Among other things

It's pretty remarkable that Hulu can stream full episodes of popular TV shows to literally millions of people at a time but the US Government can't seem to stream a live image of the Gulf of Mexico being destroyed... along with livelihoods, ecosystems, and shrimp cocktails for year's to come.

The video feed is down. I am not much of a conspiracy theorist but when a site goes down - it goes DOWN. Meaning you cannot see the site. In this case, the site is fine - its actually pretty quick to load - but there is no feed. So that tells us that the site, and the feed are hosted in different places. We can assume that the site is hosted on one of the US government's public servers. The video feed, however, is obviously not or the entire site would have crashed.

Why didn't anyone who manages the US Government's websites think to mirror the feed?!

If Congressman Markey had so much trouble getting access to BP's video then the "load", or the amount of data being requested from the server, couldn't have been that high. Releasing it on the .gov site seems to have opened it up to a much larger audience and the Commodore 64k computer that was serving the file must have given up the ghost.

... or someone over at Bad Portal kicked out the electrical cord.

It seems that BP can control the flow of information - it's the flow of oil that they have a tough time with.

So the TFA of the Day goes to the geniuses who trusted BP to give us a clear picture of what is going on at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

T....F..........A.................

Apologies for the length but I felt like making up for the missing words in the original piece.

Lists should be reserved for groceries, to do's, tabloids, late night television, and words you cannot say on those late night television shows. But if we are going to make lists related to design why populate it with "influential people". I think that "who's missing" is the wrong question - "what's missing" is the list that I would have preferred to see...

- Why them?
- What is "influence"?
- Why 27? - or - how many designers belong on a list of influence?
- What is 'Our Era'? (and who are "We"?)
- Are we there yet?

I think that each person on this list has significance of some sort and influence of another. Some on the list I actually have an abundance of respect for (I respect them all as people - but not necessarily the work they do and things they say). Lists like this frustrate me so much because they seem so shallow and fickle - and the sole claim of design is that it neither fickle nor shallow.

Exemplary of the things that make this list implausible is that it is impossible to compare the people on the list to one another. How does one compare a historian to an expert on human factors to a product designer to an architect to a professor? In design it actually matters whether you design desirous objets d'art or if you develop better soap bubbles. So it is hard to appreciate why the names of the people on the list are being applauded? Is it the number of objects that they have produced? Is the amount of praise heaped upon each of their works counted? Perhaps the amount of money they make was piled up and measured?

I would argue that their brains were each weighed and then multiplied by the amount of times they were blogged about but I can't figure out how to count the amount of times a person is blogged.

Seriously - let's be honest about this list. The characters on it represent a tiny fraction of the people in the world who do something called "design" and almost all have an army of people who work for them - also designing. Eventually one or two of those people will be on a list too. But in the end it makes absolutely no sense to make lists of people who "design". It is especially egregious to try and list people across a random set of industries. Some of the people on the list don't even participate in an industry. Across the fields (disciplines? personalities?) that are represented there isn't a common objective I can see. It's likely that they can't even compare paychecks.

If not merely forgettable, lists like these are damaging because they seem to describe a world that is fashioned by 27 (or so...) people.

I think that Helen Walters has been doing a good job but this was really disappointing. I have to believe that this was not a decision based firmly in journalism. To that end I would respectfully request that if the marketing department at BW insists on making lists that they consider stop making lists of influential people and start making lists of influential issues. There is too much work (Design) in the world to do for 27 (or so...) people to accomplish alone. Perhaps if BW spent more time identifying issues we would be able to stop perseverating problems and start solving them.

This is what the process of iterative data collection might look like...
1. collect raw data in the field > 2. store data > 3. organize data > 4. analyze data > 5. sort data into discrete actionable groups || 1a. with each group treat data as raw and repeat at step 1 - integrating new data as you go. (soak-wash-rinse-repeat)

One solution could be to devise even more computational solutions to analyze said data. This is a problem because I think that people will be tasked with building a "fail-proof" system to do this analysis (which will inevitably fail - a la Things Fall Apart). This is a complicated process that requires careful consideration at each stage. One wrong decision could cause you to effectively "lose" important information. Perhaps they should devise better data collection protocols that has a better chance of retrieving usable data. Maybe there are two approaches to making the collection/analysis system better.

1. Put resources into building a smarter collection mechanism. So when data is collected some analysis is done on the spot - before it is catalogued with other data.
2. Put resources into building a smarter analysis mechanism. So when data is collected there are abundant, redundant layers of analysis ready to retrieve, organize and cross-reference it.

This is doubly interesting to me because an amazing professor, named Ugo Gagliardi, told me a story once about the earliest hard drives (when magnetic discs where becoming fast and small enough to mass manufacture). As he told it there was a kind of crisis in the industry early on. On one hand hard drive manufacturers could spend a lot of money trying to make a VERY smart hard drive controller. This very smart controller would effectively remember where everything was. On the other hand, a much cheaper approach would be to make the hard drives dumb - very very dumb. They spun, they wrote, they read - but the operating system would need to tell these drives what to write and where. The drives we use today are descendants of this early decision and, as you might imagine, the cheaper solution was the chosen. The result was a market with more competition where each member could compete on price to put their product in a computer with a range of operating systems.

*If* I have the problem correctly assessed - I wonder what a good solution is? It's not simple. On the supply side though (meaning the people and places being surveilled) it could get easier to overstuff the machine - the more brittle the system gets the less actual garbage it takes to undermine it. (GI/GO)

I wonder which will be chosen? Smart drones that can analyze on the fly? Fleshware using an army of smart analysts light the WW1 era rangefinders teams? Maybe - smart software, that will be called skynet it will be able to analyze and even direct new missions without having to slow down for our mushy emotional analysis... Eventually it will learn to command drones without us - integrating data and selecting new targets - realizing that the human race is illogical and therefore a threat to successful data collection and analysis (its sole goal). --- The skynet solution seems best :-O

1. John's message is clear, singular, short - Design rules and he understands it, in twitter. By comparison Parsons has no message on Twitter.

2. There is a #thenewschool tag which is functional but only for those who understand that Parsons is part of TNS. #johmaeda is a name, a brand, and a representative. People who follow him, also retweet his posts. No one retweets a post about a faculty member nobody knows that only gives an anonymous (and shortened) link.

3. TNS branding is not working, at least online and for Parsons. Most applicants still don't know or don't care about TNS until they get here and the brand message isn't at all relevant to most designers I speak to. We knew this was a problem but now it is working against us because online the length of a brand name matters even more than in word-of-mouth communication. Think about Tropicana's disaster this summer. All they did was modify the packaging! Also think 'Tide, the new detergent for cleaning', or 'Wendy's the new burger for taste'. It's still Parsons and online that's all it should be - particularly when you only get 140 characters. *It would be interesting to see if there are corollary impact issues for other schools but because Parsons had the strongest branding in the first place it will be harder to assess.

4. John's tweets are short and to the point. Only about Design. The New School's tweets are long and wide-ranging. They typically link back to new school and discuss a smattering of faculty or events but provide no depth or serial-relevance. The message is muddy at best.

5. Don't discount the value of Twitter to undecided applicants or thought leaders - and don't disregard the value of proper brand messaging. Design School's are notoriously bad at this game but in the past few years Art institutes, SVA, and Parsons-CDT has done a good job.

6. Our 'target market' is texting and tweeting constantly - almost unconsciously - and though it might sound absurd it is already a fâit accompli for them. John seems to get this and we look like a second-act comparatively.

Colleges and Universities need to appreciate some key points here...

1. Twitter is not a typical message engine. The successful brands are dividing their message to scale with the technology (Twitter, Facebook, etc.). New School is doing the opposite!
examples - zappos! , kiehl's, and (of all things) microsoft with 'Scobleizer's' blog. I can go into detail but these the first and last are well documented.

2. The message and the medium are subject to framing that must be done consciously. Every day there are a million ideas and messages coming and going from faculty at universities across the country. Its not the typical role of a faculty member to consciously frame their messages but its important to consider. Aggregators can help by allowing individuals to seed their own digital library with comments and articles of others. Its easier to make your message clear when you can see how others frame similar issues.

3. Related to the above - programs and schools within universities need to share approaches to outreach so that they don't have to be 'integrated' by a central admin group.

Its a new game and the next few years are going to be madness trying to predict enrollment without under or over reaching. The benefit of individuals within the university having a voice outside of it, is that once the students do arrive, they already have a sense of what they might expect. Savvy students already come prepared to learn and already have opinions - connecting them with the right academic community can provide both them and the faculty with an audience of mutual appreciation, or at least mutual interest.