A most apposite post for a December 7th - one of those leaves on the calendar on which one does a certain amount of thinking about sudden transitions between these states.
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Useful information
From the Speedbird monthly archives
Monthly Archives: December 2006
An idea in footwear that just never seems to go away, despite the fact that it’s never executed particularly usefully. Take a look at the Puma Slancio, part of the 96 Hours collection I’ve famously been smitten with since its introduction in ‘02 (but which has been radically repurposed as a Neil Barrett boutique line since that introduction).
If you buy the Slancio’s marketing copy, it’s an “essential travel item perfect for the modern man on the go.” (!) This quaintly retrograde proposition rests on the weight- and space-economizing idea that you only have to pack (or wear) one pair of shoes, yet get to enjoy it in three different configurations: street shoe, hotel/inflight slipper, and pool sandal.
In the abstract, this seems to make a good deal of sense. It’s certainly true to the original 96 Hours conception of a line of clothing designed with a whirlwind international trip in mind - a trip on which you had to look professional a certain amount of the time, but also expected to be able to have some fun. (As it happens, this use case describes most of the travel I’ve had to do over the last few years, to a surprising degree of accuracy.) Space in my bags is always at a premium, and I genuinely would love the flexibility the Slancio would appear to offer. So why haven’t I ordered me up a pair yet?
Well, consider the original proposition: in whatever configuration, this shoe system (I’m tempted to call it a “platform”) has to see me from breakfast meeting to client presentation to speaking engagement to drinks with friends afterwards. To lapse into business jargon, that has to be its core competency, and if by simply detaching its exoskeleton I’m also afforded a comfy lounge slipper and a spare pair of flip-flops, so much the better. The trouble is that in its maximal configuration, the Slancio is simply too clunky and inelegant to choose as one’s sole footwear for a business trip - you could never wear it with a suit, for example. Whatever morphological concessions that are made to ensure it works as a system doom it as a shoe.
Yet the idea of a modular shoe springs eternal. I remember prototypes dating at least as far back as an SFMOMA show of 1999, and the concept seems to make so much sense that manufacturers and designers keep coming back to it, despite the fact that it’s never worked out quite right. It’s all but undead.
I have a pair of “three-way convertible” Final Home shoes that suffer from some of the same limitations as the Slancio: they’re neither particularly comfortable as sandals nor as shoes, and a disaster as clogs. (I wonder what, if any, influence East Asian lifestyles, with their many-times-daily requirement to step in and out of shoes readily, have had on these designs. Certainly both the Slancio and my Final Homes have a step-in configuration - what I call the ajushi mode - which makes them unusual in the Western context.) The Yves Béhar-designed Puma minis are similarly limited, with the sole of the sockliner insufficiently articulated to allow them to function in the intended role of travel slipper, and the liner’s material nastily unbreathable into the bargain. I do try not to buy shoes that make my feet smell more than would ordinarily be the case.
Even the deeply unfunky Timberland had apparently experimented with a highly modular concept, allowing the wearer to recombine from a fairly extensive menu of outsoles, sockliners and footbeds. I could never track down a retailer which seemed to have any available for testing, though, and they’re no longer even referred to on the brand’s Web site - probably too complicated to keep all the permutations in stock.
Beyond this very real logistical issue, which an all-in-one design like the Slancio would seem to address, modular designs all seem to flirt with the Swiss Army Knife syndrome. You can certainly use the Philips-head or the saw blade on your Swiss Army Knife, at least for a short while, but you wouldn’t want it to be the only such you had available. The same goes for shoe-component-as-sandal. Margins for comfort and utility, it turns out, are surprisingly tight on something like a flip-flop - they’re already optimized on something like the nominal form factor, and any change introduced for the sake of making it easier to plug into a modular infrastructure is likely simply to make the thing less comfortable.
Acceptable for the length of a three- or four-day trip? Maybe. Acceptable at the still greater price of requiring a complementary distortion in the shoe’s other configurations? Maybe not. As far as I’m concerned, the challenge of the modular travel shoe remains unconquered.
Here’s a user-experience blunder that rather surprises me. Take a look at the Quick Contacts chat panel on your Gmail page, if you should happen to have one. You might notice that the name of anyone you’ve either sent or received mail from is listed there, with current online status indicated, just so long as they have a Gmail account.
This listing is clearly operating on the principle that people who send me mail should by default be considered members of my social circle, and should enjoy a status at least potentially akin to that of “buddy.” The primary problem with this assumption, of course, is that the set of people I correspond with via email is far larger than that of people I want knowing whether or not I’m currently online. A one-time connection of arbitrary shallowness strikes me as being rather insufficient to establish this kind of social linkedness, but in Google’s conception of things, this is precisely what apparently happens.
But there are other issues, as well. Like most people, I assume, over the course of a year I correspond with many more people than I can easily remember. Some of these are personal and reasonably persistent contacts, some of them professional and therefore with a duration best described as “project-based,” and yet others are one-offs, mayfly relationships called into being by a single set of email exchanges and never again activated. But all are treated identically by Gmail’s Quick Contacts module - and if I want to do something about it the onus is apparently on me to reach into the comprehensive list of my contacts and disable the offenders one name at a time. The result is a smooth and undifferentiated list of “contacts,” some of whom I don’t remember (and some of whom, frankly, I may not want to be reminded of - fallings-out being a social reality, but something rarely adequately provided for in social-application design).
This is why engineers should never design social systems alone.
Anybody else noticed the unusually crisp graphic language the laggard CBS network is using in ads promoting their new season? The design direction is bold, and in context, fairly impressive; with high-visibility yellow backgrounds and severely-cropped type used as a graphic element, the ads seem a few orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the gormless shows they’re touting. Oddly enough, I can’t seem to find any of the campaign online, nor is it carried through on the net’s own Web site. Cold feet? Miscoordination?
Locals can see the ads to best advantage on one of those superbright video billboards above the subway entrance at 23rd and Broadway, just across from the Flatiron Building. I’d be curious to hear what you-all think. (These are the very billboards, mind you, that I’m probably supposed to be appalled by, and regard - as any bien-pensant would - as the worst sort of blight on the streetscape. Actually, I find them energizingly urbane.)
Inscription found in a book while cleaning up:
Nothing in the world is usual today. This is the first morning.
Lines from Izumi Shikibu, they destroy and will continue to destroy me - a lingering trace of other inscriptions, other gifts, other hopes.
