Monthly Archives: March 2019

Café barbershop menu

While I didn’t have the opportunity to sample their lattes or get a hair cut, I do appreciate the look of the signage in a cafe/barbershop that I visited in Quebec City last week (we could nitpick about weighting and categories). It’s a good concept really – drink a nice cup of coffee while getting your haircut. Most salons I visited in Hsinchu have this feature but the coffee was almost always poor and the timing imperfect. Inevitably your cup would end up getting hair in it. The Humble Barber in Charlottetown attempts something similar with beer on tap, but it doesn’t really work, and who in their right mind wants to get inebriated during the day (there is work to be done!). The benefits that I could see in Quebec are a stronger sense of community, like the barber shops of old, where you get people hanging around for longer periods of time – preferably talking. Unfortunately, the reality is, most would just take advantage of the generous seating and free wifi to stare at their various devices. Thats what they were doing in Quebec.

Cognitive Decline

I walked out of the house today without my keys, which resulted in a taxi drive to downtown. This is surely further evidence of my cognitive decline, which I attribute to my laziness towards studying Chinese or deep reading of any kind. If there is a bright side, it’s the knowledge that it’s pretty difficult to get into our house without the fob and key. No windows to slide in through.

There is a reason why “our religious services aren’t five minutes long”

A great experience which engages the senses trumps efficiency.

Multi-sensory

The entire experience of vinyl helps to create its appeal. Vinyl appeals to multiple senses—sight, sound, and touch—versus digital/streaming services, which appeal to just one sense (while offering the delight of instant gratification). Records are a tactile and a visual and an auditory experience. You feel a record. You hold it in your hands. It’s not just about the size of the cover art or the inclusion of accompanying booklets (not to mention the unique beauty of picture disks and colored vinyl). A record, by virtue of its size and weight, has gravitas, has heft, and the size communicates that it matters.

Records, in all their fragility and physicality, pay proper respect to the music, proper respect to the past. They must be handled carefully, for the past deserves our preservation. They are easily scratched, and their quality is diminished as a result of those scratches. They are subject to the elements—left in the sun, they warp. Like living things, they are ephemeral.

Why vinyl records survive in the digital age

First Contact

One of the greatest points of concern when we were deciding to return to Prince Edward Island was access to quality health care. My views on this were shaped in a large part by my mothers inability to get timely care for the maladies that struck her late in life – that is until she came to the end of her struggle where she had what can only be described as world class treatment during her time in Palliative Care. There are also the stories from friends detailing the experience of sitting in pain for hours and hours at the hospital emergency room. If there was any motivation to stay healthy and fit it is this.

I’ve also set aside a small investment to use in the event that we need to seek treatment abroad – a medical tourism fund, so to speak. I can’t afford additional insurance as of yet, but that’s something we will be looking into in the future.

Any criticism/negativity I may have is not directed towards the professionals themselves but the system. The people who worked at Palliative Care were the most amazing people you would ever meet.

There have been a few instances where I might have sought a doctors advice if we were still in Hsinchu, but have thus far been lucky enough to medicate our way out of any problems, with over the counter meds. That is until now.

Camren has a minor problem that through his dogged independence has become a bit of a bigger problem. He has an ingrown nail on his toe that has become infected, which if left untreated might lead to greater problems.

Following instructions on the foot care service menu of the Water Street clinic I called to see what service might be appropriate for him. To get foot care I was told I would need a referral from our doctor. As we don’t have a doctor (and likely may never), we will be off to the walk-in clinic so they can assess where we go next. Fingers crossed they don’t suggest the emergency room or like they used to say to my mother, see you in a few months.

Update:

I used the Skip the Waiting Room online booking form to what I previously would have called registering to see the doctor. I don’t know what it is called here. I could talk at length at the problems with Skip the Waiting Room user experience, but it in the end worked, and I appreciate the efficiency of the system. It not only saved time but also would seem to be the only guaranteed method to actually see a doctor. The small fee was a bit of surprise, considering this is a socialized medical system.

The doctors visit went well – we got our 3 minute consult and were out the door with a prescription. The cost of the medicine was reasonable as well.

One parent didn’t have as smooth an experience as we had. She arrived without registering and was told that the clinic was full and was informed that there was no where else in the Charlottetown area for her to go. Visiting a doctor here requires a measure of advanced planning.

Overall my preconceptions of the medical system were today somewhat unfounded.

If someone cares enough to dislike our work, the best response is, “thank you.”

Thank you for taking the time to consider it, thank you for caring enough to let me know…
Seth Godin

… go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses. Sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns. Sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short, go and get the seat of your pants dirty in real research. Robert Park

In an ideal world I could split my days between “making” and collecting qualitative research data from observation and interviews.

Serious leisure

The sociologist Robert Stebbins identifies “serious leisure” activities as the most fulfilling: pursuits that require regular refinement of skills learned in earnest. Hobbies are declining, but a hobby is exactly the kind of activity that adds value to the weekend. Stamp collectors and basement inventors may not be cool, but they know the benefits of becoming fully immersed in an activity and losing track of time – that rejuvenating “flow” state.

A hobby is an activity undertaken purely for its own sake, but technology attempts to monetise it. A friend used to make beautiful earrings occasionally. Almost ritualistically, she would buy the beads, and carefully craft the small, coloured jewels in a quiet workspace. Then came Etsy. Now she makes beautiful earrings and sells them, ships them and manages this business along with a full-time job and a family. What was leisure became labour. The side hustle is a weekend thief, but in a time of stagnant incomes, many must choose income over time.

Even though she is exhausted and a little miserable, my friend is praised for her hard work. The Protestant mindset has a firm grip in the culture: live to work, not work to live. We get competitive about our busyness (“I stayed until 9pm!” “I stayed until 10pm!”) because it makes us look wanted and worthy – supply and demand. It is hard to shake the ingrained value that time must be utilitarian and occupied, which is why taking two days off can seem suspect, or a bit like failure.

I was just about to sit down and do some really unimportant work but I think I’ll go hang out with my son instead.

From Who Killed the Weekend?

Poor affordance

A TV remote at the Prince Edward Home

Most would recognize this remotes usage, though how you hold it correctly is often not as clear (infrared remotes need to be pointed towards the receiver), but to the aged and/or those with poor eye site these buttons don’t clearly indicate their function, so a hack is required. I wonder how much time was wasted helping people turn on the TV before some thoughtful nurse increased the label size.

The February report

I’m going to be updating the “what I am up to now” section sometime over the weekend but first I thought I might note the challenges over the past month. Here are the top three.

  • Volunteering. This was one of my goals for moving back home, volunteering my time with organizations that might be a good fit for my experience and in return, other than the satisfaction of helping others, having a greater connection to the community. Generally this has not worked out. My impression thus far is that you need to be as aggressive in finding a volunteer opportunity as you might a job (perhaps this is my inexperience showing), many of my emails have gone unanswered and PEI Newcomers in particular seem disinterested. It could also be that there may be no need for volunteers in the organizations of which I am familiar. What I have done instead is to connect to people on a more personal level and offer to help them as I can. This has worked on a couple occasions thus far.
  • I started this month in a Product Specialist role at the StartUp Zone. I do genuinely like helping people and sharing the successes and failures I have seen after 20 odd years of working within and with product centred organizations. What has become clear to me is that I have little interest in selling myself or design research in general to people resistant to such topics. My current interest is not consulting and the amount of time that is required of each meeting not financially viable. So I suspect I’ll be changing the nature of this relationship going forward.
  • Instead of writing a new workshop this month on what would have amounted to covering part of a design thinking process, I hauled out an old talk on another topic. The rationale was to test the waters and see if there is an appetite for such things – when you ask new business owners what areas they would like covered invariably they bring up Facebook ads, boosting Instagram followers and some such. I didn’t want to spend a week on a 90 minute workshop only to have people show complete disinterest. What I asked of Startup Zone was a sample group of people, maybe 6 – 8, representing the community at large so that we could have a small intimate presentation and a talk about experience design. My mistake was not communicating this clearly, as it became something more than I planned. Despite some hiccups, my clicker battery was dead, I did manage to learn a great deal and the next one will be all the better for it.

One last challenge. I don’t know if it’s reverse culture shock, the terrible weather, or a lack of sleep but I’ve found that my conversations and writing have been taking on an increasingly negative tone of late. I always considered it a normal part of January, but that was when we lived in a region with little in the way of winter. I think the immediate fix to this is more exercise (I haven’t trained in months), more time talking with my wife, and less time stuck alone in my cubicle.

Punishment for laziness

Charlottetown is a small place and none of the 3 parkades more than a 7-10 minute walk from anything in the downtown. But a parking spot right outside the office is hard to pass up on these cold days, so when I saw one available this AM I grabbed it immediately. I had just enough change for the meter to allow me to run to the bank to get cash (resulting in paying their exorbitant fee), run to a couple businesses begging for change, and then top up the meter. Naturally, I lost track of time and missed the meter expired time by about 3 minutes. The guy in charge of writing tickets was much more punctual.

Happy 13th

This past Wednesday was my son Camren’s 13th birthday. As per tradition the day started with pancakes and ended with cake. Gone are the homemade special cakes with seemingly massive amounts of chocolate on top. That tradition has been temporarily replaced with an ice cream from DQ, but will likely return in the future.

I’m pretty proud of his ability to adapt to life in this foreign land, and looking forward to watching as he develops into the interesting man he is sure to become.