On the improbably named blog, Asia Carrera Videos (which mysteriously has nothing to do with the adult film star or her videos), marketing executive Jeff Bader makes an impassioned appeal about “Designing Websites That Appeal to the Senses.” He coins the term “SenEx” to mean the full range of human sensory and experiential phenomena.

Bader starts out,

We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but we experience the Web; this is what makes “The Website” one of the most powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives.

This casual observation reveals a common bias and self-interest among online advertisers and the Web designers and developers who serve them. The Web is actually a pretty thin “user experience.” Bader doesn't tell us how or why the Web is an experience while other forms of media are not. One can easily argue that watching TV or listening to the radio are more profound experiences, because they are collective acts (whether the collectivity is friends and family gathered around the tube, or the background awareness a radio listener has that he or she is one of thousands or millions simultaneously engaged in listening). For most users most of the time, using the Web is a solitary, mute experience. For that matter, using the phone, which is more interactive than reading, watching, or listening to Web artifacts, may be a richer experience than surfing the Web.

In closing, Bader acknowledges that Web “user experience” designers have only two senses to work with: sight and hearing (although one add “interaction,” a kind of meta-sense). He puts this in a good light.

The power of Web-audio and video is their ability to illicit experiences by presenting information in a linear narrative that appeals to the senses of sound and sight. This ability attracts and focuses an audience's attention on the material you want highlighted; it presents that material in an easily digestible format; it clarifies the meaning and significance of critical details; and it penetrates viewers' consciousness so that the information is retained.

Is this true? I don't believe so. The power of the Web, such as it is, is its non-linearity. The now famous YouTube video, Web 2.0: The Machine Is Using Us, argues that non-linearity is the Web's defining characteristic. Hyperlinking defines the Web. It's a way to quickly relate information in the context of other information.

This information, however, isn't in a new form: it's invariably visual or aural and presented in two dimensions. (Second Life and similar on-screen worlds are disparaged as “2-1/2D” by developers who work in true “3-space," like those who design themed environments or product simulations. For them, it's a trompe l'oeil, a “trick of the eye.”) It's difficult to harness this interactivity for narrative purposes. It's too fluid, mentally quantum.

Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that “user experience” designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the "user experience" aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences -- perceptual, cognitive, and material -- between watching a computer screen or listening to an iPod headset and navigating the holistic environments -- enveloping, unpredictable, objective and subjective, entertaining, and often risky -- in which we live our lives. When you're a hammer, however, the world is a nail. When you're a “user experience” designer, the world is the Web writ large. Welcome to Thin Universe.

What do you think?

The last three weeks have been hectic, a perfect storm of convergent deadlines. Four projects that have been germinating more than six months (one of them, for two years), plus a couple consulting opportunities, finally erupted, ripping me away from Total Experience. Now I'm back, with lots of catching up to do....

By far the largest of the projects, in sheer scope and size, is planning for the US Pavilion at the forthcoming Shanghai 2010 World Expo, possibly the most important and certainly the grandest World Expo since the New York World's Fair, in 1964. Nearly 200 nations and NGOs are expected to participate -- in other words, the whole world. The Chinese and Shanghai governments are pouring nearly $4 billion into developing the Expo, and that doesn't include new maglev train lines, a new airport, new docks, new traffic metering systems, a regional 4G wireless system, untold amounts of commercial and residential construction, and the wholesale relocation of entire neighborhoods from what will soon become a highly congested area to new communities elsewhere in Shanghai. It does include $100 million in subsidies for developing nations. Over 70 million visitors are expected to visit the Expo between May and October 2010, just two years after the Beijing Olympics. There's a not-so-subtle competition between the two cities: one is China's political capital, the other its economic capital. This Expo means a lot to China, but even more to Shanghai and the rest of the industrial South. The Expo's theme is “Better City, Better Life,” which translates into progressive urbanism and lively communities, a healthy and stable environment, “green tech” and a sustainable economy, and a higher quality of life for everyone. This is the first Expo to take on such a global theme, and one so timely. The US Pavilion will have a lot of important storytelling to do.

Toward that end, the BH&L Group, an impromptu consortium of Expo veterans -- world-class designers, architects, and builders -- has gathered, led by legendary Expo designers Barry Howard and Leonard Levitan, and I'm a member (but only an Expo apprentice). The BH&L Group's noble purpose is to create a great US Pavilion for Shanghai, one that speaks eloquently of the American people's desire, in common with the other peoples of the world, for better urban environments, globally, and better lives in them. We submitted our Proposal to the US State Department in February, as required by a November 2006 RFP from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). One of the Proposal's most creative innovations is the prospective creation of an "Expo corporation" in which any American can invest, an entity with longevity that can acquire assets to fund not just this Expo -- to the tune of $100 million -- but also, Expo's to come. We hope we get the nod; we're still waiting to hear. In the meantime, I'm continuing to build BH&L's Advisory Board. The Board already boasts an impressive collection of experts to help us grapple with the Expo's theme, the Pavilion's design, and China's cultural and international trade issues. But I keep searching for potential new members. We're going to rely a lot on our Advisors once things really get rolling!

In the process, I meet interesting people. An interesting person I met today is Nina Simon, author of the excellent Museum 2.0 blog, subtitled, “From visitors to users. From artifacts to social networks. What's good, what's bad, what's possible?” Nina is one of the principal designers for "Operation Spy," a new attraction -- and quite an experience -- soon to open in this, the "Year of the Spy," at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Founded in 2001, the Spy Museum offers a fascinating exposition -- or should I say, exposé? -- of the international spy business. It's “Spy vs. Spy" all over again, only this time for real. The Spy Museum investigates how intelligence communities are formed, the trade's startling technical evolution, and the confounding social issues associated with covert activities. The Spy Museum's website is a virtual embodiment of the Museum, clever, mysterious, and highly interactive. Nina describes "Operation Spy" in an email:

I'm the project lead for Operation Spy, a 3,800 sq ft new immersion experience that is set to open at the Spy Museum in June of this year. I'm the “experience development specialist,” which means I was the creative director, and now have slid into managing the construction and build-out. It's a really unique museum experience --a narrative, guided immersive mission in a highly-themed environment. Guests will enter in small groups and spend an hour trying to find a missing nuclear device in a (fictitious) foreign country. There are motion simulators, safes to crack, and agents to polygraph. There are branching endings that reflect the guests' actions and decisions throughout. It's been a blast to design and I'm enjoying watching it come together ... hopefully these last few months will send it out into the world with a bang!

So when a shady eye peers at you through the Museum peephole, and a raspy voice inquires, “Psst...who sent you?” you'll know what to reply: “Nina sent me.” Then the eye will draw back, the door will creak open, and the raspy voice will whisper, "Enter...Operation Spy." (I think I'm channeling Edgar Allen Poe.)

Earlier, I posted an invitation to readers, to make me aware of exemplary experience design projects for possible inclusion in my book-in-progress.

I forgot to add an important category:

• Pageants, Festivals, Rituals, and Spiritual Places and Experiences

Please keep this one in mind, as these phenomena are often the most intense expressions of intentional design for experience. Thank you, and special thanks to those of you who've already submitted very interesting prospective cases. I'll review them and get back to you over the weekend.

(Illustration: Festivals in India)

On my end of year list of recommended gift books about experience design, I included the fabulous Atlas of Experience, by Dutch cartographer-philosophers, Jean Klare and Louise van Swaaij. I thought it incomparable. But now it has friendly competition: Strange Maps, a remarkable blog

The Atlas of Experience is a beautifully illustrated collection of maps and text depicting, as places and features on an fantasy globe, states of mind -- Elation, Panic, Loneliness, the Swamps of Sloth, and The Long Road Home. It shares my reference shelf with a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a traditional atlas of the world.

“Strange Maps,” on the other hand, features fantastic maps of our real globe -- truly strange maps. The blog first appeared in late 2006. Its author, not identified on the blog, has assembled an outstanding collection of strange maps from different times and geographies (including our own), and keeps discovering more. The editorial notes that accompany each map are informative and warmly written.

It's difficult to convey in words the magic of these strange maps and how addled, propagandistic, mistaken, or clever each one is. Reading Strange Maps, one comes to appreciate the ingenuity, craziness, or both of simple people trying to portray the complex worlds in which they live and often revealing more about themselves, their cultures, and their times than their actual environs.

Sometimes, however, it's not the cartographer who's off-axis, it's the geospatial “reality” that a strange map portrays: bizarre realpoliticks, theological mythology, empires that endure only days, territories claimed by multiple nations, and especially the virtues of regions as proclaimed by their inhabitants -- and the evils of surrounding people and places.

How strange the maps of our time will seem to future geographers. Given the obvious ecological interdependence of all systems on our planet, the arbitrary divisions known as cities, nations, regions, and other human constructs may seem extremely odd. Ursula Le Guin put it well in her portrait of a future, re-ruralized California, Always Coming Home: they are places in an historical epoch when the “people-with-their-heads-on-backwards” lived.

The atlases of our interior selves and of our geography co-exist and intermingle, each equally real and fantastic.

Despite the cellular industry's uninspiring (in fact, sickening) plan to saturate the mobile environment with advertising, hope lives eternal in the hearts of mobile experience designers that there is another way -- in fact, many other ways -- for the medium to develop.

Next week, the Mobile Nation international conference, hosted by the Mobile Digital Commons Network and the Canadian Design Research Network, will offer participants a chance to explore deeply the emerging field of mobile experience design. The conference theme is “Creating Methodologies for Mobile Platforms.”

Participants will share expertise with WiFi, Global Positioning System (GPS), Bluetooth, Radio Frequency ID tags, intelligent garments, ambient media applications, and geo-locative gaming. The conference features keynotes, live demonstrations and hands-on workshops.

It will take more than better platforms to avoid the advertising onslaught, but certainly, better platforms will make possible other uses of mobile technology other than those constrained by arbitrary, self-serving industry limits. And then truly creative design for the mobile experience can take place.

The event takes place at the Ontario College of Art & Design, 100 McCaul Street, in Toronto. The speakers and sessions are knockout. Highly recommended. (Nice website, by the way.)

As I wrote earlier, I'm working up a book about experience design -- also called, “designing for experience.” I met with my publisher and it looks like a go. As cases that can be featured in the book, I welcome your suggestions of exemplary experience design, applied to the following:

• Architecture and urban designs (intended to produce identifiable experiential outcomes)
• Cross-media environments (e.g., so-called “real-world games” employing various media )
• Customer experiences (processes as well as physical artifacts)
• Exhibitions, museums, and learning centers
• Experiences for education
• Experiences for entertainment
• Games and simulations (in the “real world,” not just on-screen)
• Haptic environments (acoustic, tactile, scent, motion, etc.)
• Immersive environments (virtual and physical)
• Integrated marketing (synergistic scored experiences)
• Landscape architecture and interpretive environments
• Longiitudinal experiences (single or multiple related experiences that occur over time)
• Themed attractions, theme parks, and themed destinations
• Workplaces and “third places” (places that are social, apart from the workplace and home)

These categories overlap. It doesn't matter at this time precisely into which category a case falls, or whether it's for a client or experimental. Also, if you have an example of experience design that doesn't fit within the categories, send it along anyway. Our field is growing like Topsy: there are always new expressions and formats. Also, I'm interested in instances where research methodologies, like usability and ethnography; and application methodologies, like interaction design, wayfinding, and corporate narrative, have contributed to successful experience designs.

As for the much-debated “user experience,” I'm interested in on-screen presentations and discrete products if they were integral parts of more complex experiences (for example, integrated media campaigns, the interior of a vehicle, or exhibitions).

Please be sure to include with each case suggestion a point of contact (email and phone if you have them). The POC should be an individual associated with the case project, with whom I can arrange the case's submission for review. Send your suggestions to my Gmail address, please. Please include in the Subject Line, “Experience Case:” and the case's working name. I'd appreciate it also if you'd share this invitation with your friends and, if you're a blog author, your readers. Thank you!

The icky experience of cellular telephone service is about to get ickier. “The Ad-Free Cellphone May Soon Be Extinct,” laments an February 24 article in the New York Times by Eric Sylvers.* The last non-advertising communications medium. An endangered species.

For all that's been written about the ethics and aesthetics of cellphone design -- cellphone user interfaces, mobile interaction design, the on-cellphone “user experience,” and “user-centricity” -- and the many investments in and careers built on this engrossing pastime, commercialism, not design, ultimately rules the cellular service roost. Cellular customer experience is about to undergo a momentous transformation, not for the better.

Lest anyone's missed the news, CHI 2007 -- the annual conference of the ACM's Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, SIGCHI for short -- will take place next month at San Jose University (California). It's a worthwhile event for those who make their livings studying and applying lessons learned about how people connect with technology (and vice versa).

SIGCHI has long been a mainstay for those interested in how computing and information technology generally have altered human experience. Throughout the 1990s, SIGCHI was poor cousin to the more glamorous SIGGRAPH, the SIG devoted to computer graphics and glitzy, entertainment/defense-driven conferences. But SIGCHI's finally come into its own with the recognition that UX (“user experience”) is a central and important factor in the success of online and device-driven environments. Just how important is indicated by CHI 2007's registration fees -- at this point in time, north of $1,000 (not including travel and accommodations) for everyone but students -- and its roster of A-tier corporate sponsors. I suspect that this and the full week required to attend all of the events, including tours of local interaction labs, may discourage many people from attending. But CHI 2007's roster of talks is fascinating, as always, and this is a great opportunity to recruit UX researchers and so forth to keep the wheels of digital commerce turning. Also, day registrations are available. So no doubt the halls will be full.

So which conferences will you attend this year? I count at least 25 that get my attention, with topics ranging from expo design to ethnography to digital technology to landscape architecture; even children's emotional development. If I had a cool $100,000 to invest in my education and edification -- for my readers' and clients' benefit, as well as my own -- where would I best put the money? I hope to read in your Comments good suggestions.

Sometimes good experiences get taken for granted. Here are two projects that deserve commendation.

The US Passport Office has issued a new passport dubbed the e-Passport. It's an unfortunate name, because it puts the focus on the passport's inclusion of an RFID chip and not the excellent look-and-feel of the passport itself, which is what most impressed me and will impress most passport holders. The RFID chip has drawn a lot of controversy. It's supposed to make it easier to screen returning Americans and more difficult to counterfeit by ne'er-do-wells (as always, terrorists come first to mind, followed closely by drug dealers and gun runners) -- and already, the chip's own vulnerability to cloning has been demonstrated. But that's not what got my attention.

What got my attention, however, was the e-Passport's excellent graphic design (Flash version) and textual contents of the e-Passport. Yes, textual content. In the past, US passports have been uninspiring examples of bureaucracy-speak -- don't get in trouble, don't volunteer to serve in foreign militaries, don't import cigars from Cuba, etc. -- hardly the stuff to instill pride in Americans overseas. The e-Passport is different. It feature beautifully rendered two-page portraits of American landscapes coast to coast. (Pictures of actual Americans, glorious in their diversity, would have been equally welcome; but what can you expect from a nation that still adorns its drab currency with pictures of old white men, dead now for centuries?) The multicolored engravings are complemented by inspiring quotations on every page. And not just patriotic cant. One quote that will stay with me forever, now that I've seen read it in my daughter's new e-Passport, is Dwight Eisenhower's sage advice:

Whether jaded border guards and customs officers in foreign nations will appreciate the beauty of the e-Passport, whose pages they will besmirch with their inky stamps, is unimportant. What is important is that Americans, now traveling overseas in record numbers, can proudly display their passports to friends, family, and business colleagues and so help to tell an American story -- an idealized story, but one to which we can aspire. And the e-Passport, in addition to the standard English and French diplomatic greetings to foreign readers, finally includes one in Spanish: “El Secretario de Estado Unidos de America....” It's about time. Kudos to the anonymous civil servants who put this together.

Of purely domestic importance but ubiquitous and collectively beneficial is Folger Coffee's new HDPE coffee cannister. This is an easy to handle, air-tight canister that allegedly keeps coffee fresh longer than conventional coffee in metal cans and hard-to-reseal plastic bags. It features a “peel-away” AromaSeal with a built-in air valve (which critics have attacked as being essentially useless, but that's another story). The main benefit of the canister is that it's ergonomically convenient, unbreakable, rust-proof, and recyclable. It even won an award from the Arthritis Foundation for its ease of use. Lastly, the canister's bright color is useful early in the morning when you're too bleary-eyed and grappling for that first cup of coffee (as I can testify). Kudos to P&G for this good idea that could have been mundane but which isn't, and which can be experienced and enjoyed on a daily basis.

Nathan Shedroff, a good friend and author of the first (and so far, only) book on holistic experience design -- aptly entitled, Experience Design 1-- is interviewed by Bay Area ethnographer Steve Portigal on the ever informative design portal, Core 77 (link here for the MP3, 47MB). From the Core 77 introduction:

Nathan Shedroff, experience design guru, author of the seminal Experience Design 1 and co-author of Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, sits down with Steve Portigal in San Francisco to talk about the experience and design of experience design. Seriously.

Shedroff's definition gets things started: “Experience design is an approach to design, and you can use that approach in pretty much any discipline—graphic design or industrial design or interaction design, or retail design. It says the dimensions of experience are wider than what those disciplines normally take into account. And if you think wider—through time, multiple senses and other dimensions—then you can create a more meaningful experience.”

And he follows it up with the 5 levels of significance:

1. Function (“Does this do what I want it to do?”)
2. Price (“There are lots of cars out there to get me from point A to point B”)
3. Emotion (“That's where lifestyle is engaged. How does this make me feel?”)
4. Identity or Value (“This is subconscious: ”Would I be caught dead with this?; am I a Nike fan, or an Adidas fan?“)
5. Meaning (Not ”Is this me?“, but ”Does this fit my reality?“ ”Does this even fit inside the world as I perceive it?“)

Nathan addresses his talk mainly to commercial designers, but it has universal application to all design disciplines and practices. I understand from Nathan that he's contemplating republishing his book online, in an easier to read format. Nathan: please do!

ERSATZ Notwithstanding the imminent Second Coming of Authenticity to the experience economy, where all the world's a stage, a long line of modern philosophers, from Husserl and Nietsche through Heidegger and Sartre, have had a lot to say about what true authenticity is all about -- and it's not about pushing product, making sales, collecting votes, gathering converts, or creating good vibes. It's about being in the world, authentically. Which is harder to do than it sounds, especially as one tries to navigate among all the clever invention and meanings passed off as the real thing.

But slogging through their work on ontology and phenomenology may be difficult for a generation of marketers -- self-designated “user experience designers,” “customer experience designers,” and just plain “experience designers”-- raised on Truth as revealed by TV anchormen and NY Times columnists; or more recently, rap music, the Internet, and the wisdom of the crowds (i.e., bloggers like me).

So I was delighted to discover an article on Hermenaut, the Digest of Heady Philosophy, by Joshua Glenn, “Fake Authenticity: An Introduction.” It appears in Issue 15 of the Hermenaut, which explores Fake Authenticity in the context of the writings of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose short stories inspired such iconic films as Bladerunner and Minority Report. Glenn's easy to read essay sets the tone for the coming Age of Ersatz.

The editors designate Dick as Hermenaut of the Month, posthumously. Glenn in an insightful biography of the foresightful author, reports that Dick was fascinated by the “semi-real” -- another term for manufactured authenticity. Realistic fakery, which is apparently what's in store for us all.

Parenthetically, although I'm skeptical of many premises regarding intentional authenticity, I do like experience-economy evangelist (or “E3,” an interesting coincidence) Joe Pine's article on “Architecture in the Experience Economy” on DesignIntelligence -- if you discount the possibility of there being an “authentic architecture,” a concept Glenn destroys -- makes a lot of sense. Designed places aren't necessarily authentic, but they're a hell of a lot more fun to co-create and inhabit than the designed buildings, architectural ego trips, in which most of us must spend most of our time.

We live in a fearful world. We also live in a world beset by marketing pollution.

Yesterday's stupid marketing stunt in Boston, conducted by “youth marketer” Interference (I won't dignify them by publishing their link) in behalf of Turner Broadcasting (another Bozo organization), exploited both conditions to create worry, expense, and disgust. Little electronic dolls representing a loathsome character from an asinine, late-night TB cable show were placed everywhere: attached to poles, fastened to bridges, placed in alley ways -- if there was a public device or vista, it was graced with one of these dolls. The dolls were mistaken for bombs. City police and Homeland Security went nuts, mobilizing to shut down the city in case terrorists were afoot.

No doubt, despite the furor, the campaign almost certainly will attract new viewers to Turner's cable show -- an adult Romper Room, complete with talking toys (that crap on you) -- thus validating the assault in the name of numbers. What's amazing is that the same campaign was conducted in eight other cities without any repercussions at all because the dolls were seen as "just dolls, not bombs." Oh yeah, that's how I like to wake up: walking down the street, with electronic dolls for unlikable characters now added to the mix of billboards, wallboards, bus signs, newspaper stands, and the local "solicitor," all with the same commercial proposition: "Gimme!"

Public places are now fair game not only for traditional advertisement littering, but also for non-traditional, skirting-the-edge-of-legality, all-out trashing. The individuals who perpetrated this outrage against the commons and their apologists in the marketing industry should themselves be made a public spectacle: bound and pilloried in a public place, targeted with rotten tomatoes, mocked and reviled -- then branded with a Scarlet Letter (how about "A," twice, for "advertising asses"?

The GenYs for whom these insults allegedly are conducted, and the GenXs that arrange them, will long rue the absence of noncommercial space in the cities that they’re going to have to live in for the next 60 or more years. They’re fouling their psychosocial nest. I won’ t even get into the business issue of marketing saturation and consumer fatigue resulting from every street corner becoming branded with someone’s BS advertising for yet another trivial product.

If this and similar incursions against public space produce "good results” that in turn give license to further (and worse) predations, then the marketing profession had best start examining itself to find out if it still has a soul or whether it’s all about Mammon. (lllustration: Canada's excellent counter-marketing This Magazine)

This is zhuanji, the Chinese word for “a stroke of good luck!" As you may have noticed, I've been absent from this blog for the last week. I'm engaged in probably the most important experience design project of my career, and this phase of it has an early February deadline that I absolutely must meet. I can't talk about this project now: it's what the current generation of money-chasers call “stealth.” I promise to tell all, once this mission is accomplished. Thanks for your patience and thanks also to Paula Thornton, who continues to post provocative entries worth your while. (For a much-needed caution on the frequent but incorrect use of the Chinese word for crisis, weiji, to mean “opportunity," as I almost did, see “Danger Plus Opportunity Does Not Equal Crisis,” on Pinyin.info. Weiji is actually a situation to be feared: the unknown abyss.)

I hope I'm not a Cassandra. Only months after I praised the advertising industry for acknowledging the value of full-featured experience design, Interpublic Group, one of the world's largest advertising combines, dissed its pioneering Consumer Experience Practice. MediaPost's Joe Mandese broke the news(“Interpublic Shutters New Media Practice”).

While the eight-person unit was beginning to generate genuine insights, it was also incurring significant costs without a clear revenue stream back to Interpublic, pitting it in a political quagmire with other operating units doing similar research tied directly to client business. Under [Nick] Brien's helm, Universal McCann in particular has amassed an array of new research techniques and products that one insider termed “duplicative” with those of the Consumer Experience Practice. Universal also has been rebuilding a formidable communications practice and is getting close to announcing some of the fruits of those labors.

The full story remains to be told. No doubt corporate politics and power plays had something to do with it: within IPG, CEP executives Stacey Lynn Koerner and Lydia Loizides were intellectually avant-garde. Koerner was with IPG for a decade, always pushing the envelope. Loizides was a relative newcomer, from the new-media world. But more indicative is the issue of ROI. Old line marketers and ad agencies still have a problem with developing new knowledge that can't be sold, unlike Google and other new-media leaders that correctly perceive in knowledge a currency more valuable than dollars. Knowledge can be exchanged for more knowledge, which in turn creates generative value (nearly infinite). IPG told Mandese that it intends to press on with innovations like its LA-based Emerging Media Lab -- which, for the life of me, looks like a sparsely-equipped college research lab -- and more client-linked research initiatives like those of its main competitors, Publicis (click at your own risk, the Flash crashed my Powerbook) and Omnicom. Bon chance.

Meanwhile, while we wait for the other shoe to drop, you can read Loizides' ever-interesting and provocative observations on her blog, Media Technology Futures. I do and either learn something new, or gain a new insight, with almost every posting. Her postings from CES were great.

I hope CEP's closure isn't a trend, but with so much breathless “new research” taking place, much of which is useful, but much more of which is duplicative, I sense a bubble bursting.

While I'm on a rant about marketers -- who are on the verge of replacing politicians as Least-Admired Persons -- permit me to direct you to Louise Story's emperor's-new-clothes article in the New York Times, “Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See an Ad.”

Story begins:

Add this to the endangered list: blank spaces.

Advertisers seem determined to fill every last one of them. Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes.

Explains one marketing executive:

“What all marketers are dealing with is an absolute sensory overload,” said Gretchen Hofmann, executive vice president of marketing and sales at Universal Orlando Resort. The landscape is “overly saturated” as companies press harder to make their products stand out, she said.

Story observes:

Outright advertising is just one contributing factor. The feeling of ubiquity may also be fueled by spam e-mail messages and the increasing use of name-brand items in TV shows and movies, a trend known as product placement. Plus, companies are finding new ways to offer free services to people who agree to view their ads, particularly on the Internet or on cellphones.

More is on the horizon. Old-fashioned billboards are being converted to digital screens, which are considered the next big thing. They allow advertisers to change messages frequently from remote computers, timing their pitches to sales events or the hour of the day. People can expect to see more of them not only along highways, but also in stores, gyms, doctors’ offices and on the sides of buildings, marketing executives say.

And that's just the beginning. Sprays and odors and even physical assaults on our sensoria are in store. How much can our psyches tolerate before we develop “allergies” to this stuff, serious mental asthma? Public space, the last commons, is in the process of being informationally trashed for private ends. It's taken for granted, even praised, so lost has our culture become.

In Europe, there are laws against noise pollution. Why does it sound ridiculous to speak about outlawing marketing pollution? Are we all, as Don Henley sang, just prisoners here of our own device?

Story's article will be archived next week, when it will become available only for a price, so grab your copy now. It's a classic. And a warning.

(Photo; New York Times)

Awhile back on this blog, in “Finding experience in a tube of toothpaste,” I critically considered GlaxoSmithKline's multi-multi-million-dollar investment in the development and promotion of AquaFresh Toothpaste, which it hopes will best rivals Colgate (Colgate-Palmolive) and Crest (Proctor & Gamble). I concluded that despite GSK's sizable investment, Tom's of Maine does a better job at creating the warm fuzzies that make customers seek and stay with its products.

Now it turns out that P&G's back in the fray, reports the New York Times' Louise Kramer. “In a Battle of Toothpastes, It's Information v. Emotion,” Kramer describes P&G's massive $100 million roll out of Crest Pro-Health, which certainly sounds healthy but really doesn't have much more to recommend it than the toothpaste it allegedly betters, Colgate Total. Colgate's counter-punching with its own nine-figure advertising campaign.

Like most consumers, I can't keep all of these shelf space-stealing brands in my head, so pardon me if I observe that the billion-plus dollars going into North American toothpaste advertising have basically one function: to make the owners of Saatchi & Saatchi and Young & Rubicam (Publicis and WPP, respectively) and their counterparts a lot richer, and the rest of us a lot more confused. The ad agencies like to pin the blame on the consumer, that intrepid seeker of facts about toothpaste who demands more, more! I doubt it.

Much ado about nothing. A billion dollars is a lot of money to push goo that lubricates your toothbrush, applies meager amounts of medicinal material, and most importantly, tastes good. These companies can't find anything better to do with it? How about educating kids (and adults, a tougher mission) to eat less sugary foods? Or initiating programs to train people how to use floss, which would be infinitely more valuable to dental hygiene? Oops, I forgot, there's no shareholder ROI in that!

What Brooke Shields, whose white-capped smile graces the Colgate ads, has to do with dental health is beyond me.

Oh yeah, she's a mother as well as an occasional actress. She knows what kids need.

I prefer to get my toothpaste advice from Colgate's original spokesthing, Happy Tooth, from my Howdy Doody days. Happy Tooth knows: It's been there.

Harry Shearer on “Le Show” (a highly recommended alternative radio program) brought to my attention the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) plan to offer advertisers a chance to assault a captive audience -- travelers waiting to be screened for airline flights -- with more marketing gook. The plan is described in full on Aviation Week's Commmercial Aviation website:

“TSA plans to launch a one-year pilot program where airport operators may enter into an agreement with vendors, who will provide divestiture bins, divestiture and composure tables, and metal-free bin return carts at no cost to TSA,” said spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. “In return for the equipment, TSA will allow airport operator-approved advertisements to be displayed on the bottom of the inside of the bins.”

(“Composure tables,” as Shearer wryly notes, are those metal slabs where TSA agents -- beneficiaries of the Bush Administration's main “make-work” policy -- dump out your personal belongings and sort through them if you trigger one of the metal detectors. Composure is one thing the TSA does not offer its unlucky victims.)

SecurityPoint Media supplies the ad-festooned security devices. This fascinating company puts a smiling face on social despair, in the form of advertising revenues. It calls the program “A Better Checkpoint Experience.”

Talk about government welfare! Now airport administrators and advertisers can benefit by the long compulsory wait that everyone is subjected to when they want to fly, whether to Baghdad or Baltimore. The program is one more of the commercial benefits made possible by the campaign of fear-mongering that's been the mainstay of this Administration's political marketing.

So far, reports Forbes, Rolodex is the only advertiser to have signed up for the program, being beta-tested at LAX:

For the advertisers, the program is a chance to reach a wealthy demographic: Frequent flyers. According to a 2004 study of frequent flyers by market research company Arbitron, airline travelers are 80% more likely to have an annual household income over $100,000. They're also more often household or business decision makers.

“It fits well with the Rolodex position of clean and organized,” says Doug Kruep, the company's director of brand development office solutions.

TSA claims that the program has saved $250,000 in the six months it's been running, Probably just a drop in the TSA's overflowing welfare bucket. Airports want to get in on the largesse too, of course, reports Forbes:

Airports believe ads will equal profits. “We are always looking for creative ways to increase nonairlines revenue to help us keep our operating costs down,” said Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams.

I always thought advertising on buses was an outrageous expression of agency greed. But bus advertising pales in chutzpah before the coming security checkpoint onslaught. TSA is holding an "Industry Day" tomorrw, on January 11, at its headquarters in Arlington, VA, for those interested in participating in the program.

Of course, billions have been wasted already on thousands of unimpressive attempts to make Fortress America a safer place, but most have been invisible. This one is right out there for all of the flying public to experience. What will be the reaction? A lot of grumbling, for sure, but maybe, just maybe, an upwelling of angry public opinion that refocuses Americans' consciousness on how 9/11 has been exploited to make money for commercial interests. I can think of few government enterprises less crass than this one.

I wrote earlier about the yucky experience of waiting in line at Albertsons supermarkets having to endure the ridiculous Avenu advertising videos. Most commenters agreed. Apparently the TSA has taken a cue from Albertsons and is going it one better. You can always shop somewhere else, but if you're going to fly, you're going to endure the TSA-hosted advertising, damn it!

What's your take? Are you looking forward to more force-fed marketing messages? Or will you take the train instead?

My colleague Paula and I tend to publish Total Experience in spurts. A week or even two will go by without a blog entry -- and then three, four, or more explode out of our minds and onto the screen. Maybe that's because we don't have brilliant thoughts every day, at least not ones we deem worthy of taking your time to share. Real insights come of their own accord, on their own schedule. Not each day when we wake up.

This defies the laws of media, best exemplified by television with its mostly empty content, but content nonetheless, continuously broadcast, cablecast, or netcast so that the viewers won't tune out. Media colleagues, they've already tuned out. They sit passively, thankful for the experience of a mental void. (See my preceding article, Stress and the Internet.)

I have more faith in our readers, that you prefer to look in when something's significant and not be bothered the rest of the time. RSS notwithstanding, it's the policy with which we'll sit tight.

However, we are cooking up some pretty good new stuff. I promised earlier a state of the art discussion of experience design. It'll be here later this week. Turn on your newsreader and when you get the call, do read up.

A year ago this week, Krysta Tippett's excellent Speaking of Faith (on public radio) featured a conversation with rheumatologist Dr. Esther Sternberg, author of The Balance Within. The episode, entitled “Stress and the Balance Within,” examined the mind-body connection, especially the effects of continuous stimulus on the human nervous system and the consequences thereof. (The show is archived for streaming, downloading, or podcast listening, along with related music and other audio materials.) We swim in a sea of concerns that technology has made more turbulent of late, deeper and darker, and pay for it with our well being.

Sternberg describes how our brains manufacture biochemicals when we're faced with “fight or flight” situations. When we perceive a threat, our brains go into action and start secreting hormones: putting the body on notice, stepping up many of our autonomous processes. Being able to anticipate and react to crises in this way has been a key to human survival, especially in primordial days when prowling saber-tooth tigers were the issue. The animal predators have largely been replaced by human predators and environmental threats, so having our awareness heightened is still essential.

The problem is, the primitive parts of the brain that secrete the biochemicals can't discriminate between a genuine threat and a mere sensory excitation. So, the more inputs we endure -- particularly those to which we can't respond, to gain closure -- the more likely that the biochemicals will begin to overwhelm the body's normal chemical balance. That's when we experience stress, an imbalance that is physiologically based but which, because of the mind-body connection, affects us psychologically as well.

When stressed, we easily sense the emotional danger, becoming edgy, insomniac, or distracted. But we don't correctly assess stress' impact on our bodies -- that is, until we suffer cardiac arrest or become chronically ill, two scientifically established (among many) effects of stress.

I reflected on this while cleaning out a couple thousand emails from my laptop's collection of many thousands more, emails that are complemented by untold numbers of phone calls -- my monthly phone bill is scary -- and assorted unbidden communications, like TV news, crazy “user experiences” on the Web. There's a general digital hum of alarm that afflicts all Americans (and, I guess, people everywhere) whenever wars are raging, economies are out of control, and products are on sale. The more we know, the more we feel the need to act but are prevented from it by power hierarchies, scarce time, and trivial obligations. Our personal life crises, in this Information Age, are also abetted by digital communications. This daunting, vast, stress-inducing melange has grown exponentially with the expansion of the Internet and its assimilation and distribution of more and more and more information. Users of this all-consuming utility are “always on.”

Tony Perkins, editor of the original Red Herring, has celebrated the positive aspects of being “Always On” with his eponymous, blog-based, venture-business community. Perhaps being always on is a good thing, for those with resources to buffer the info flood: professional minions, administrators, technological filters, and so forth. Maybe it's like the gallons of ocean water that wash through the gills of a baleen whale, leaving behind plankton for consumption. But for the rest of us, we're the unaware victims of stress that addles the mind and endangers the body. We just factor this invisible mental pollution into our general experience of being slightly out of control, a common theme of popular films. Paradoxically, the welter of information doesn't seem to have increased our understanding of our predicament; our problems multiply. First there was smog; now it's global warming. Knowledge isn't power, it's merely awareness. Awareness without the power to act produces stress.

Those of us who are Internet-dependent for work and pleasure know the majority of our acquaintances primarily as presences on the Internet. Our friends and family have their own 24/7 networks of online relationships that indirectly impact us. And almost everyone watches TV, reads newspapers, goes to movies, or all three -- not to mention riding roller coasters at theme parks, gambling wildly, or engaging in reckless recreational activities. Therefore, most of the people with whom we deal are probably suffering from stress, too. Maybe they're not clinically crazy, but if we knew them more intimately, what tales of woe would emerge. I now consider every online and media celebrity as probably half-cocked. And not copping to this fact I take as a blatant demonstration of neurosis, at the least. That's okay. Like the Firesign Theater, I think we're all Bozos on this bus. There's a certain pleasure having faith in Digitalism as our epoch's Great Leveler. (I don't apply the same easy acceptance to kids who are multitasking beyond human comprehension, and who have been this way since early childhood. They're not so much “born free” as born crazy, infomaniac crack babies.) I take great deal of pleasure in siimply raising a child.

For a long time there have been individuals who've proudly refused to watch TV, read newspapers, or use computers. Their resistance has been commonly attributed to petulance, political consciousness, romanticism, and eccentricity. Now it turns out that these Luddites may be more sane than we are, if less well-informed. Maybe ignorance is bliss. Too bad that for most of us, we've been banished from the pre-digital Garden of Eden by the mighty Archangel Internet, who now bars our way home.

Like many in Southern California, last week I contracted a trilogy of viruses that took me out of action until now.

Thanks to TE co-author Paula Thornton for holding down the fort with her provocative postings. For the New Year, I'll be jumping back on the horse, bareback, with a critical review, "The State of Experience Design."