BlogLESS: Talk to me about why the program was founded?
ZD: The reason for founding the MFA in Collaborative Design is summed up nicely by Peter Schoonmaker of Illahee, one of the mentors in the program. His Twitter bio says "Seeking non-trivial solutions to wicked problems." I think there is a pretty clear recognition in the world of design that the wicked problems facing the planet require an approach that works between and even transcends disciplines and takes into account the needs and desires of many more human and non-human actors than are currently consulted by designers.

These ideas and the need for this program have been percolating over the last five years at PNCA, and finally became a reality this year. I am very excited to be part of a program that allows students create work with native wetland species as their primary clients! What do the wetland plants want, and how do we make these designs viable and integrated? What other stakeholders need to be taken into account?

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I ran across this article a few weeks ago and found it interesting because it illustrates some of the things we've been saying about ethical strategies for a while. Namely, that it might be profitable to behave unethically but that, in the long-term, the Internet will find you out and shut you down. The corollary: being ethical makes good business sense.

The subject of the piece is DecorMyEyes.com, a business that sells designer eyeglasses. Its owner discovered that treating his customers poorly --incorrect orders, insults, and even threats-- helped his business by increasing his visibility online. Apparently, there really was no such thing as bad publicity.

So he started doing it intentionally.

And here's where the story seems to violate our aphorism: When people went public about their stories of awful treatment, it only seemed to have the opposite effect.

The owner brazenly replied to his angry customers on a forum:

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

The owner (whose real name is Vitaly Borker) generated just enough negative feedback to game Google's algorithm, but not so much to be shut down by authorities. For a while he was able to keep enough business to offset the business he loses due to complaints.

That was, until the NYT story. A week after the article was published, Borker was arrested and charged with making threats and mail and wire fraud.

Since the press coverage, Google seems to be reworking its algorithm to better account for bad publicity. In the case of DecorMyEyes.com, at least, the effectiveness of these changes is still hit or miss.

Ultimately, it seems our assertion was upheld. Borker may have profited initially from being unethical, but once word from the forums spread to the wider press, he lost.

Be good. Because if you're not... people will find out.

Listen to this, from the Forbes blog:

During a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood New York conference, Gerald Marzorati, the Times’s assistant managing editor for new media and strategic initiatives, explained why the paper's print business is still robust. "We have north of 800,000 subscribers paying north of $700 a year for home delivery," Marzorati said. "Of course, they don't seem to know that."

As evidence that Times subscribers don't realize how much a subscription costs, he pointed to what happened when the paper raised its home-delivery price by 5 percent during the recession: Only 0.01 percent of subscribers canceled. "I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they're literally not understanding what they're paying," he said. "That's the beauty of the credit card."

...Stealthily hiking rates on the assumption that customers are too dim to catch on and/or too lazy to do anything about it is the kind of thing that gives banks, credit card companies and cell phone providers such a bad reputation. When I pointed this out after the panel to Marzorati, he was quick to dial back his condescension. All he meant to say, he explained, is that customer retention is always better in an opt-out situation.

Nick has been pointing out the problems with this kind of scammy thinking for a while now, but it's a bit of a surprise to hear it from the New York Times. More evidence that you've got to keep a leash on your social marketers -- and that includes anyone who speaks for you in public.

According to the BBC, researchers at Princeton University recently found that when people read information that's presented in harder-to-read fonts, they can recall it better than information presented in clearer fonts. The researchers argue that schools could boost results by simply changing the font used in their basic teaching materials. This also has interesting implications for designers.

The following is excerpted, roughly, from the BBC article:

28 volunteers in a Princeton study were given 90 seconds to try to memorize a list of seven features for three different species of alien. The idea was to re-create the kind of learning in a biology class. Aliens were chosen to be sure that none of the volunteers' prior knowledge interfered with the results.

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font. The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember. Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts recalled 14% more. They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to "deeper processing" and then "better retrieval" afterward.

Interesting information here for web and print designers, and an opportunity to reflect on some traditional design wisdom. The traditional strategy is to design all of the information you're presenting in a way that is as clear and easy to read as possible. This makes sense, I think, because most often designers are tasked with delivering information to an audience that is assumed to be at worst hostile and at best indifferent to the message.

But this policy may be self-defeating in non-advertising contexts. If this research is on to something, there may be circumstances where it makes sense to intentionally design things (think about, for example, instruction booklets, magazine articles, and so on) with fonts that obscure clarity. In cases where we're sure that the audience wants the information, we might be doing them a service by printing it in a less than perfectly clear font.

Food for thought.

It's a simple idea: serve (locally-sourced) pie and coffee, give people a place to sit and talk, and good things can happen. Greensboro, Alabama is the site of PieLab, a community space developed by design group Project M and non-profit housing organization HERO. You can read more about its founders and mission here.

What I like most about it is the earnestness and simplicity of the idea. The New York Times discusses how, early on, PieLab's young designers struggled to fit into the local culture. The latest incarnation is sensitive and helpful, without being patronizing.

Image from the PieLab Facebook Group

Image from the PieLab Facebook Group

Now we know what Willy Loman sold.*

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant's argument for belief in God is that we must represent the highest good as a state of affairs in which everyone is happy because they are virtuous (5:113–114, 124). But neither the laws of nature nor our best efforts can guarantee that happiness will result from virtue. Therefore, Kant thought, we must conclude that the highest good is impossible -- and thereby fail to be motivated to virtue -- unless we postulate "the existence of a cause of nature, distinct from nature, which contains the ground of this connection, namely the exact correspondence of happiness with morality" (5:125), i.e. unless we posit the existence of God (cf. Rohlf, SEP).

As far as I'm concerned, meditation of this kind is prompted by the image above.

Famously, R. Buckminster Fuller hoped that the geodesic dome would help address the postwar housing crisis: geodesic homes are extremely strong for their weight, their "omnitriangulated" surfaces provide an inherently stable structure, and spheres enclose the greatest volume for the least surface area.

Turns out, there are some serious problems with Geodesic homes. But suppose there weren't. What was the likelihood that the door-to-door salesman model would correctly apportion reward (i.e. sell homes) to virtue? Not much, it seems to me. A thought, then, for Monday: successful marketing is the practical postulate of all designers.

Consider, finally, that in adopting this postulate, we are motivated to get on with being virtuous.

* Thanks to Megan for pointing out this link, for the leading thought, and the conversation.

Co-founder Jess Lin explains how Hello Rewind benefits survivors of sex trafficking:

We train and teach them in fundamental skills -- sewing, English, business skills. Many of the laptop sleeves made through Hello Rewind are hand-crafted by sex trafficking survivors, and we hope that they become an integral part of our business operations. After supporting the sex trafficking survivors involved with Hello Rewind, the remaining profits are recycled back into the company so that we can grow the business to support even more women.

Via.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently posed this challenge to readers of the Washington Post:

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

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