smorgasbord-design

Last week I took some time out of my day to talk with Nick Southgate (Grey) and Victoria Murray (IPA) about Behavioural Economics. Specifically we talked about choice architecture and how this reflects my day-job. I could, and did, talk about default setting on transactional forms, page hierarchy, button sizes, pupil dilation and all sorts of strategies experience designers deploy to assist (and, let’s be frank, hoodwink) our users. Whilst I’ve got a good grasp of the behavioural side, the economics does continue to confound me.

I’m not great with money, but I like organising things. I can’t remember when it was that I got a copy of MS Money, probably around 2002, but it co-incided with my increasingly web-based life. At that time NatWest’s site was an HTML-skinned translation of their internal systems and as such was largely designed by bankers for bankers and consequently a grind to use. Time-outs, slow, paginated statements and nothing that could really pass for analysis or interrogation existed. To this end I’d download as much data as I could and import it into Money. Putting aside the usual Microsoft prejudices, this was actually software that worked. It allowed me to flip to and from accounts,  associate spending to categories, identify trends, budget, calculate interest and so-on and so forth.

The strongest element of this management for me was the assignment of categories. Before this point I kept this kind of stuff in my head: “I’ve taken about £50 out in cash this month”, “about £100 in groceries this month”, “£1000 of my savings is allocated for my bike/laptop/holiday” and so on.

If it turned out that I wanted a laptop costing £1200 and I had £700 in savings and £600 in my current account I could technically afford that laptop, but I wouldn’t buy it because, in my head, I only had £700 in the allocated savings account.

This was (it appeared) no different to putting coins in a piggybank – easy to deposit, hard to extract. Or allocating three cookie jars for deposit bits of your pay to rent, bills and food. If the food jar is empty, you tell yourself you can’t raid the bills jar – even though there’s money in there to feed you… This is a common strategy, it’s called bracketing (Soman & Cheema) or Envelope System (ostensibly ‘invented’ in The Great Depression)

Banks, largely, don’t let you do this online at-source. Well, they do if you count opening up different accounts. When my wife and I moved into our first owner-occupied place this year we started a process of bracketing by consolidating and creating accounts to deal with joint savings, personal day-to-day spending, personal savings and day-to-day expenses – not to mention investments and shares. This is clumsy and annoying. It means some are tax efficient, low-access accounts, some are distinctly not. What happens – even with MS Money to keep track – is that money that could be earning better interest doesn’t move in to the savings accounts until we have time to do it or – as happened recently – current accounts approach overdraft because nominally-protected savings haven’t been used to prop-up unusual spending patterns.

[Aside: I once heard a colleague talking about a sweep account where all his current account surplus was swept into his savings at the end of every month. A superb nudge, why don't all banks offer this?]

This strategy has been shown to be used by gamblers too. Winnings go in to a different coat pocket than their stake money, taking from the winnings pocket is a physical objection that increases the level of consideration to give the gambler a fighting chance of keeping their habit under control.

I’d assumed that I was doing this in MS Money too, allocating money to ‘cash’, ‘rent’ etc. surely, the same thing? A virtual cookie jar right? Nope. As Chris Peterson so rightly puts it, this is not the same. It’s ex post facto. I’m allocating the monies having already spent them, analysing and tracking my behaviour rather than using strategies of bracketing and assignment to modify that behaviour. Ok, so there’s some overlap; by knowing I’ve a budget of £100 cash per month, seeing I’ve spent £70 is helpful to reign in the next trip to the ATM but it’s still essentially a mental barrier. It’s diagnostic, not preventative.

So, on to the solution (and hat-tip once again to Chris though the answer did rather suggest itself). My online bank should allow me to allocate jars/envelopes/brackets. I could see my total account balance as allocated to my identified needs: a balance of £5000? £100o for the mortgage, £1500 for this month’s bills, £1000 for the holiday savings. So, I’ve got £1500 to play with this month? Well, last month you spent £400 on day-to day costs … so that’s more like £1100. Not quite enough for that MacBook Pro yet…

Each of these brackets could be intelligent, based on that post-analysis of your spending. They could be temporal, expiring once a time limit is reached, or rule-driven based on the achieving a financial goal. How strict these brackets are can be user-defined, do you allow one bracket to take from another under given conditions? Perhaps after asking you, ‘are you sure’? The equivalent of hiding the alarm clock on the other side of the room to make it harder to hit the snooze. This is information architecture, it’s choice architecture. It’s the taxnomic organisation of your finances and no bank is doing it in-house.

Sure, you can, of course, sign-up to online services such as Mvelopes promising this kind of functionality but who wants to do that? Why complicate the experience? I wouldn’t sign-up to Google Mail and then find a third party to manage my folders and mail rules. So, instead of blithering on about Mint et. al to financial clients and pointing out analysis capability they’re missing out on delivering, perhaps we can identify some territory that they could actually own … that is if they have the agility & appetite to do so.

Poor old Rory, he can’t seem to do anything right over at BBC’s dot.life. One minute he’s been told he’s anti-Apple and the next, an Apple fanboy. Theoretical biases aside, his report on Jonathan Ive’s RCA session, “Listening to Mr iPhone” made for further corroboration that designing for people needn’t mean asking those people what they want:

“… how did [Apple] decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” [Ive] said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.”

Though the solution may not come out of a focus group; the problems certainly do. It is the interpretation of these problems that reflect – as human-centred designers – our skillset, in the same way a keyword reflects perhaps something of a user’s need but not necessarily their motivation. Recently I’ve begun to find myself faced with a long list of requirements from clients who’ve “listened” to their users and are passionately trying to ensure their next online release is the answer to their range of gripes and desires. It’s hard to knock these back and say “the customer’s wrong here” but in quite a few cases they will be. If we don’t we might find ourselves with the antithesis of Ford’s vision, The Ford Mondeo. A car so everyman, so bland and box-ticking that it did nothing spectacular at all – becoming a byword for mediocrity.

Ive doesn’t design mediocrity and the long-held assertion at Apple that the focus group is ineffectual hasn’t done their revenue or sales figures much harm has it?

:: More on how to interpret what users want from what they do/say, in “Desire Paths and Digital Ethnography“

Emma Roberts in a classic greyscale Bruce Weber shot

I’ve been following the Riam Dean case with a great deal of interest. On the surface this is a girl who, born with a disability which led her to wear a prosthetic, has been sent to a stock room because it didn’t fit with the Abercrombie & Fitch look. The reality is surely something quite different.

I should declare I am a fan of A&F so I speak from a biased position but I cannot believe it is as simple as the Daily Mail and others would have us believe. A&F customers – and let us be clear there are millions of them – buy in to a brand look. This look is stage-managed, it’s cultivated, it is meticulously controlled. The reason for this is because it works, it sells billions of dollars worth of clothing. When A&F opened in London it was preposterously popular and the queues in Burlington Gardens at Christmas (during a recession) were lengthy even when a basic Polo short costs over £50.

When I go in there it’s no secret that I would like to look like the models in the doorway, like the handsome lads serving me and I probably gawp at the cute girls dancing on the balcony above the door. A&F (like many image-conscious brands) only employ good-looking people, Riam is good looking and they will have employed her no-doubt because she is pretty and would add to their cultivated look.

Riam is their target market: ‘college’, educated, petite, cute and willing to spend disposable cash on an aspirational brand (Aside: the brand is not so aspirational in the US, in fact they have created a premium A&F brand, RUEHL No. 925, to meet this market). It would make no sense for a well-manicured brand to piss off their market and create this kind of publicity.

So let’s start unpicking this case, bearing in mind we’ve heard a lot of Riam’s testimony but very little from A&F.

1. As a major American company that has experienced discrimination lawsuits in the litigation-happy USA their employment policy is likely to be watertight.

2. By agreeing to work for them (and there will be hundreds applying for each job) you agree to meet their look criteria. If she was not comfortable exposing her prosthetic limb then don’t work there, they were happy with it, they employed her. Girls not comfortable exposing their breasts aren’t strippers. Muslims not happy working with pork don’t make bacon sandwiches.

3. If she was unhappy to expose her limb why is is she is now happy to be photographed with it exposed?

4. It was her decision to wear a cardigan to cover the arm, not the firm attempting to cover it up and hide it. If I was happily employed by my employer but felt embarrased by something and wore an unauthorised (by contract) item of clothing I’d expect it to be considered a breach of contract.

5. The management team offered to resolve her dispute, she – according to their evidence – decided not to but rather go to court. What was the process that A&F would have followed to settle the dispute?

6. She is a student lawyer who will no doubt benefit from the exposure amongst an increasingly-competitive profession by making sure she is articulate and apparently principled. Call me a cynic but this smacks more than a little of self-promotion.

The way this has been made to sound is that Riam didn’t feel the need to mention her limb at interview, A&F found out, thought it didn’t look nice, made her wear a cardigan and then used a look policy to hide her in the store room.

I’m open to debate but I would hope that our proud and noble legal process are able to cut through the hyperbole here, on the face of this piece by CharonQC, I don’t hold out much hope.

UPDATE: 26th June 15:51 based on Maria Barbera’s evidence reported on BBC News

7. Abercrombie & Fitch told Riam Dean she could work in the store wearing short sleeves. Something Riam appears happy to do here and here.

8. Abercrombie & Fitch were aware of her prosthetic limb but were not aware that she had been given approval to wear a cardigan, her cardigan prevented her from working on the shop floor (not her arm) as it breached the look policy.

9. Riam was not distressed by the decision that she should work in the stockroom.

10. Riam’s initial complaint was that she had not been given the opportunity to remove the cardigan. The reason this was done was apparently due to the manager’s sensitivity to her body image – assuming she wouldn’t want to take it off, rather than insisting she did.

11. This is where the evidence from Ms. Barbera causes a problem because, rather implausibly, she asserts that she “did not make the link between the student’s reluctance to take off her cardigan with her disability”.

12. Taking a look through the statements presented on feminist Zelda Lily’s exclusive, “I Questioned My Self Worth” it seems Riam resigned via email and the company failed to follow this up or invoke the process that might have dealt with the apparent discrimination at an early stage.

13. There is an unsubstantiated suggestion that Riam was offered $10,000 (£6,000) to settle out of court.

So, I continue to follow this case with interest. For an discussion on the A&F look, this BBC News Magazine piece does a digestible job, though the usual narrow-minded comments add little to the debate.

I rarely buy a Sunday paper but today I picked up The Observer. That in itself shows how little I have come to care about the overweight £2 supplement-fest of traditional Sabbath newsprint. Irrevocably damaged by the packaging of throwaway DVDs and the cellophane-wrapped glossies that contain 3^rd rate cultural reviews and only smatterings of the kind of reportage that I used to find compelling over a lazy breakfast in Kent.

Inside today’s Observer was a lazy little piece of Twitter bashing by Barbara Ellen. A theme that’s been repeated in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of late. The general opinion goes that Twitter, and by implication almost any (micro)-blogging service, is a window on nothing more than banality, a product of the narcissistic age. Much of the blame is levelled here at celebrity Twitterers, the journalists taking great delight in selecting the most trivial output and demonstrating this as typical of the worth of the medium. At this point it becomes abundantly clear that many of these critics have not actually used Twitter in any way like that which more broad-minded individuals do.

Imagine taking a phial of water from the Thames, glancing at the muddy result and proclaiming the Thames itself boring, mundane. This is in-effect what comment like this is doing, Twitter is a stream, a veritable river of information that is nothing more than a conduit for the Zeitgeist. If you don’t like what’s being said then you don’t much care for the lives we lead for this is them, laid bare, broadcast. Take, for example the counter analogy, does one mundane and trivial piece in The Observer reflect the printed press?

Stephen Fry, whom Ms. Ellen invites to “hang [his] noble head in shame”, has the extent of following on Twitter he has not because of Jeeves & Wooster or Lord Melchett but because Stephen embodies the internet in its current form. He embraces dialogue, real-time output and the genuine excitement of the accessible, switched-on media. To compare his output with that of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s is not really comparing like with like, again it is akin to comparing a vacuous piece in London Lite with The Guardian; both are disseminated by printed press ergo they must they be the same?

But where I think Ms. Ellen’s focus settles is on the apparent hypocrisy of the individuals who bemoan invasions of privacy and liberty but are prepared to bare-all on Twitter; revealing their locations, itineraries and candid personal snaps of their lives. The difference here, Barbara, is that they have chosen to do this. If they are happy to take their self-publicity on which they depend into their own hands and many, many thousands are prepared to engage and converse with them in that regard who are we to criticise?

Later in the self-same paper I read a piece on the demise of MySpace (though it is perhaps over-played) and – in the way that when something vexes you it seems to be in every newspaper, bulletin and water-cooler conversation – it puts me in mind of other pieces I’ve consumed about the end of Friends Reunited and the apparent morbidity of the regional press. Clearly we are in tumultuous times. Consumers are consuming in a bewilderingly fluid manner. As fast as we all try and keep up stars are being born and going supernova with alarming pace. The only trend which runs concurrent in all this is the trend for digital.

Digital allows us all to be publishers and yet, as Demi Moore’s Twitter output has perhaps illustrated, this does not mean that we should. Or at least, that we need to sound the death knell for the traditional media big-guns. On Friday night I watched a superb new documentary series on BBC One (”Adventures In War Sea and Ice“)  which teamed Sir Ranulph Fiennes with Robin Knox-Jonston and John Simpson and tasked them with experiencing the others’ challenging line-of-work. In this inaugural episode, Simpson dragged his cohorts through the inestimable dangers of war-torn Afghanistan in the search of news. What it did perhaps illustrate to me was that John Simpson, carefully skilled orator as he may be, doesn’t actually do much more than collate opinion and rebroadcast it as his comment and insight. This is not to downplay his learned contributions and his ability to sort the wheat from the chaff but in simple terms he does no more than any of us citizen publishers do and thus it comes down to a matter of trust.

Trust is a theme taken up by Nick Cohen in his piece “Who would you rather trust – the BBC or a blogger” itself a response to Clay Shirky’s output “Here Comes Everybody”. Nick’s central theme appears to be that we can trust the (paid) hack more often than we can trust the blogger. On the basis of Simpson’s editing re-telling of his interviewee’s statements I’m not convinced that’s entirely the case. He argues that reporters of this ilk have “earned the right to be believed”. How? By attending a journalism course and spending a few years on the local rag being paid the minimum wage for writing pieces about the County Fair? I simply can’t concur especially when the unfiltered immediacy of a picture posted on Twitter or a video blog from the site of an atrocity demonstrates a vivid humanity that a hastily-scrambled satellite link-up from the rooftop of a distant hotel can never match.

There will always be a place for quality journalism and apocalyptic fears that camera crews won’t be dispersed to capture the stories, display a naivety that somehow citizen journalism and locally-sourced content won’t have an enormous part to play. Because the BBC truck hasn’t rolled into the township does not mean that BBC-affiliated bloggers, editors and analysts cannot take that content and demonstrate their value by producing from it a coherent, insightful and professional piece of news. The BBC’s role will continue to be one of aggregation, sourcing the news from individuals on the ground and overlaying the comment and impartiality for which it is famous. The difference is that the source of this news is increasingly unlikely to be a BBC employee with an expense account, a Marks & Spencer suit and a background in BBC Radio Cumbria.

I wrote a presentation for some clients recently that listed a host of trends for 2009. One of them was Data Visualisation. Ford recently showed a concept dashboard that utilised a revised data display – including physically analogous fuel and oil gauges, a nature-based economy meter and so on. Fiat’s eco drive is a wonderful example of behavioural marketing and put me in mind of the basic but powerful motivating visualisations in the Nike+ interface. I don’t have a Fiat so I ended up joining Fuelly and suddenly I became aware of how much fuel I was using. I shared it with my friends, they saw the data realised I was using too much fuel and it became clear I had engine problems. I sold the car and the environment breathes a little sigh of thanks. WattzOn takes this into your home and exposes your energy consumption with a view to shifting your habits.

Outside of the sphere of behaviour change, I’m growing increasingly interested in the exposure of personal data online. I’m not suggesting Nicholas Feltron started it with his exceptional annual reports but they certainly are the benchmark. It evidently led (thanks in no small part to Ryan Case) to the implementation of Daytum (which exposes for example my data on lunches, commuting, celebrity spotting and nut consumption). A less stylish competitor Zealog offers similar functionality.

I remember back in 2002 downloading K10K’s moodstats which was a lovely app that tracked your mood through the course of time. This required regular fettling to produce the kind of trends and colouring that make such a beautifully-designed application really zing and ultimately I just forgot to keep it up. I suspect I’ll forget to maintain my Daytum page too. Which is why automatic collation is more likely to be of benefit. My last.fm listening stats are a joy for me to behold with no input from me. I’ve taken the time to chart them using 3rd party tools, I’d love it if I could feed them into Daytum.

I’d also love it if I could push my Dopplr data in there. My Dopplr account did spit-out a nicely designed PDF of my data from 2008 but the paucity of my input meant it looked sad and empty. Now, if only Dopplr could trace me on my iPhone’s GPS…

Something that might be more difficult to track automatically is sexual interaction. Bedposted.com allows you to track how often you make the beast with two backs though one assumes the sharing of this data will be subject to a little more internal censorship than the Daytum equivalent of tea vs. coffee consumption. A more practical use of personal data might actually be sexually related though. A host of sites and iPhone apps are now available that track menstrual activity – a clear boon to the conception-keen, time-poor modern couple. Presumably this data has a very limited target audience; broadcasting ovulation might be an involuntary physical evolutionary by-product (Lapdancers get more tips when ovulating) but the voluntary objective digital feed is hopefully controllable. But I digress. 

Well, actually, that leads me on to Trixie tracker (what an atrocious name) which allows you to log and visualise your baby’s patterns: nappy changes, feeds etc. To me this serves two purposes: showing prospective and objective measure of the real effort involved in caring for a child (clearly not the only consideration) and secondly, using a signal-to-noise approach to identifying anomalous situations that might point to health concerns.

On a broader scale, tracking our species has led to some interesting data visualisation. Of course there was the BBC’s excellent Britiain From Above. This sounded like it was going to be a collection of aerial shorts strung together with a drab voice-over but was actually both literal and metaphorical in that it traced – from a distance – the activity in/on our country and people. At the same time, Twitter’s role in being the repository of the zeitgeist is allowing it to be cleverly scrutinised via API to display measures of human emotional activity: We Feel Fine and Lovelines both variations on this theme from the exceptional talents of Jonathan Harris (and Sep Kamvar).

Most pertinent to me, and of the most practical significance to my work and my finances is the visualisation and tracking of my income and expenditure. Microsoft have retired MS Money in the UK which was my preferred method of tracking it. I now find myself tracking shares on Google and desperately hoping either Geezeo or Mint open their services up to British users.

How cool would it be if a major British bank rolled-out this kind of visualisation, budget tracking and community supported advice and analysis within their online bank environments? Rather than carry all this data around on a hardrive in my laptop, stick it in the cloud, safe and secure on their servers and – much like Nike+ – continuously update, improve and delight me, long-wow style. Banks have a great opportunity to become human and encourage responsible attitudes to saving and spending building this kind of service would go a very long way to achieving that. A cause far more noble than drawing graphs of how many times you’ve crashed the yoghurt truck.

PS. Flowing Data’s summary of other exceptional Personal Visualization work

Westminster In The Snow (Feb 2009) (http://www.willbl.com/2009/02/snow-castle/)

I’ve always wanted it to snow properly in London. I grew up on top of the North Downs in Kent and got used to winters where snow would cripple my Dad’s metronomic commute to The City, forcing him to call, Arran jumper-adorned, into his dealing room and attempt to convince his sceptical colleagues that the journey down the hill genuinely was impossible.

He used to sit, supping cream of tomato soup and bemoan the fact that those within Zone 6 could never grasp the Narnian nightmare that had descended with every flake of snow.

As a child and owner of a bike, skateboard and sledge, I was in no position to comprehend the terror of a rear-wheel German saloon on ice; but I was in a position to give no mind to his irritation as I hiked off out to the hills to accompany my sister and brother in flinging ourselves into the valleys in celebration of gravity.

Since my Dad has retired he has had scant opportunity to remind me of the reversal of fortune. Snowfall in recent years has done little to prevent a journey to work whether that was by train to Norwich or otherwise to London. Back in 2002/3 I remember spending a lunch break in the Victoria Tower Gardens opposite DEFRA watching a lonely, greying civil servant make an impossibly cute Mr and Mrs Snowman, and that is the last time I recall settled-snow on the capital’s streets. That day I’d easily made it in from Kent in defiance of my Dad’s counsel.

As I read Stuart Jeffries excellent piece in Tuesday’ Guardian I was reminded of my Dad and his ex-colleagues, some of whom still trade in the City. Were they too taking time off from The Downturn and larking about in the snow? If they were, were they were enjoying it more than I?

Now officially a Londoner I was on the wrong side of the wintery equation, sat ‘working from home’ after a failed attempt to negotiate Richmond Park with two wheels and a good Gung-Ho friend. Not for me the childlike exuberance of snowball fights, snowmen and a red-faced stroll in numescent light; a genuine blizzard of work and tiresome email management ensued. My only conscession a drawn-out cup of tea in front of the BBC’s coverage of Armageddon.

If 1 in (insert tiny number here invented by spurious ad-hoc research) people had bunked-off it seemed a cruel irony that I, a veteran of deeper drifts and an expert coal-sack tobogganer, was left to my vocational obligations. For so-long the champion of home-working and the always-connected office, I had a sickening sensation as I browsed my colleagues’ flickr sets of frigid frolicks that I’d missed a glorious opportunity to join in a once-in-a-generation skive. More importantly, I’d done exactly what I’d lambasted my Dad for 25 years ago and had thus lost my childish snowy innocence.

I’ve had over a week off and it’s been grey and cold for most of it. Today however it’s clear, dry and sunny and as I look out across the Thames toward the Long Water at Hampton Court I feel pretty upbeat about things, in spite of the (BBC-branded) Downturn (née Credit Crunch). 

Then I read Indy Saha’s (Planning Director at Agency Republic) essay “Walking The Walk” from Campaign in June which ended on the buoyant: “…the future is most definitely rosy for digital agencies”. Ignoring the fact that Indy’s prophecy was sputtered in the fragrant perfume of an early summer, it always concerns me when people assert such things – much as when commentary team at a football match predicts the surety of a team’s victory only for the inevitable injury-time 30 yard canon. 

But what irked me a little more than Indy’s confidence, was his talk of desire paths. I love desire paths, I’ve browsed the touchingly-human flickr group and discussed the digital version, Digital Patina, on my old blog (“Ambient Signifiers” Subtle indicators to make you feel you’re on the right path“)  and the IxDA discussion group. The trouble with desire paths, and in fact any kind of footstep-tracing, is that it doesn’t show the whole picture.

Tracing through web logs of user paths no-more show the users’ intentions, experiences, needs or motivations than the footprints in the snow show whether the hiker was carrying skis, a child or suicidal thoughts. This makes digital metrics of this type little better than measuring eyeballs on traditional Above The Line (ATL) campaigns.

Far, far better than this is the use of ethnography. Catriona’s recent work for Tesco at Foviance helps to prove the point: Tesco could see, in their online shopping data, that their Value (i.e. budget) shoppers were purchasing online in bulk – multiple loaves of bread, numerous toilet rolls etc. and the natural interpretation of this was that they liked to stock-up and save on delivery costs. However, by actually spending time immersed within these customers’ environments, observing and enquiring, it became clear that these were not personal orders. The shoppers were buying for groups; a collection of residents in a tower block, a housing association or council estate. Clubbing together, sharing the one delivery, these customers were sub-contractors for Tesco, acting as a distribution house within their community. The result of which meant that Tesco could implement online features to support this activity such as the ability to assign items in the order to named individuals: Lucy’s loaf, Nigel’s beans etc.

So, whilst it’s great to lurk around the outlet-pipe for web-metrics, looking for new and better ways of signposting and structuring paths throughout the online experiences we build, far better to go one-step-beyond and actually invest in the time to understand the cognitive pathology behind those journeys.

I hate advertising. Which is a bit of a problem because I work for an advertising agency. Well it would be were it not for the fact that the big boys here don’t like it either (Flo, Nick & Toby ish). I’m going to be a bit more specific. I don’t like behavioural advertising, the net-savvy, digital offspring of broadcast advertising. There is a paradox here in that I really should like behavioural adverts; I’m a user-experience advocate, a psychology graduate and someone who spends a significant part of their days espousing simplicity. Reducing complexity. Noise. Clutter. Surely only showing someone useful, relevant advertising is a good thing? Nope. It’s not, it’s terrible.

Take Last.fm for example. I love it. I love the way it appeals to my end of the Autistic spectrum, recording everything I listen-to, tracing and tracking my musical story. I’ve produced charts and scoured that data for trends: “Gosh, I really went through a folk-phase in May…” etc. etc. But what I don’t like about Last.fm is their killer-app, the ‘type an artist/track/tag and hear an endless supply of similar stuff’. On the occasions that I’ve used it, I’ve found myself trapped in a world of acid jazz, downtempo or ephemeral folk. Left to its own devices, my music taste would stagnate. The more you listen to the same stuff, the more it tracks, traces and assumes that’s what you like. I’d become a narrow-minded bore. Replete with an encyclopaedic knowledge of a niche genre or an artist. The kind of cretin that only listens to mid-tempo Japanese dubstep.

And this feature is gaining in popularity: c.f.  iTunes’ Genius feature or Bang & Olufsen’s prophetically-mundane “More Of The Same“. It’s the same reason I’ve never bought anything that Amazon recommended. I’d have a bookshelf full of contemporary design books or countless user-interface design textbooks. A DVD library reflecting Dwayne Jonhson’s back catalogue and 16 smoothie makers.

It’s the same reason I abhor the idea of segmented media of any kind. I do indeed like Jeremy Clarkson and Ray Mears but if it were left to the brains of the Dave schedulers and their segmentation Difference Engine, I’d be nothing but a pen-knife wielding bushman with an Alfa Romeo that would be used on track days whilst quoting satirical bon mots from Mock The Week.

It’s all a bit of a contradiction though. My desire to eschew the trend for targeted, segmented material leads naturally to a broad – indeed broadcast – model in which a Higher Power dictates to me what I should consider and consume, without knowing me. So I’m swapping the chance to read books I’m sure to like, to hear music I’m bound to enjoy and programming that will enhance my understanding of a subject all for the equivalent of a bran-tub where I could as easily end up with a tampon as I could Top Gear.

But how do you broaden your mind, how else do you discover new things (and this is the important part) outside your current realm of understanding or awareness? It is only by eavesdropping on other segments’ material; by overhearing that unusual track, by catching the start of a show like Maestro or seeing that blog post about the V&A exhibition. Here is the parallel with Public Service Broadcasting. It, like broadcast advertising, allows the fertile, inquisitive mind to discover and explore the fringes of their interests. Cut-off any source of new and different ideas and that explorative passion will wither and die. The sphere of influence closes in tightly and we become more segmented than ever.

The challenge is thus to accept that an industry that pays my wages is getting increasingly more effective in presenting personalised advertising, but that we need to ensure such personalisation enables us to exclude what we know you will not like, keeping the edges of what you might like very fuzzy indeed.