Bus karaoke

Imagine my fear Dear Reader. Here I am in Taiwan, invited to attend a study meeting on KM measurement (I’ll blog on the meeting later this week). Nineteen Asian countries participating with me as “technical expert”.

Every day, the participants and I were taken by bus about one hour out of Taipei to the venue. Then on Thursday, we all went on a “field trip” to a leading Taiwan company – to hear about their KM implementation. On the way to this company…on the bus….the representative from the Taiwan host company announced that we would have “bus karaoke”. Each participant was to sing a national folk song from their country.

I was paralysed with fear! My mind scrambled, thinking: does Australia even have a national folk song?  I came up with a crafty solution – being a New Zealander, I would say that I will do the Haka (now, THAT would have been something to watch. Me doing a traditional war dance). But I was listed as the “distinguished expert from Australia” so I had to come up with something Australian.

Then the host, Eugene, announced: “we will sing in alphabetical order”. OMG. Australia starts with A, that means I’m first. Beads of sweat were starting to trickle down my forehead (and it was only 16℃/60.8 ºF). Okay, so should I sing one of these iconic Aussie songs?

• Down Under by Men at Work – I thought I could probably belt that out reasonably well but lacked the rhythmic accompaniment;
• okay so what about Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home? A good song, even used by Qantas but heck I don’t know the words to it;
• so what about Eagle Rock by Daddy Cool. Looking around the bus at the young participants from Vietnam and Thailand, I doubted they had heard of this Aussie band from the dim, dark 1970s;
• mmm….John Williamson’s True Blue? neh, hate that song;
• how about Gangajang’s This is Australia (which I think is really titled Sounds of Then)? no hope of singing this one, no idea of the words;
• anything John Farnham??
• Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport by Rolf Harris?
• could I possibly do a Jimmy Barnes and rock out Khe Sanh? nope, don’t have that gravelly voice.

Eugene starts to saunter down the aisle of the bus, microphone in hand, waving it towards me. Those beads of sweat were turning into huge rivers. My eyes must have looked wider than a deer with the headlights beaming on them. But Dear Reader, imagine my relief when Eugene by-passed me and went straight up to J for Japan (they did a fine rendition of Sukiyaki BTW). Then on to Philippines, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand (okay he wasn’t good with the alpha order).

I started to relax, thinking to myself that the “distinguished expert” was to be saved the humiliation of having to sing…what???? Then I heard mutterings: “Eugene, you forgot Australia”. I turned around to give that person the “death stare” but it was the very nice Indonesian man, smiling happily at me.

I was doomed Dear Reader. My number was up. Like a lamb to the slaughter, the dreaded microphone headed towards me, with the lovely host, Eugene, happily chirping: “oh, how could we forget Australia!” (wish you had Eugene). So in a flash, I decided I had only one hope: Waltzing Matilda. But what the heck are the words?

I don’t recall having to sing Waltzing Matilda since I was a primary teacher, haranguing the kids with music lessons. Is it: “once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong” and what the hell was he doing under the Coolibah tree??

Eugene handed over the microphone. Stalling for time, I stood up and went on about Australia being such a multi-cultural country that we don’t actually have a national folk song, so really….I can’t sing anything, sorry. That didn’t work because several of them shouted “sing Waltzing Matilda, we know that”. You do?  Excellent. I thought if they know it, they can sing and I’ll do a Britney and just mime the words.

That didn’t work either. They all looked at me eagerly, silently, awaiting the humiliation of the “distinguished expert” I guess. And then…..reaching back into the mists of time….I remembered the lyrics of Australia’s unofficial anthem. Deep breath. Swallow. And I belted it out. They stared at me. I remember thinking to myself: “If this ends up plastered all over YouTube, someone is going to die”. I finished. They clapped loudly and several asked if I was a professional singer. The Welsh genes finally came in handy

Swiss snap

I continue to love the Swiss. Awhile back, I told you how the Swiss privacy watch dog was raising concerns about Google Street View cruising the streets of Switzerland and accused Google of potentially not protecting private citizens’ privacy. Well, now the skirmish is shaping up to be a huge cat fight to watch because the Swiss are hauling Google’s ass into court. Happy face

The Swiss are making demands and asking for a temporary injunction to stop the Google juggernaut. Apparently, Google did not comply with the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner’s recommendations around making Street View more palatable for the privacy-obsessed Swiss. Naughty Google. Here are the Swiss demands:

• up to one week before Google cruises into a town or city snapping images, they are to inform authorities. (Guess this would give people like me, who have an aversion to Street View, time to erect barricades around the home to stop the Google eye from peering into my backyard. But doesn’t really give one a chance to mount a legal challenge, so not sure that this demand goes anywhere really);
• remove any pictures of enclosed areas such as walled gardens and private streets;
• blur faces and car plate images. Since arriving in Switzerland earlier this year, it’s alleged photos of people and cars are identifiable and insufficiently blurred, especially around sensitive areas such as schools or hospitals.

Naturally, I’ll be watching this space. I think this is the first time Google has faced a law suit from a Government agency.

But here’s an interesting question. I conducted a webinar last weekend on Intellectual Property Rights for my students in Hong Kong. We were talking about copyright, industrial design, patents and so on. So..I wonder…let’s just say your home is designed by an architect. Even better, let’s imagine that the architect is you. So you would have drawings, plans, computer-assisted designs etc. Architects can protect their designs through copyright.  For example, in the US, Congress passed the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA), which amended the Copyright Act to specifically include “architectural works” among the list of protected works in 17 U.S.C. § 102. Let’s also say that your partner is a sculptor and has some original works – statues – in the garden.

So along comes Google’s Street View car. Snap, snap. The image of your house and the sculpture are plastered on the internet via Street View. Is this infringement of copyright?

Image credit: Wikipedia

Thankfully Aussies are good swimmers

My last post brought you rather depressing news about future water wars and food insecurity. Well, there’s more worrying news I’m afraid, especially if you’re an Aussie. No doubt you’ve heard about the latest climate change report that focuses on Australia: Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coasts. The report is now up on the Department of Climate Change’s website – go here.

If you can’t be bothered wading your way through this meaty report, I’ll give you the bad news:

• Australia has become a coastal society. Around 85% of the population now live along the coastline and it is of immense economic, social and environmental importance to the nation;
• all Australian state capital cities are located within the coastal zone;
• airports, sea ports and almost a quarter of a million residential homes on Australia’s coastline are at risk of disappearing under rising sea levels by 2100, if climate change continues unchecked;
• up to AU$63 billion of existing residential buildings are potentially at risk of inundation from a 1.1 metre sea-level rise;
• 157,000 to 247,600 existing residential buildings will be at risk from sea inundation by 2100, under a sea-level rise scenario of 1.1m;
• basically if you have a house along the coastline, you’re toast and will have real hassles selling;
• the report offers 47 recommendations such as reviewing evacuation plans (yep, I’d get these plans ready fast) and overhauling building codes to ensure sturdier homes.

Basically dear Aussies, our number is up. Our beach way of life, lazying on the beach, swimming and surfing, golden sand squishing between the toes – all the stuff that makes up our national identity – is threatened by climate change. We’d all better adapt to living away from the coastline and get used to far hotter weather and wilder weather patterns. Insurance companies are already refusing to insure coastal homes and are now tallying up the potential costs (AU$150 billion and counting).

The cat fight I reckon will be over the big question: who’s going to pay? Will owners of beachfront homes get compensation from local councils or State governments? Have State and local authorities got it together yet? – what are their plans for protecting coastal areas and citizens, coastal buildings, public works etc? My bet is that State and local authorities will scramble to protect public buildings and fret over whether angry residents, with beachfront homes sliding into the sea due to soil erosion or inundation, will create public safety issues. They won’t give a toss about the thousands of home owners who will see the value of their expensive beach front homes go belly up. Call me cynical but that’s what I think will happen.

A plan to save civilization

This coming week, I’m in Taiwan but through the magic of auto-posts, ThinkingShift lives on. I hope to take heaps of shots with my new plastic fantastic Superheadz Pink Dress camera.

But today I’m bringing you a slide presentation you need to look at. Awhile back I told you about Lester Brown, the American environmentalist. His website, Earth Policy Institute, has just published a slideshow called Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Plan B refers to the response to the environmental challenges our planet now faces. The major challenges, as I’ve blogged about many times, are food insecurity and climate change. Here’s a summary of the slide show:

• Earth’s average temperature will rise 1.1-6.4˚C (33.98 ºF-43.52 ºF) during the 21st century;
• we are already outpacing these predictions;
• crop yields drop by 10% for every 1˚C rise in temperature;
• in an effort to ensure their own food security, some affluent food importing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, China and South Korea have begun buying or leasing land abroad to grow their own food. If you don’t believe that rich dude countries are leasing foreign land, then check out this – Pakistan is having a hissy fit that Saudi Arabia is planning to lease 202,342.8 hectares of farmland in Pakistan. I would have thought Pakistan had enough hungry people without leasing out precious land. And Libya is planning to grow wheat on 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) in Ukraine ;
• historians have argued long and hard that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to food shortages and skirmishes over access to food (along with the Sumerian and Mayan civilisations). The fall of our own civilisation will be due to food shortages and battles over water. I’m now seeing articles about future water wars. My own view is that we’ll see the rise of water privateers. Here’s just one example I can give you of how the poor in developing countries (not to mention you and me) will get shafted by the privatisation of water. Water is going to be the oil of the 21st Century. Private companies will buy rights to water. Two French companies – Suez Lyonnaise des eaux and Vivendi Environnement – are the ones I think we need to watch. Just search for these two companies on the internet – go ahead, it will freak you out to find that these two companies alone supply water to 230 million people around the world (and this includes the US).

The slide show offers up some responses (Plan B):

• a worldwide switch to highly-efficient lighting would cut electricity use 12%, equivalent to closing 705 coal-fired power plants;
• the wind potential in North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone could satisfy U.S. energy needs.

There are heaps of ideas in the slide show to save the planet and our civilisation. There are also a ton of facts that will freak you out such as:

• soaring food prices – from mid-2006 to mid-2008, world grain and soybean prices tripled;
• since 1981, oil extraction has exceeded new discoveries by a widening margin. Most of the easily recovered oil is already pumped;
• between 1950 and 2000, world water use tripled. Some 70% of water use is for irrigation. Over-extraction is leading to disappearing lakes and rivers failing to reach the sea. Aquifer depletion is causing water tables to fall and wells to go dry;
• massive Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are melting at accelerating rates. Together hold enough water to raise sea level 12 meters (39 feet). A 10-meter rise in sea level today would inundate coastal areas home to more than 600 million people.

Free 3 month subscription to CHOICE!!

So..you know I recently blogged and twittered about the CHOICE Lab tour and live-twittered the CHOICE Shonky awards – a glittering ceremony where awards were given out for shonky products and services. I had great fun twittering the event. Just in case you missed it, here are the winners and my photos taken at the awards are at the end of this post (I was concentrating on twittering, ergo the photos aren’t that great):

• Plugging Stuff and Nonsense goes to Reegen Micro-Plug
• Cheese-Fearing Surrender Monkey goes to Tiffany FP807 Food processor
• Water at What Price?  goes to Chef’s Cupboard and Massel liquid stocks
• Honey (Oat crisp), I shrunk the groceries goes to Uncle Toby Oat Crisp Honey cereal
• Blinding us with dodgy science goes to L’Oréal Elvive
• Profit Protection Insurance goes to the Credit protection insurance industry
• Sky high surcharges goes to Qantas and Tiger Airways
• Teleconfusication goes to Tel.pacific phone cards

Now to the really exciting stuff. CHOICE is GIVING AWAY A 3 MONTH FREE SUBSCRIPTION to CHOICE magazine to a lucky ThinkingShift reader!!! The competition is only open to AUSTRALIAN RESIDENTS. Sad face. I know a lot of my readers are from the US. But to win it, you gotta be an Aussie living in Oz. So what do you have to do I hear you ask?

Check out the link above for the Shonky awards and the winners. The ThinkingShift competition is a slightly different twist – it’s the People’s CHOICE award for the all-time shonkiest product you’ve come across.  Leave a comment and tell me what that product was and why it was shonky, just like the Shonky winners above. I’ll select the winning entry and then contact you for details, so make sure you leave me an email address. CHOICE will then grab your details and send out your FREE 3-month membership. I’ll base my selection on what sounds like the most dodgiest, shonkiest, amazingly “What the?” product or service I’ve heard about in a long time.

So you gotta be in it to win it as they say. Competition open until Tuesday November 24th 6.00pm. Happy face!

Don’t do it NZ!

Well, I never thought I’d have to sling off at my beloved New Zealand but what the??? Has NZ taken a leaf out of the Bush Administration’s book of unwarrantless surveillance?  Are NZ citizens about to become the most surveilled on Earth, taking over from the Brits?

There’s a little piece of legislation NZ’ers need to worry about – the Search and Surveillance Bill 45-1 (2009). If you want to hyperventilate, have a read of the whole Bill. If you want to be spared the discomfort of lack of breath, I’ll summarise for you. As I understand this Bill, it will:

• give increased search and surveillance powers for government agencies, other than police, who have law enforcement responsibilities. This would include agencies such as the Fisheries Ministry, the Inland Revenue Deparment, Commerce Commission, the Reserve Bank and even…wait for it…the Pork Industry Board;
• what are these increased powers I hear you ask? These agencies will have the ability to eavesdrop on phone conversations, hack into computers and use hidden cameras to watch every move you make. This will include the power to use tracking devices without a person knowing they are being tracked.

I’ll pause here. A good friend of  mine joked the other day that I have the sort of suspicious mind that might lead me to suspect that pot plants are listening into my conversation. She was of course joking (I think). But reading this Bill, it would seem that an NZ agency could indeed place an eavesdropping device into a pot plant. Now, I do wonder what on earth the Fisheries and Pork Industry dudes would be doing – do they plan to use the goldfish in people’s homes to eavesdrop or farm pigs?

Joking aside this Bill has been slammed by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the NZ Privacy Commissioner. The word “chilling” has been used to describe this Bill.

Let’s look further:

• on my reading of the Bill, non-state agencies (such as fisheries, conservation or labour) will be able to conduct warrantless surveillance or compel a person to answer questions or handover computer access codes (clause 125(4)(a).  To require NZ citizens to answer questions is the removal of the right to silence and a total invasion of civil liberties;
• unfair searches and seizures could be conducted;
• these agencies will have the power to detain anyone at the scene of a search.

I don’t see much in the way of safeguards or accountability built into this Bill. For example, once remote accessing of your computer has taken place or you’ve been tracked by video camera for days on end, is there a requirement that the agency in question inform you that surveillance has taken place and has finished?  Doesn’t seem so.

When I come back from Taiwan, I plan to look into this further. I’m concerned that, particularly with computer searches, there are muddy waters – and this could lead to mixing up private data with evidentiary data.

Clause 57 has me fretting also. It deals with obtaining residual warrants for surveillance. Section 3 of the Bill defines a surveillance device as:  

(a) an interception device;

(b) a tracking device;

(c) a visual surveillance device

So residual warrants cover surveillance that is not of a visual, electronic or tracking nature. Clause 57 goes on to say that a law enforcement agency, if they wish to use a surveillance technique, procedure, or activity other than that defined in Section 3 must obtain a residual warrant. As I read it, the technique, procedure or activity could include covert entry into a private citizen’s home.

I don’t have many NZ readers. Most of my readers are from the US and Americans well know the sort of warrantless surveillance crap and threats to democracy and civil liberties that have been slung at them by Bush and his croneys. I hope that NZ citizens kick up a stink about this Bill. I believe that it was met with such criticism that it won’t potentially become law until May 2010. I just hope it doesn’t sail through Parliament.

If you know more, leave a comment.

Image credit: Tumeke!

Games for change

So you know the next two weeks will be thin on the ground for me – I’ll be flat out like the proverbial lizard preparing for my KM study meeting in Taiwan, flying to Taiwan blah blah.

I don’t want you to hit the Unsubscribe button though because I’ll be back with those long, raving and ranting posts I know you love so much. But to clear up my backlog of interesting stuff to share with you – here’s a great site I found that uses games to bring attention to the most pressing issues of our day, such as poverty, human rights, global conflict and climate change.

So a lot of arty geeky types, along with academics, journalists and individuals from the nonprofit and government sectors have collaborated on the site Games for Change. I’ve been dabbling with some of them because I need to design curriculum in the next few months.

There are various game channels – I really wish I had access to this sort of interactive, educative stuff when I was a teacher back in the mists of time. I particularly like the games on global conflict and human rights. They deal with real-world issues.

Check out this game – 3rd World Farmer - designed for ages 11+ years, the game lets players manage a small virtual farm in a developing country and experience the hardships and dilemmas faced by the poor.

Ars Regendi is a political game where a player can found their own State and lead it according to his or her political ideals. And Escape from Woomera is probably a very timely game for Aussies to play given the current situation with Sri Lankan refugees. The game gets players to try and escape from an immigration detention centre.

And my favourite? It’s a game called Civilization IV: Quality of Life and involves players in using their moral values to reward a society.

Given Gen Y and Millenials penchant for virtual worlds, these digital games are a fabulous way of raising social, legal and moral issues and facilitating social change. The site also has a toolkit of the game-making process and prompts you to think about the sorts of questions you need to ask if you’re thinking of designing a digital game. Cool!

Future of learning

For the next couple of weeks,  I will be “on the road”. I’m off to Taiwan to participate in an Asia Pacific Knowledge Management study meeting.  I’ll be speaking on Intellectual Capital – more when I come back.  See – I actually still do stuff in KM

This is good news for you dear reader as it means I won’t have any time for long, ranting posts.

But next week, I’ll be offering a lucky reader a 3 month free subscription to Choice magazine! Stay tuned for competition details.

Meanwhile, I have a backlog of interesting stuff to share with you. Look what I’ve found!  I’m excited by this even if you’re not. I spend a fair bit of time teaching uni students. This semester, I’ve taken a break from face-to-face teaching but in 2010 I’ll be getting back into it. For over 6 years, I’ve been teaching in a virtual environment via an online facilitation system. This of course means that I spend a fair bit of thinking time on education – how to engage students; how to design interactive stuff; how to encourage students to engage in intellectual discourse and so on.

So I was doing some research about educational trends and I found this cool site on the future of learning. I often wonder if F2F teaching will become a quaint relic of the past and whether students and lecturers will be engaging in a virtual environment like Second Life. I wonder how gamers will influence learning; or how Gen Y will bring a whole new perspective to education.

The 2020 forecast has some great insights and examines the forces that will impact on education over the next few years.  Here’s a quick summary:

• we are shifting towards a “culture of creation” and this means individuals can grasp the opportunity to create new selves, organisations, systems, societies, economies and knowledge;
• “educitizens” define their rights as learners. Participatory media will lead to a re-articulation of identity and community in a global society;
• resilience (which is a concept I spend a lot of time thinking about in relation to KM) – schools and educators will need to equip students with skills that facilitate resilience eg networking power; using social media to engage with the wider community; applying collective intelligence;
• new tools for visualising data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns – I actually think this will be a huge area for educators as software applications that help people to visually think and problem solve become smarter;
• local values will reawaken. Economies of group connectivity—combined with fears of globalism and concern over dominance of big business—will create a revival of localism. New civic processes will emerge and educators and learners will need to engage with this;
• youth media and Gen Y will dominate – smart networkers will push the organisational edge for employers and community leaders. Gen Y’s experience with interactive games and virtual worlds will result in community learning that stresses cooperative strategies, experimentation and parallel development.

There’s sooooooooo much on this site and explored in the trend map but I’m short on time as I have to prepare stuff on intellectual capital. So I’m going to leave it to you to check out the interactive map - pretty cool the way you can navigate the map and drill deeper. At the very least, it will trigger thoughts about the way educators and learners will need to change course over the next few years and how a “learning ecosystem” will be the future of learning.

Make sure you check out the section on Altered Bodies and A New Civic Discourse. For KM people, there’s also some great resources on scenario planning.

The library as conversation

Are you going to get a Kindle? Have one already? I don’t get it because I prefer to hold the book in my hands. So what’s the future of libraries, stuffed full of wonderfully musty smelling tomes? Does the library have a future at all? Will it be full of Kindles that can be loaned out? If they eventually come in hot pink, I might be tempted

I came across this fantastic presentation and audio from R. David Lankes, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, which provides insights into the future of libraries and librarianship. He starts off with a fairly confronting statement:

“(Librarians) have become so busy and adept at keeping the library efficient and well-managed that we have lacked the space to step back and observe it from a high level”.

And then goes on to say that: “The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities“.  So it’s not about books and collections. I remember when I first started my career in knowledge management there was a lot of angst over whether librarians were information managers whilst knowledge managers were some sort of more evolved species dealing with knowledge (and some dudes even call themselves “wisdom architects”, which if you believe the twaffle of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid, is the most evolved of all species).

But now I think we’ve reached the point in the debate where we can say that we are all doing the same thing, albeit concentrating on different aspects. So records managers, information managers, knowledge managers – we’re all attempting to facilitate knowledge creation, transfer and continuity. The fact that records managers concentrate on retention and compliance whilst knowledge managers may focus on collaboration and decision-making are simply different lenses looking at the same thing. In fact, my KM colleague, Baoman, has a well-crafted reflection piece on his blog in which he ponders this very subject, inspired by gentleman and scholar, Patrick Lambe.

So I very much liked Lankes’ vision for the mission of librarians (not libraries note) and that knowledge and learning is created through conversation and conversation theory. Conversation theory consisting of:

• language
• memory
• conversants – exchanging language
• agreements – between conversants (even if it’s agreeing not to agree)

So he’s suggesting that librarians are in the conversation business and need to be facilitators of conversations. Lankes uses the term “participatory librarianship” and says that participatory librarians “seek to enrich, capture, store and disseminate the conversations of their communities”. Further, he queries the rigidity of catalogues when users are now familiar with tagging and folksonomies and asks – how do we build systems that all users can use and he looks at social networking sites (where users build the system around themselves and their own language). Users now construct an open discovery space.

Lankes also emphasises that skills change eg cataloguing skills and that library education should equip a librarian for change. And this means librarians as activists, lobbying for change, innovating and proactively serving the community. He believes the best days of librarianship are ahead of us not behind us. To get maximum benefit out of the presentation, listen to the audio. Almost makes me want to go back into librarianship.

Also, check out Lankes’ website, which basically provides you with a Participatory Librarianship Starter Kit (articles, presentations and webcasts). Great stuff!

Open wallets

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. The highlight was being invited to blog and Twitter about the Choice Shonky awards. I’ve become a real fan of Twitter actually – despite earlier doubts. I much prefer it to Facebook, which I don’t use really (am I the only person on the planet who doesn’t use FB??). I prefer the live conversation going on in the Twittersphere and the connections you can make. If you missed my blog post about the Choice lab tour and the Twitter stream, go here and here.

And speaking of the connections one can make on Twitter, I’ve connected with some really interesting people. I’ve even connected with a KM colleague in Melbourne, who I’ve never met and just put him in touch with a company in Melbourne who contacted me about some consulting work in KM. And one of my Twitter connections is Dr Stephen Saunders who is @shoppologist

Regular readers know I don’t pimp products on this blog but I will mention stuff I think is useful or would like you to know about (and no, I don’t get paid). So to today’s post. Stephen is an expert in consumer behaviour and has over 25 years’ experience with retail and marketing organisations.  Pause: I had to chuckle a bit – thinking of how Stephen would scratch his head in puzzlement if he ever followed me on one of my shopping “kamikaze raids”. Would his years of experience equip him to cope with me, in full flight, at the lip gloss counter??!!

I digress. Stephen has put his expertise to great use and produced a book that is a gem for both retailers and consumers. It’s amazing to what extent psychology is used to attract shoppers and try to keep them in the store. I love looking at retail shop windows – particularly quirky or brightly coloured displays. One of my favs is L’Occitane, who have the kind of shop display that just tempts you to wander in. You expect to smell the lavender of Provence as you enter the shop.

Another shop window you might find me in front of (I try not to go in though) is Darrel Lea, which is an Australian family-owned confectionery company in business since 1927. They have consistently colourful and intriguing window and in-store displays like this:

But there are things that will propel me out of a shop fast:

• cheap, tacky, nasty looking displays with confusing signs screaming 50% off here, 30% off there. Like this:

• shops that look cluttered or the entrance is festooned with bins of 50% items, like this:

• harsh lighting that makes you wish you’d brought your sunglasses along, like this:

• dead boring shop front windows that scream beige-ness, like this:

So what does Stephen have to say in his fab e-book? Well, can’t give too much away – you can buy it here. But some tidbits for you:

• “Shoppers like to belong to groups called shopping ‘tribes’ – any good tribe has a badge or insignia. This is also why a good shopping bag is important”. (Mmmmm…never thought of it this way. Must admit I like my Body Shop and L’Occitane bags, which identifies me as belonging to the environmentally sensitive shopping tribe I guess);
• don’t put stock outside the store – destroys sight lines, adds clutter, conveys ‘discount’ image”. (Totally agree: I hate those discount shopping bins outside a shop. I always feel like I’m rummaging through reject stuff, stuff other people have not wished to purchase. It’s like you’re getting palmed off with second best-crap);
• “Shoppers want to identify with their stores, they want to know what a store stands for. Especially important for browsers.” (Yep: personally I think this is something a lot of retailers just don’t get. This is why I like, for example, L’Occitane. The “story” is obvious and told via the window and shop displays – authentic and natural products);
• “There should be some ‘mystery’ about the layout – areas that look interesting from the front of the store”;
• “Don’t let your merchandising disrupt navigation sight lines”.

There’s a heap of practical advice and tons of photos to illustrate Stephen’s points.  I learnt some valuable lessons about the psychology used to tempt shoppers. Check out the e-book and also Stephen’s blog, which I particularly like because he always seems to be cruising around shops taking photos (great job!). I have shamelessly ganked photos from his blog for this post.

Meanwhile, Stephen here’s a story for you. The other day, I was at Priceline in Toronto NSW. I know Priceline well in Sydney and quite like that shop as there is plenty of room to browse and you don’t get swooped on by the dolly birds asking “can I help you or are you just happy browsing?” (really hate this: if I need help I’ll ask thanks). So I walk into this Priceline and at the very door to the shop the dolly bird asks the question. I flee to an aisle and settle in for some lipgloss browsing, only to be aware of the dolly bird lurking pretty close behind me.  She asked (again) THE question to which I replied “look, I’m just browsing thx”. She keeps lurking in the aisle, not far away. My patience melted and I asked her why she was standing there. Her response was “I have to stay in this aisle”. Okay, maybe this is because (a) the retailer is worried about shoplifting; or (b) this is standard practice. Whichever, it’s ANNOYING to have someone so blatantly lurking nearby.

So if it’s not in your e-book Stephen, please add “Note to retailers: do not ruffle the feathers of your customers by irritating them with obvious security measures. This signals lack of trust to your customer”.

Needless to say, I gave up browsing and left Priceline in a hissy fit sans lipgloss.