some wiki knowledge: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogical_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design_pattern

Now is turns out that this approach was famously fleshed out in architecture by fellow named Christopher Alexander in a series of books that attempt to capture a humanist approach to building, that can be applied by even a novice. Alexander seems to have a bit of a cult following. The design pattern approach apparently set off a big movement in computer science, user experience design, game design, and even education.

There is also a fun notion of the anti-pattern, which is what not to do.

I came to this originally when I was talking to a user-experience designer earlier this year and he made an offhanded comment about UX patterns...I was curious about how he seemed to think you could capture the rather subjective issues we were discussing but I forgot about it until I was recently reading The Art of Game Design (a good one) and the author mentioned it and so I stumbled into a rather interesting world.

It seems like it is one of those internet conversations that has seen a flurry of activity but reached a dead end and has faded away. Particularly in the early 00's it seemed there was a bunch of discussion on the UX side but then it stops...see this discussion as a prime example: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?347

What seems to be happening is that the language and the logic is easier to talk about than the subjective intangibles which then is smothering the fundamental insight. This is a typical anti-pattern I think best known as "There is nothing less funny than talking about comedy." In the blog discussion linked about you see that much of the debate is supposedly about what patterns are useful for and such but the currency of the debate is really about what makes up a good pattern and what categories make the best template for writing them.

An interested bit of internet culture aside the thing that intrigues me is the capacity for this mode of documentation to capture elusive things like performance and live experience design best practices.

On the art side for instance, performance art struggles as a discipline because it doesn't have a clear body of practice yet...it is more of a interdisciplinary hodgepodge which is interesting from an innovation perspective but less so from a credibility standpoint. How do you teach something for instance that has no fundamental set of skills?

On the live experience side of things, I have been struggling to find a way to capture this as a body of knowledge that is broad enough to approach any kind of live event...from a birthday party, to a corporate conference, to a day at the park. Seems like a series of live event patterns might be an interesting approach.

I spent a few minutes in the upper westside Apple Store in NYC the other day and was struck by an odd dance.

The store is laid out in two floors...a first floor and a basement level connected by a translucent spiral staircase. When folk with appointments seem to meet their Apple helper on the first floor and then go down to the basement for the lesson. 

The thing is the people getting these lessons on this afternoon all seemed to be the sheepish looking businessmen in fine suits and designer glasses. When a short little geeky guy with an Apple badge comes to fetch them, the businessman grabs his briefcase and follows them down the staircase. They don't walk together...the geek leads several paces ahead and below; and then looks back, up, and shyly while the businessman follows. The small geek below, the businessman above...down into the basement via the translucent stair off to do something that seems a bit dirty.

I wonder if that was how Apple imagined these afternoon rendezvous when they built the building.

I went on a bit of a quest the last two days to figure out how to make roti, a flat bread eaten in many variations around the world.

One of my favorite things I have discovered living in Brooklyn is the Caribbean street food also called roti...which is an Indian style curry wrapped up in a large flat bread. The whole wrap is a roti as is the bread itself. This is also not to be confused with the Indian style roti which is a whole wheat flat bread you sometimes get at Indian resturants instead of naan. There is clearly a great deal of overlap.

What I realized it that the Caribbean roti wrapping was a roti called Dahlpuri...a large bread filled with cooked split-yellow peas. I have yet to find a recipe online but here is a break down of the Caribbean style roti:

http://chennette.net/2007/04/08/musings-on-roti/

I did find this, which seems to be another style: http://www.trinigourmet.com/index.php/how-to-cook-guyanese-roti-video/

What I had an easier time finding is a ton of guides to making the simpler Indian style roti. I gave it a go and today I finally made something that might be called a roti.

First, Indian roti is basically flour, water, salt, and oil. It is mixed up, rolled out into thin pancakes, and then cooked on a dry pan.

I used these sources:

http://showmethecurry.com/breads/rotli-roti-indian-bread-recipe.html

(using a toaster as your bread oven) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2VFZXacyAI&feature=related

Getting dough right always seems tricky to me. I used a four to water ratio of about 2-1. I didn't have the Indian Chapatti flour and was using a rather hearty organic whole wheat flour that would get kind of slimy. I ended up mixing in some white flour too for a better result. Different flatbreads seem to consist of pretty small difference in the basic mixtures of flour, fat, salt, and liquid.

I focused on creating a dough that was kinda dry and not sticky to touch. I think it needs salt for sure. Still not sure the best way to incorporate the oil.

My biggest mistake was overcooking them and not understanding what was happening when I was cooking. You are supposed to cook them on one side till it browns and starts to bubble, flip it to brown the other side, and then do one of a couple tricks to get it to puff up. Traditionally this is done in a Tandor over but I used a pan and experimented with a toaster oven.

I was ending up with a dry cracker that wouldn't puff much at the end that tasted like matzo. Roti should be soft and bendable but cooked. I cut back on the cooking time on the 2 sides before puffing and it worked. I realized what is happening is that you are just sealing the outside and then doing the real cooking on the inside with a final steaming when you puff it. I suspect pita, tortillas, and other flatbreads all are similar in this regard.

It is easy enough to experiment with this cause you can make tiny roti to practice. Now that I have the basic idea, the ingredients seem simple enough to just whip up without a recipe.

At some point I want to try the Trini-style roti too. Till then I am dependent on Ali's Roti shop on Flatbush.

The participants your choose to be a part of a brainstorm are obviously important, but the there are numerous ways to decide who to include.

A Half & Half is a ideation and problem solving format that I use for small groups. The basic idea is a pretty simple and might be a way to add a new dimension to your next brainstorm...give it a try.

1) Invite a group of curious people together (I suggest no more than 8).

2) Make sure at least half are new faces

3) Try to include at least one “creative” (an artist, designer, etc), and at least one person who is radically outside your industry.

4) Have just one cental topic or question to explore.

You can run the discussion freestyle or use something more formal. Typical meeting/collaboration challenges will apply. It can help to have a facilitator and a note-taker.

Depending how you tweek the meeting, different outcomes can be reached. Perhaps you want to raise issues...asking broader questions might be in order. Perhaps you want to look at new angles of a problem your team is stuck on...have the old-hands describe the problem in a short 5 min presentation and then spend 20 minutes silently listing to the ideas of the newbies. 

There is a lot of talk about bring together interdisciplinary groups to solve problem but it is tough to execute. Often are networks are not as broad as we might think. You might consider inviting someone else to curate the newbie half of the meeting. 

As long as the participants are generally curious and open minded, good facilitation should be able to make the group work. If you don't have good facilitation, it still will be inclined to new ideas because of the new people. The main contribution of a Half & Half is in making a conscious curatorial decision to bring in new perspectives and to bring in enough of them that they have a voice in the room.

- There are a few principles at work here will encourage new ideas.

1) Having new people who are not versed in the social dynamics and history of the problem you are trying to solve forces the old-hands to look at each other and the problem anew.

2) Sometime there is already an appropriate solution available and in common use in a different industry.

3) Conflicts are good when trying to generate ideas, as long as they support the meeting goal. New perspectives introduce new conflicts of interest and vision that encourage the participants to be creative.

4) Participants from outside your industry will have a harder time seeing the kind of specific applications your group might be jumping to already. When trying to generate new ideas, holding off on looking for application is your friend.

I use these principles often when putting together Double Happiness Workgroups.

Good luck.

Here is a little bug fix for you Yelp app loving Pearl users if there are any left in the world.

I downloaded the yelp app for Blackberry 1.3 a couple days ago for my Pearl. When I would try to boot it up the app would freeze my phone on a screen asking about allow permissions.

Only way out was a battery pull but that didn't solve the problem.

After a few emails with the Yelp folks I was guided to the application permissions...I check allow on all the options. That fixed the problem finally. I am told this just allows the app to fucntion normally and doesn't expose you personal data in any unexpected ways. The phone does know where you are so it can find close businesses/restaurants during a search.

Now you can find that noodle bar you are looking for.