Since launching our UX consulting service AQ Lift last October, we’ve held a UX cram session with four of their startups, and also spoke about the integration of design and development within a lean startup at the New Context Conference. AQ and ONLab share a belief in the potential of Japanese startups in becoming global leaders.

Below is the joint press release from AQ and ONLab.

AQ and Open Network Lab to lift User Experience quality for Tokyo’s Startups

Tokyo-based design firm AQ and seed acceleration program Open Network Lab (Onlab) have formed a new partnership, in order to embed user experience design best practices within the recent surge of entrepreneurship in Tokyo’s web industry.

Via the partnership, AQ will hold regular user experience design workshops for resident startups enrolled in Onlab’s four month program. Teams will be able to ask questions, gather feedback and sketch solutions via one-on-one sessions with AQ’s user experience designers.

In addition to the mentoring program, AQ’s managing director Chris Palmieri will join Onlab’s roster of mentors. AQ and Onlab also plan to hold public workshops and seminars to teach how design processes can be integrated into the rapid development cycles of web startups.

“After our first session at Onlab, some teams were able to take our quickly scribbled designs, code them, release them to users and start collecting stats in just a few days. This tight feedback loop was motivating for everyone, so we started talking about how to make this a regular thing.” says Chris Palmieri, UX designer and managing director of AQ.

The partnership is part of Onlab’s ongoing effort to instill the importance of user experience design in its own startups and the greater Tokyo tech community, a group which is often dominated by engineers and entrepreneurs with less exposure to design thinking.

Last August, Onlab ran a “Lean UX” workshop with Janice Fraser, a co-founder of Adaptive Path and frequent consultant to Silicon Valley Startups. In October, Onlab ran a workshop at Keio University’s SFC Campus on design for startups.

“With the help of AQ, Onlab looks to strengthen their acceleration program to help startups build better products with better design and usability.” says Open Network Lab’s managing partner Hiro Maeda.

AQ is a Tokyo-based design and consulting firm, founded by Chris Palmieri, Eiko Nagase and Paul Baron in 2008. AQ has designed websites and applications for early stage startups, large corporations and cultural organizations in Japan and abroad, including ASICS, MyGengo, Mozilla Japan, and Tokyo Art Beat. In 2011, AQ launched AQ Lift, a rapid user experience design consulting program for early-stage web service businesses.

Open Network Lab is a seed acceleration program based in Tokyo, Japan. It was jointly established by Digital Garage, Kakaku.com, and Netprice.com on April of 2010. The program is mentorship-driven; where mentors such as Joi Ito (Director of MIT Media Lab), Biz Stone (Co-Founder of Twitter), Phil Libin (Founder of Evernote), and many others have participated. 24 startups over 4 batches, including Giftee, Wondershake, Sassor, Compath, and Mieple have been funded by Open Network Lab.

For more information, please contact:
Chris Palmieri (AQ) chris@aqworks.com
Chihiro Kobayashi (Open Network Lab) onlab@garage.co.jp

Related reading:

• Video about ONLab’s mentors
• Interview on the tech news site Penn Olson: Tokyo-based AQ Wants to Help Start-ups Design Better
• AQ blog: Event report on The New Context Conference 2011 Fall
• AQ blog: Event report on our UX cram session with ONLab

At AQ, you will help people find meaning, utility and joy in our websites and applications. People will love and remember the things you make because they helped them discover something new in the world around them or accomplish something they never thought possible.

All about You

• You’re equally comfortable defining what something looks like, how it behaves, and what it can do for people.
• Your design process starts with hunches, but thrives on real world feedback. You observe user behavior and translate it into the next round of design.
• Your work speaks for itself, but you love explaining it to anyone who will listen.
• You have at least two years professional experience designing interfaces OR have invented and launched your own web service/tool/app.
• You have a set of design tools with which you can efficiently perform daily acts of beauty, but are open to learning new ones as well.
• You know your way around HTML, CSS, and maybe even know enough PHP, Ruby or Javascript to bring your idea to life.
• You’re a native speaker of either Japanese or English, and can communicate in the other.

The Position

• We start with an initial three month full-time contract, after which you’ll become eligible for full-time employment.
• Salary will be determined based on your skill and experience.
• All the magic happens at our sunny office in Nishi-Azabu, Tokyo (accessible via Omotesando and Roppongi stations).

Working at AQ

• We set the course together. Everyone has a say on what ideas to investigate, which projects to take on, and who we work with.
• We work together. We don’t have many meetings, but we do a lot of designing, writing and building together, usually in groups of two or three.
• We like to share. The book we’re reading, the apps we’re using, the event we attended, people we met and things we learned. We’re rarely left wanting for something to talk about.
• We like to eat. Exotic snacks seem to always be around and a topic of conversation. Some of our best conversations and ideas happen over lunch.
• We leave the door open. We get a lot of guests: developers, artists, designers, writers, clients, researchers, teachers, and relatives.
• We work with great people around the world. This means a bit of travel and a lot of Skype to the US, UK, Holland, China and Australia.

How to Apply

Send everything we need to know to hello@aqworks.com. We prefer URLs to PDFs.

Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab) kicked off the conference Thursday morning with a sprawling, energetic assessment of the “AI” (after internet) world, including the methods and outlooks that produced some of its greatest innovations. His call for all of us to proceed, not with maps, but with compasses, was echoed by speakers throughout the event as a fundamental requirement for lean entrepreneurship.

Panel Session on Integrated Design and Development for Lean Startups. Photo by Chiaki Hayashi

On Thursday afternoon, I joined a panel session with Joi, CJ Kihlbom (Elabs) and Brian Flanagan (HyperTiny), moderated by Mikihiro Yasuda (Digital Garage), to discuss the integration of design and development within a lean startup. Lean startups, a term popularized by Eric Ries and the theme for this year’s event, are businesses that operate based on a set of agile business, design and development processes, in order to more quickly find and meet market needs.

CJ started our panel with a short presentation of how designers and developers work together at his agile web development company, ELabs. His teams tend to get the best results working side-by-side on the same problem at the same time, in the same medium, whether it be sketching on paper or prototyping in HTML, even if one has the title of designer on their business card and the other has the title of developer.

The panel was in agreement that any such collaboration must begin, not only with shared tools, but shared values, tastes and respect. I recounted some activities that led to successful collaborations at AQ, including starting projects with a non-design, non-development creative task, like co-writing a key piece of content that defines the product.

Thursday wrapped up with an introduction to the concept of a lean startup by Janice Fraser of Luxr, a San Francisco based consultancy focused on “creating high-performance product teams in high-growth startups”. Janice stressed the importance of “getting out of the building” to talk to your customers, releasing so early you’ll be slightly embarrassed when you look back, and continually interrogating your product to ensure it has not only a problem/solution fit, but a product/market fit.

Our Unconference session on Lean Content

On Friday, Tomomi and I hosted a late afternoon unconference session asking what it might look like to apply lean startup principles to content strategy and content creation. During the session, we unearthed all kinds of problems that typically pop up in the content creation process, including ambiguous ownership and content scope creep. We ended the session by putting our own top secret product on the chopping block, asking the group for suggestions on reducing the barrier to launch without sacrificing content quality. We weighed a spectrum of content creation options, from fully DIY to Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing, including potential tradeoffs in community-building, content quantity and content quality.

We owe a great thanks to ON Lab’s Hiro Maeda for inviting us to the event, as well as the many speakers and participants. We learned quite a lot and had a good time doing it!

Update: AQ Lift was launched on October 28th.

Last Wednesday, we tested the program with a half day design session at Open Network Lab (ON Lab). ON Lab is an incubator for global-minded Japanese engineers, led by Hiro Maeda, and co-funded by Digital Garage, NetPrice and others.

Professional chin-stroking in action.

Chris and I met with four teams for one hour each, to test out their apps and services:

• Find JPN – a marketplace for tourists looking for authentic Japanese experiences.
• Compath – a social location discovery application
• Pirka – an app to encourage yourself and people you know to pick up litter.
• ABCloop – an online community for social language learning.

Together with each team, we sketched design changes, rewrote copy, and simplified user interactions. Each team left the session with a list of improvements they could start implementing the next day, and hopefully a slightly more user-centered approach to their product.

We went into the sessions with close to no prior experience with the products, allowing us to play the role of a user first encountering the service. This revealed ambiguities in how each product communicates what you can do with it, and why that’s valuable to prospective users. We also discussed what it takes to earn a new sign up, and how that might differ from what it takes to retain that user over time.

For us, it was a very satisfying workshop. Each of the four teams were bubbling with smart questions, spirited opinions, and a singular dedication to make their product better. We can’t wait to see how each product evolves over the next few weeks and months.

To hear more about our experience at ON Lab, as well as the state of Lean UX in Japan, join us at the upcoming New Context Conference on Thursday, November 3rd. Chris will be joining a panel session with Joi Ito (MIT Media Lab) and Brian Flanagan (HyperTiny) to discuss this year’s theme, Lean Startup Camp Tokyo.

One of these challenges, designing for smartphone and tablet based web browsing, has inspired several bold new practices: the abandonment of Flash, the embracing of HTML 5 and CSS 3, Luke Wroblewski’s Mobile First, and most recently Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design.

Responsive Web Design Today

The demo that started it all: type size, image size and layout responding to browser window size.

As understood from Marcotte’s seminal article and book, Responsive Web Design is a flexible, adaptive approach to the display of web content, achieved via technologies that rearrange, resize, add or subtract content. Marcotte’s Responsive Design serves a more legible, usable web page to an array of devices with varying screen resolutions and download speeds.

The popularity of Marcotte’s responsive web design will likely result in better content consumption experiences for a lot of websites, for a lot of people. However, by focusing our conversation on the optimization of visual presentation, we’ve placed just one of what I hope will be the three pillars of responsive web design: content, presentation and interface. By broadening the definition, we will allow responsive web design to better support the way people experience the web today and will experience it tomorrow.

In this essay, we explore ways in which the first pillar, content, might become responsive. But before we begin, let’s first examine the role physical devices can play in making these experiences possible, especially the mobile devices which initially inspired the responsive web design movement.

The device is more than a display.

In Responsive Web Design, Ethan Marcotte uses media queries and a little Javascript to learn a few characteristics, resolution, size and orientation, of the user’s device, and responds with a more legible page.

However, as Gino Zahnd points out, devices are much more than displays with modems attached: they also provide mechanisms for input, sensory feedback, processing power, data storage, and environmental adaption.

We can call on each of these device capabilities, to help us understand something about the user’s goals and context, and deliver a response that is more useful, more relevant, and requires less effort.

As device capabilities continue to increase, it becomes easier to slip into design discussions that confuse the devices with their owners. We can avoid this pretty easily however: Always start with the question “What is this person trying to do?”, not “What can we do with this device?”.

Mobile devices are more personal than mobile.

Most discussions of mobile begin with a story of the user on the go, out and about, painting the town red. As Marcotte points out, this is a assumption from which to start, since many people spend as much time playing with their smartphone on the sofa as they do on the street. Acknowledging both contexts will open our imagination to a wider range of possible offerings, and save us from viewing the mobile web as a restrictive, watered-down version of the PC web.

A more reliable and powerful assumption is that mobile devices, including tablets, are primarily personal devices. Though it is possible to share an iPhone or iPad, their lack of multiple user accounts makes co-ownership awkward, reducing the value of the device for both owners.¹

Data moving through the stack: not everything makes it through to the website, but the layer where any type of data starts and stops changes from time to time. (Click to Enlarge)

This bias towards individual ownership has resulted in most of us carrying more intimate personal information on our mobile than on any other device. My iPhone, for example, knows where I am, what time it is now, what languages I speak, what time I woke up this morning, when I last exercised, what I’ve been reading lately, what I’m doing tomorrow afternoon, with whom, their contact information and much of my contact history with them. Whether it’s a good idea or not to do so, all of this information, could one day be used to make any web experience more responsive.²

Of course only a thin slice of that information is currently disclosed by the device to the web browser, and an even thinner slice disclosed by the browser to any website. The depth of these disclosures will however continue to shift based on device capabilities, industry standards, public taste and individual preferences. As responsible designers³, we should always work at least a few steps back from the line of what is possible, and ask permission any time we take a step forward.

Responsive Content

Now that we understand how much devices can teach us about users, we can look at how users derive value out of content, and devise a few new responses to maximize that value.

A valuable encounter with content can be dissected into a hierarchy of needs:

1. Access
2. Legibility
3. Ease of comprehension
4. Relevance to the moment, interests, behavior, and personal history
5. Everything else: Later access, referencability, sharability, conversability

The better a publisher responds to each of these needs, the deeper users can engage with the content.⁴

Let’s use the example of a news story on a recent crisis, the 2011 London Riots. How can we improve the quality of engagement with this content? Here are a few ideas:

If you know that I’ve read this story once already, show me what has changed. In the midst of a crisis, a single news story may be updated several times throughout the day. Add timestamps to passages of text, compare it with my “last read” date, then respond by highlighting new passages, saving me wasted effort when my time is most precious.

If you know I’m in Japan, show me a quote from leaders in East Asia, or make comparisons to similar historical events that occurred in my area. This will likely increase my engagement with unfamiliar or far away topics, raising my cultural literacy and potential contribution to public discourse.

How responsive is too responsive?

This second example, though modest, begins to serve, not only a different presentation of content, but different versions of the content itself to different people. Though this difference seems more helpful than harmful, how does the user experience change as these customizations increase or grow more personal?

If it were possible for a site to know my age, would we want it to tune the writing level? If it were to know my gender, would we want it to tune tone of voice? Uh, not really. These are clear overreaches, both creepy and damaging to society.

Even our tame example, a quote selected and presented on the basis of a user’s IP address, would contribute to the further destruction of the canonical content experience⁵⁶, making any discussion of the content more fractured and confusing. Imagine comments, blogging, tweeting, email forwarding, even political election debates around a news story when everyone has read a different version of it.⁷ Though not impossible to overcome, this challenge to meaningful discourse will require a new set of adaptions that will take years to work out.

Work from the outside inward.

This type of customization becomes less problematic when applied to the content around the content, such as related links, illustrations or maps:

If I live close by zoom in. If I live far away, zoom out. Imagine our London Riots story was accompanied by a map of the affected area. If I were to access the story from a flat in East London, you’d do well to display the map zoomed in to the city level, maybe even closer, since I’m likely to be familiar with the microgeography of the area. If I were to access the same story from Istanbul however, you would do better to zoom the map to a regional level. This tiny response to geographical context would increase comprehension for most people, without disrupting the conversation around the story.

Side-by-side comparison with a map of Tokyo at equal scale helps Tokyoites like me process an unfamiliar map of London, and understand the sprawl and severity of the 2011 Riots.

The 2011 London Riots and your current location. Click image to view (requires GPS). Code by Raphaël Mazoyer.

A similar customization can also be used to increase comprehension through comparison. During the London Riots last month, an image appeared on Twitpic showing the size of the affected area side-by-side with the 23 wards of Tokyo, revealing that they were roughly the same size. This simple image made the scale of a far off event instantly personally relatable. A savvy publisher could replicate the evocative experience of this visual for readers around the world by detecting the user’s current location and placing a map of it side by side with a map of the riots.

The Road to Responsiveness (Where’s the source code?)

As you’ve surely noticed by now, this article is heavy with what-ifs and light on how-tos. Though all of these ideas are possible via today’s technology, no one-off demo will prove the scalability or even desirability of any of these ideas.

Truly responsive web design will only be born from the sustained collaboration between publishers, designers and technologists, as they develop new publishing tools, new markup language, new production workflows, and eventually new approaches to digital storytelling and product development. All of this will come at both a production and delivery cost, though I believe the promise of more engaging, more efficient digital content will prove worth the investment.

I expect a lot of fumbling around in the dark before we find the practices which best respond to the ever evolving and fractured context in which people experience the web. But let’s fumble together, content creators, editors, designers, business strategists, developers and users. Only together can we begin to move responsive web design from experiment to application, and begin responding, not to devices, but to people.

Footnotes:

1. In my observations, even the lovely interactions of sharing and collaboration which the physical form of the iPad affords, are ultimately only infrequent streaks in a primarily personal ownership experience.

2. Some of this is of course already happening within individual apps and website.

3. And by designers, I mean anyone who is making decisions on how people experience a digital publication or application, including interaction designers, engineers, editors, product managers, etc.

4. While engagement itself may not always be the end goal, it is a powerful means and measure for almost any other goal.

5. Craig Mod calls this “the fall of the great, immutable artifact”, at the hands of endlessly editable digital versions and social marginalia.

6. While news organizations’ digital publications are only beginning to to respond to the reader, they’ve been responding to the moment for years now. Jump to the bottom of an online news article these days and you’re likely to see a disclaimer along the lines of “A version of this story was published in The New York Times on August 28, 2011”, making lunchtime discussions of the news a little more confusing already.

7. Required viewing: In his 2011 Ted Talk, Eli Pariser warns that similar personalizations on websites like Facebook and Google Search are already resulting in an unintended “filter bubble” effect, in which we we are less often exposed to opposing viewpoints and challenging information, weakening our collective intellectual rigor.

Credits:

Thanks to Olivier Thereaux and Raphaël Mazoyer for helping me shape this into something semi-coherent, and hopefully useful to a few people.

Double thanks to Raphaël for whipping together the map demo while I was asleep.

Though I rarely have time to read the emails, I always read the subject lines:

Barack Obama is in your Inbox

• You should pass this one on
• Exclusive: First look at our report
• A milestone
• (no subject)
• Midnight
• They’re wrong
• You’re the first to know
• Deadline: Thursday
• Video: Afghanistan
• How about a T-shirt
• Dinner
• This video really moved me
• Dinner with the President
• Not too late
• Something lovely
• Tap
• Decided something today
• Our plan this summer
• Restating the obvious
• You’ll like this one
• Something happened
• Fixing what’s broken
• Tonight
• Big things
• Video: First look at our campaign plan
• Unlimited funds
• The next move is yours

Here is what I noticed:

They never mention the candidate. Since the ’08 campaign, messaging has always been about us, our community, the change we want. Nothing new here, but impressively consistent.

Actually, they rarely include any proper nouns. Instead of people, places, bills or taxes, they speak of opportunity, urgency, belonging and progress.

They are written to be forwarded. Though an email from a campaign manager titled “Something lovely” comes off a little cloying, once I forward it to my sister, there’s a decent chance it’ll blend right into the conversational tone she’s used to from me.

I would love to peek in on the writing process for these subject lines, and
see the stats on how these are performing. Leaving my personal aesthetic objections aside, I doubt there are many CRM campaigns anywhere operating on a higher level than this.

Google+ is no exception: it’s a relatively compact first release of just a few core concepts. Like many, I look forward to watching millions of people build on these concepts with improvised hacks, shorthand and other homemade enhancements, to complete a product story started by what may have been just a few dozen in Mountain View.

When taking a look at some of the decisions Google made, I found five ideas worth keeping in mind when designing any new service.

1. Use language that people already know.

“Google+”

Pluses everywhere.

“+” is a completely unimaginative and entirely appropriate name for what Google+ is aspiring to be. It is not a new, independent product. It’s a layer of social tools built to enhance what Google already is to billions of people.

Some have complained that the symbol is too small; tacked on to the Google logo you barely notice it. But this isn’t a 20th century branding exercise: tacked onto the Google logo in the bottom left corner of a subway poster is not how we will see it most of the time.

Its compactness allows it to inhabit any corner of the product interface, taking on different forms and nuances as needed. As “Google+” on the website it means “the Google you known with an added benefit”, as “+Chris” in my Google toolbar it tells me “Add yourself to the conversation”. As “+1” in my search results, it means “raise your hand in support”. Nothing particularly original here, but the flexibility of it will allow the product to be whatever and wherever Google needs it to be, next year and the year after.

“Circles”

Circles couldn’t be more elegant. It’s a common noun, and Google is using a common definition pulled straight from the language of offline relationships. It requires no learning to understand its purpose or how it functions. It does what it says. It’s a one word opinion paper on what Google thinks is the primary nature of online social relationships: loosely bound, transient, non-binary, and founded on shared interests.

The web interface for circles may be clumsy, but it's a smart communication tool.

2. Interfaces don’t only enable, they speak.

The drag-and-drop interface for managing Circles is a great piece of communication to introduce the concept of circles. The large circles containing rings of small portraits leaves a memorable image of the feature, an image you might retrieve as a mental model to explain the feature to a friend.

Okay, the usability is not optimal. Web designers have yet to get users to master drag and drop within a web browser. Maybe Google will, if by brute force, but in its current form, manipulating the large contact cards and circular targets feels like dragging boulders across a beach to drop them into the sea.

Even in its first week, Google+ contains many better tools with which to organize social relationships, so this is not the one most of us will use most of the time. However, if it helps sear the concept of Circles into our collective understanding of online social networks, it will have done its job.

3. Contrast is the key to Focus is the key to “Simple”

Designers and users have managed a consensus on the superiority of “simple” tools. In reality however, most of the truly simple tools were invented by our ancestors, leaving us mostly with simple looking. A spoon is simple. Google+ is not, but it looks simple because it has been designed to optimize focus.

The stream, for example, has been designed for focus on the presentation of content, making it one of the most elegant pieces of visual design on Google+. Like Twitter’s timeline and Facebook’s Wall, Google+ stream includes many tools for the manipulation of content. These tools remain quiet in flat whites, pale greys and thin lines until you show interest, when they spring to the foreground: text fields take on a comforting size and visual heft, buttons and icons, now ready to be clicked, blush in full-color saturation.

My favorite focus detail in the stream’s design is a hairline vertical rule, which appears when I click in the vertical space of any content item in the stream, or use the j/k keystrokes to toggle focus between content items. This little line helps the user tame the uneven height and visual texture of content blocks, find their place after scrolling, and understand where content begins and ends.

While Twitter and Facebook use similar techniques of progressive disclosure, neither has reached as comfortable a balance of visual focus.

4. Tune the “volume” of the interface to the environment.

Google+’s smartphone browser interface is a full-featured manifestation, conceding very few functional limitations imposed by the cramped screen size, while taking advantage of the extra bits of information a user on the run can provide about their environment. Whether or not the product designers started Google+ from mobile remains unclear, it is clearly a “mobile first”-class experience.

Where Google has refused difference in functional richness, it has embraced difference in aesthetics, as the smartphone interface bears almost no visual resemblance to the PC site. The PC interface seems inspired by the quiet aesthetic of the printed page, while the smartphone interface takes all its cues from the pumped-up visual language of iPhone apps:
Large, beveled, bold icons we can identify out of the corner of one eye, while the other monitors our overfilled take-out coffee as we barrel up the stairway towards the next subway transfer.
Zooming and sliding animations that let the user know that they’ve changed levels of detail in the hierarchy of information, even if we weren’t fully paying attention.
Shadows, highlights and layering that encourages clicking.

The total of these details isn’t a realistic, consistent world of 3D beauty, nor should it be. These details have been added to reduce mistakes and increase confidence as the user manipulates the interface, within the multisensory distractions of the real world.

5. Loyalty is built from a thousand tiny moments.

These days, people know they are making an investment whenever they try new software, even free software. If they aren’t investing money, they are investing effort, attention, social influence or one of any number of finite resources at their disposal. When Google decided to enter the crowded social network business with Google+, they took on the unenviable extra burden of inciting a mass brand switch. As Instapaper creator and tech writer Marco Arment pointed out, Google+ has to do this quickly for any of its key features to be useful to its first wave of users.

Google made several smart decisions to make this likely. By far the most important of these decisions was to chop the user’s investment size into tiny pieces, offering the user modest returns of happiness for those tiny investments, and removing as much friction as possible from the transaction, via kick-ass interaction design.

The best example of this was the organization of social relationships with Circles. Google didn’t force us to upload and organize our entire contact book on day one. Instead, they added a tiny interface to Google+ and Gmail that allowed us to describe social relationships piecemeal, when we felt like it. This investment occurs via the frictionless repetition of a tiny cursor movements and just one click, a flawless specimen of interaction design.

And what does Google give you in return? At this point, who knows. The “Rolodex card” we clicked on disappears and seconds later, is replaced with another. Not particularly valuable, but satisfying enough the first dozen times. Before long we notice your Circles begin to grow. Friend’s photos appear next to their emails in Gmail. The next time we share something with a group of friends, it takes 2 clicks instead of 20. Whether these little transactions add up to the loyalty of a handful or a billion of us is a question a few years off from being answered, but in the meantime, Google buys themselves a little time to observe and adjust, and complete the circle.

From May 11 to 27, AQ conducted an online survey with the help of Tokyo Art Beat to find out about how people who work in the creative industries were affected by the events following the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11.

We hope that this survey will provide an overview of the conditions experienced within the creative industries, so to allow each one of us to gain an additional and more overarching point of view when looking back at our own experiences. We also believe that identifying patterns in the way people reacted and think about future prospects, can be of help for companies and individual creators alike, when thinking about solutions to overcome this difficult situation.

We are extremely grateful to the 491 respondents who took time to answer the survey. We hope we have made good use of your time.

Demographics

Infographic: Demographics of survey respondents. Click image to Enlarge

First of all, let us give you an idea on what kind of people answered the survey. There was a rather strong slant to the demographic category of the respondents, so let us just look at the numbers here. The majority of respondents were young, with 78.7% of them in their 20s (35.7%) and 30s (43.0%). They were based in Tokyo (70.7%), were single (68.9%), and worked for clients in Japan (56.1% only in Japan, 33.7% mostly in Japan). A lot of designers (40.2%) and fewer but significant amount of people in the advertising (26.8%) and art (19.5%) industries. Full-time employees accounted for just over a half (51.8%), followed by freelancers and self-employed people (40.8%).

Given the fact that so many people fell in this latter category, it is perhaps not surprising that 49.4% answered “less than 5” for the question on the number of employees, and the rest were more or less equally spread in different sized companies (the second largest group at 17.9% answering 20-100 employees). Most were low (39.5%, less than 3 million yen per year) to mid-income (39.0%, 3-5 million yen per year) earners. Last but not least, more women (58.8%) took time to answer the survey.

We attribute this slant to the fact that this survey was web-based and was largely diffused through Tokyo Art Beat, a website which attracts people who are interested in art and design related events in Tokyo and around, and tend to have high affinity with Internet services.

Effects of the disaster

Infographic: Effects of the Earthquake. Click to Enlarge.

What strongly emerged from the answers was the fact that despite most respondents live in Tokyo, which did not suffer major direct damages from the earthquake and tsunami, nearly everyone felt that their work was affected by the disaster in one form or another. Only 2.3% answered that they were not affected at all. Those who feel that their work is still affected accounted for 65.5% (44.5% somewhat affected, 21.1% strongly affected), and many (39.3%) have no idea how long it will take for things to get back to normal. Only 5.9% believe that they will recover within a few weeks. The damage varied according to the place. Comparing Miyagi prefecture, which suffered severe damages from the tsunami, with Tokyo that only suffered minor physical damages, the difference is clear. While 71.4% answered that they were “strongly affected” in Miyagi, only 17.1% answered the same in Tokyo. Moreover, no one answered that “there have been problems but they have been solved” in Miyagi, whereas 13.7% of those in Tokyo seem to have overcome such problems.

One of the experiences that many of us who were in Japan shared in the weeks after the earthquake, were the ubiquitous TV ads by the Advertising Council Japan (AC) that distributes public service announcements. Private companies pulled their ads for the potential danger of them being regarded as “inappropriate”, resulting in the only remaining AC ads to be broad-casted repeatedly. The term jishuku, which stands for self-censorship or voluntary restraint in Japanese, was heavily circulated over both the media and the Internet and was also applied to this phenomenon. The advertising industry did in fact have the highest proportion of people answering that they were or are still affected by the earthquake (86.5%). But similarly, 57.2% of all respondents (41.7% somewhat feel, 15.5% strongly feel) continue to sense a mood of jishuku in their industry.

“This may sound like a platitude, but we should avoid needless self-censorship (jishuku) and instead keep up high spirits in our daily lives so that we can build a Japan that would make everyone want to come back.”

Decreased demand was experienced by 62.9% of respondents (most prominent in the publishing industry with 83.9% and least prominent in the art industry with 48.3%). Related to this, cancelled and postponed events (as we remember from the controversial cancellation of an exhibition on nuclear power at the Meguro Museum of Art and the cancellation and postponement of many other art shows including Art Fair Tokyo), lack of ink and paper (popular weekly manga publications went momentarily out of print just to raise an example), unexpected budget cuts and the sudden departure of foreign employees were also cited as problems. The second most common effect of the disaster was psychological, with 46.4% having experienced them. Temporary workers and full-time employees showed contrasting results in this respect. Whereas for temporary workers, 60% felt psychological effects but only 33.3% experienced decreased demand, 37.7% of full time employees felt psychological effects while a significant majority of 69.1% experienced decreased demand. This points to the fact that unstable working conditions may have exacerbated the emotional impact of the disaster.

In addition, survey takers indicated new born concerns about the validity and meaningfulness of their work in society, a new awareness of the need to relate with people, a feeling of powerlessness in front of the events combined with the realization that what they were doing was perhaps not actually necessary and was merely a luxury. Moreover, respondents pointed to the fact that the disaster exacerbated existing problems, creating a new awareness about the need to be less dependent on the employer and to earn a skill that would allow someone to quickly find alternative employment should the employer falter, and about the stronger need to start doing business abroad in order to survive in their industries. The fact that many people were unable to go to work for a while due to damaged buildings or erratic transportation also brought the realization that the need to be physically in the office was actually much more limited than previously thought.

The fact that 74.4% answered that they need to make a change in the way they work and in their careers (47.0% need some kind of change, 27.0% need a big change) could be understood as reflecting the above concerns. People who have travelled to the afflicted areas had the highest ratio of people among them who felt they needed to make a big change in their careers (60.0%) while those who have not done anything to help with the relief work had the lowest ratio (7.9%). It is compelling to see that the age group in which the ratio was highest for those who answered that their career needs a big change was 51-60 years old, with 69.2%. This could be interpreted as the result of the earthquake posing serious questions about decades of work, coupled with the actual difficulty in inducing a big change in one’s career given the advanced age.

Ambivalent feelings were expressed in regards to the care given by employing companies and/or organizations after the disaster. 38.8% answered that the response was neither particularly positive nor negative and the remaining 61.2% was divided into equal parts between those who felt satisfied and unsatisfied. Those who felt satisfied pointed at the fact that they were allowed to go home early or to take holidays, received quick responses in a constantly evolving situation, and were encouraged to help with volunteering work in afflicted areas. Those who felt unsatisfied mentioned slow responses, inability to plan ahead in a difficult situation, scarce information given to employees, lack of any improvements made on emergency manuals, and particularly not being allowed to be late or leave early despite the fact that public transport was erratic for a few days after the earthquake.

Reconstruction efforts

Infographic: Change and Recovery. Click to Enlarge

In the midst of such a difficult situation, respondents appear to be actively seeking avenues for helping the afflicted areas. 83.8% made a donation, 75.2% are saving energy as the summer months when electricity use peaks in Japan is looming closer, and 67.2% are avoiding hoarding to prevent supermarkets from emptying out again just like in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, making it difficult for people who are in greatest need to purchase items. 11.4% are involved in volunteering projects and 7.2% have actually travelled to the disaster stricken areas to help with the removal of debris. Some also cited purchasing items from the afflicted areas, or even commissioning work to companies located there that are struggling to restore their businesses that have suffered diverse damages.

37.2% believe that their industry can make a contribution to the reconstruction efforts and the number goes down to 32.1% when asked if they can help through their own work. In other words, many feel that it is difficult to make a contribution through their work. There is an interesting correlation with the salary: the greater the amount of salary, the greater the ratio of people who feel they can contribute to the reconstruction efforts. The ratio of people who feel they can make no contribution through their work decreases as the salary goes up. This suggests either that greater income could be interpreted as greater responsibilities and hence possibilities to carry out projects, but it could also be read as economic instability leading to a greater feeling of powerlessness. Despite those variations, many projects initiated by the creative industry have been mentioned as making a significant contribution (to see the full list, please download the results from the link at the bottom of the page). Let us just mention a few:

Act for Japan

A project started by a group of creators who came together to create a platform that enables creators to contribute to the relief work. They have so far organized a number of charity events, including charity parties and art auctions.
http://act4.jp/

Art for Life

A website platform with a SNS function created through a collaboration between Roppongi Hills and loftwork that allows projects initiated within the creative industries to be freely registered and shared.
http://www.a4l.jp

Olive

Created by designer Nosigner, the wiki-style website presents design ideas for creating articles for daily use and for satisfying elementary needs out of material that can be found even in disaster stricken areas.
http://www.olive-for.us

Tasukeai Japan

Project initiated by creative director Naoyuki Sato which takes the form of an information portal website related to relief work for the 3/11 earthquake that provides comprehensive information for both people who need help and those who want to help.
http://tasukeaijapan.jp/

Although these and other projects have made and continue to make a great contribution to the relief work, some respondents (14.5%) raised concern over some of the projects initiated by creators. These included questionable effectiveness, modest scales and immaturity in running projects in comparison to other industries, projects being self-complacent or being used as publicity stunts, and the fact that some projects seemed to have lasted only temporarily when reconstruction efforts require long term contributions.

A few last words

The survey brought to light the fact that the disaster affected almost everyone. Although most of the physical damage was suffered in the Tohoku and certain parts of the Kanto region, an overwhelming majority of the people living in other areas, including Tokyo, suffered damages ranging from decreased demand to psychological harm. It made many of us question whether what we do is meaningful, and many of us now seek a change in our careers. The large numbers suggest that employers, only some of whom appeared to be playing a major role in helping employees cope with the disaster according to the survey, should be making renewed efforts not just to assure the physical and psychological well being of employees during a crisis, but to provide opportunities for employees who seek work that direct contributes to society and the people around them.

It is also important to note, that while the earthquake did unquestionably affect most of us, the effects that it caused were varied among industries, salary groups, locations, age groups and other factors. Clearly, there is no single solution to all the problems that the disaster has caused. This is reflected in the mixed feelings about some projects initiated by the creative industries, which earned both praised for their effectiveness, and scrutiny as PR stunts.

The numbers clearly showed however, that a large number of us were emboldened to take action to help those who were in a more difficult situation than ourselves. We hope that the results of this survey will inspire people to overcome their difficulties, to renew the confidence and vibrancy of the creative industry, and join or even create recovery efforts that make sense for their passions and their community.

Resources and Notes

• Download printable files of the infographics for this report. (PDF)
• This article and the printable PDFs are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
• If you liked this, you’ll probably like our Map Kit for 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami and Infographics Roundup: 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami

Entering Ubusuna House

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.”

The opening line of Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country” is a favorite quote of the Japanese. It’s one of those lines that people like to quote out loud, even when they haven’t read the book, but it’s somehow all right because the sentiment can be shared with just that line.

Kawabata’s Snow Country is the Echigo region, part of modern day Niigata Prefecture and one of the snowiest places in the country. It’s also now the stage for Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the largest outside art festival in the world. And, in my opinion, it’s one of Japan’s best kept secrets for non-touristy travel.

Coming out of a successful multi-year web project that led up to the inaugural Setouchi International Art Festival, AQ was tapped to re-build the Echigo Tsumari festival online presence at the beginning of 2011.

We’re long time fans of the festival, having made the trek with Tokyo Art Beat way back in 2006 for the 3rd Triennale to stay at James Turrell’s “House of Light”. In September 2009, AQ took a field trip to catch the 4th Triennale.

We’re psyched to be involved, to put it mildly. And after a series of workshops to plot a five year digital communications plan and several rounds of wireframing, we were more than ready for another trip.

Getting there

Paul, Eliyo, Ishida-san, and I took the bullet train to Echigo Yuzawa, a quick 70 minute ride from Tokyo. There was a snafu with the rental car – it made strange noises – and we got an “upgraded” car after being personally escorted to a rival shop in the next town. From there, we sped off to Tokamachi to meet up with Eiko, who was running late. Paul reveled in the new car. On the road, misfortunes have a way of unexpectedly turning into delights.

The kidney shape is the Echigo Tsumari Art Field, covering 760 square kilometers

Ubusuna House

Lunch was dumplings and wild vegetables at Ubusuna House, served on hand-made ceramic plates. Ubusuna House is a blink-and-you-missed-it house turned ceramic museum/restaurant. Ceramic artists collaborated to immaculately restore this two story house, which includes three tearooms for exhibiting artwork.

We were the only visitors from out of town, but neighbors dropped by for a bite. It was great fun to chat with them. The House is operated by a group of ladies from the area, and their leader told us that the House had revived the culture of the post-war Women’s Circle, where ladies from the area put their heads and hands together to help run the community. The secret to involving community members, she told us, was chatting over tea. “Talk about non-work issues for 80 percent of the conversation, and then just 20 percent of what you need to ask.”

Ubusuna House, from the front

Inside the house

Dumplings and vegetables galore

Ishida-san admiring his tea cup (and wishing it contained shochu)

Out and about

Art is more fun with kids, especially Eliyo

One thing this area doesn't lack: photogenic scenes

Rice paddies, organically shaped

Staring at a closed ski slope

Nobutai

Matsudai Nobutai is an impressive facility. Integrated with Matsudai Station on the Hokuhoku Line, it’s the first stop for most visitors and sets the tone for what’s to come with a great artwork/cafe space, gift shop, and dozens of installation works within walking distance.

Cafe Reflet, designed by Jean-Luc Vilmouth

Strawberry Fair at Cafe Reflet. Our secret mission of the trip, accomplished.

The site for Ilya & Emilia Kabakov's 'The Rice Field', one of the representative works of the area. It's currently under repair from earthquake damages.

Eiko explains that each wooden slab represents one family in the Matsudai Area

House of Light

The House of Light starts taking reservations six months in advance, and we had been fortunate to slip in on a Sunday night. It sprinkled in the evening and poured the next morning, so the pleasure of a full blown sunset/sunrise experience would have to wait for another trip! As evidenced by the lack of photos, we just took it easy.

Arriving at The House of Light

Getting oriented

Dinner!

Stone Buddhas of Hachi

We stopped the car at a particularly quiet and pretty place to take photos, when a lady came out of a nearby house. She asked where we were from, and shooed us off, saying “Don’t bother stopping here! There are many more big ones down thataway!”

One doesn’t ignore advice like that, and we stumbled upon what turned out to be Stone Buddhas of Hachi [ja]. Local legend says that a godly creature descended upon a stone 240 years ago, awaking a travelling Zen monk that was camping in the woods. He built a temple upon that stone, surrounding it with almost 200 stone Buddhas.

Stone Buddhas

Many of the tablets had fallen down, probably due to the earthquake

Guardian dog statue

Local school kids cleaning the sacred site. Shoes are now allowed.

Ehon-to-Kinomi Musem

Illustrator Seizo Tashima turned this abandoned school into the Ehon-to-Kinomi Musem. He wrote a picture book titled “The School Will Never be Empty” based on the last three kids that studied at this school. The characters are represented as huge installations made of wooden skills that are placed throughout the school, playing out scenes from the book. Many of them move because they’re connected to a shishi odoshi. It’s haunting and joyful at the same time, and “3D museum” is an apt description for the space. We ended up staying here for a few hours.

Wooden installations clunk unrhythmically in the old gym

Tashima is most well known for the book “Chikara Taro”. It’s a story about how an ojiichan and obaachan were so lonely for a child that one day, they took a bath and rolled up their grime into a little boy doll. They poured so much love into it that the grime ball came alive and thus, Chikara Taro was born. I’m fairly certain he went on to combat demons and save villages and such, but that’s really the only part that I remember. Anyway, the story is Japanese language textbooks for elementary school. The commoner’s Pygmalion.

The cafe Hachi on the first floor.

Furniture at Hachi

Walking in Akiyamago

Akiyama-go

Akiyama-go is a series of waifs tucked away between high mountains in Niigata and Nagano Prefectures. It’s said that Heike warriors and their families fled here to escape death from the Gengi in the 12th century.

It’s a harsh and unforgiving land where famine, following a bad crop, would cause entire villages to disappear. For most of its existence, Akiyama-go had been closed off from the rest of of the world because of the heavy snow. Some say that when surveyors came to this land in the Showa period, villagers asked if the Gengi were still in power.

Katakuri-no-yado is another elementary school that no longer has school kids. It’s been turned into a lodge, and it’s a grand building.

Trying to recall piano lessons long forgotten to coax a melody from the old school organ

I'm definitely coming back for some hiking.

Heading back home

This was one of the last scenes that we saw as we sped towards Echigo Yuzawa Station to catch our train. There’s definitely something to be said for visiting the area during an non-Festival season, and we’ll be back again and again!

Rice paddies alongside Kiyotsu River

Website to be relaunched in August, 2011. We chalked the URL in Tatsuo Kawaguchi's 'Relation-Blackboard Classroom／Relation-Farmer's Work'

Photos by Ishida-san and Tomomi.

How is a project of this scale born?
The first contact came from Kenya Hara, Art Director of Nippon Design Center, in his capacity as a member of the Advisory Board at Muji. He was very interested in the iPad; he talked about it as the first device that he could relate to in the digital realm, one that also fell within Muji’s brand thinking. We were given carte blanche to create “something” for the iPad and with the release scheduled for only weeks away we jumped right into the project immediately.

How did you convince MUJI that they should be using the iPad platform?
The balance between analog and digital is slowly starting to shift to digital’s advantage. While the iPad is a recent development, it’s now improving rapidly. Within 10 years the scan rate of pen recognition, screen resolution, touch sensors – these will all have greatly advanced. Think of digital cameras 10 years ago and now, and then make the leap ahead for the iPad: Tablets might have replaced 50% of our paper use. We believe Muji has to be ready for this change happening now. Of course we want to be playing a role in this too.

If we could nail this first project then Muji could start expanding into other forms of digital tools: Textbooks, manuals, etc. The potential is limitless. So we decided the best way to start out in this new medium was through a very basic tool with the possibility to appeal to the broadest range of iPad-users, as the platform’s audience grows to become wider and more inclusive.

How did you decide on what type of app to make?
We initially proposed several apps including a notepad and screensaver. After some discussion, Muji asked us to focus on stationery, since Muji is a brand already established in that world and it is where most of their revenue comes from.
We believe that 2011 is a turning point in our history. The convergence of so many years of research into platforms, technology, and UI has finally made it possible to turn stationery – one of the oldest items in our homes – into something completely digital.

But it was hard to find the connection between Muji and the iPad. Muji creates daily commodities for anyone, while the iPad is an exclusive device, a newcomer to the digital world.

The key was to think of Muji as Stationery and the iPad as Digital. The overlapping concept for both brands is thus “Digital Stationery”. And it all makes sense with what the iPad is: It can be used in your hands, on your desk, on your lap – just like stationery. So the idea for the app was born out of where people would use their iPad.

What makes your app a Muji app?
We started by looking at notepad software in more detail. There are already many desktop applications for text editing, but most are expensive, clunky professional tools and not easy to use for Muji’s core audience. An interpretation of Muji’s brand values could be: Simple; Reasonably low cost; Good basic functionality. These 3 pillars would guide our creation of a user-friendly and low cost notepad app, as simple as the interface of a paper-based notebook: Open, Write, Save, Close.

How did you demo the app prototype without an iPad?
We first created a rough paper-based concept in April 2010 and then presented it to Muji. Their response was not very positive! At that time most people at Muji had doubts if a notepad app was the best choice for the iPad. The market for these apps on the iPhone was already crowded and the quality of the few notepad apps available on other platforms was poor. But then we created a flash-based working prototype, which we presented again to Muji, this time on a Wacom tablet. They were very happy with it and we got the “wow” response we were expecting, and a final green light to go ahead. This was in May; the iPad had just launched but no one had one in Japan yet.

Did the launch of the iPad in the US while you were still working on prototypes of the app worry you – or inspire you?
We expected a lot of the iPhone notepad apps to migrate to the iPad when it launched, and had already studied the market and existing iPhone-based apps. Actually, part of our motivation for joining the competitive market was that is was a “Red Ocean” [known market space]. Most of what Muji does is Red Ocean and it’s never scared them. We looked at the competition and at what we were dreaming of for the app, and then decided on a roadmap.

What is your strategy to remain on top of users’ needs and the competition, while still preserving the simplicity of the app and the original Muji concept guidelines?
Our goal is not to expand features but to make the app better at what it already does – details, faster speed, improved recognition – but keep the essential simplicity of the app. Participating in the features’ arm race would only contribute to lowering the value of the app and would go against its original concept.

We plan to launch new updates every 2 weeks to keep the Muji name alive in the download charts. We’ve given ourselves 2-3 years to reach the top 3 handwriting apps bracket and establish Muji as a serious app creator. We’re hoping to witness the birth of wholly new digital activities created by the digital platform.

Why aren’t these apps free? After all, as users we’ve gotten used to big brands releasing free apps.
The strategy is to continually update and enhance the app over time, and that needs a sustainable business structure. Additionally, although the freemium model is pretty popular, most existing notebook apps are paid apps, so there was no reason to release a free app.

How did you decide on the price of the app? Was it born out of a secret Muji pricing formula?
The price was actually decided based on real physical Muji notebooks. A simple Muji notebook is ¥100 and they estimate that 1 person buys on average 4-5 notebooks. Since the app can handle hundreds of different notebooks, ¥450 felt like a reasonable price. And going back to the Muji concept of being “reasonably low cost”, ¥450 is also the average price of competing apps.

Did you run user tests?
We ran an internal user test 1 month before launch, asking a typical user to perform a series of tasks with the app. We actually discovered a critical issue but weren’t able to correct it before launch. It required a fairly big change in UI and that was only fixed in the first update to the app. Thankfully, we’ve built our platform so it’s now easier to update.

Doing an internal user test before launch was a requirement, but now we have real users and it’s like having hundreds of user tests at once, every day, in various contexts: Very tough but also very meaningful feedback, and it’s motivating to get it from people who care a lot about the app.

For us, it’s a new process as we’re used to working on projects for big corporations up until their release and then usually hearing little to no feedback afterwards. This is incredibly exciting for us. Lastly, user feedback is not just about fixing things, it’s also a great source of ideas on where to take the app in the future.

What are you best and hardest memories of this project?
Best
We are Muji lovers ourselves, so it was a great privilege to work with them and meet the core team. There was very little pressure from Muji besides a launch date. We were also given carte blanche and the project was nicely coordinated. We built a great dev team for the iOS platform with 6 engineers. It was also great to hear feedback from Muji brand lovers and being able to continuously work with them to improve the app.
Hardest
The Japanese handwriting recognition part of the application was the biggest challenge. There are probably no other current examples on the market.

On loss of physicality
Paul: For a company like yours which has shown through various art installations (Furin, Furumai) how well you understand and respect the human emotions involved with touch, light, sound and the analog interface, what are your thoughts on the loss of these emotions when handling a digital notebook (the touch of the paper, the resistance of the pen tip on the paper, ink smudges, ink changing color as it dries)?

Takram: We know the limitation of emotional projection on a digital interface, yet the iPad project’s ingredients are not too far from an art project. But right now the challenge is more technical than emotional. The platform is still very young. Imagine how powerful tablet computing will have become within 10 years; it will be limitless. We want to keep up with this, dream up a whole new set of emotional references for digital interfaces over the next 10 years.