Yesterday while in Paris we visited the wonderful Manufacture des Gobelins, a centuries old site for making tapestries and doing wool dying (though the dying is no longer done there - too much pollution!). They have terrific guided tours that are very informative (though only in French, so I was only able to catch a fraction and my wife translated for me), and you get to see the modern-day artisans at work, as well as many of their completed and in-progress tapestries, the majority of which are in a modern art style. Never have I seen such a painstaking and prolonged production process.

The pictures here are of some of the people working on a very large recreation of a tapestry originally made for King Louis XVI (late 1700’s). The tapestry measures 5.62 x 7.26m (18.4’ x 23.8’), and is done in a tufted style of manufacture that is extremely labor-intensive. How intensive? They have been working on this since 16 April, 1994. As of the end of last year, it was 88.8% done!

As you can see from the pictures, several people can work on it simultaneously as the loom is very large. In fact, the creation has been going on for the equivalent of 5 full-time people for 7293 days.

You can see the original painting that was used as the reference for the original tapestry above the artisans. As they work on a new section, a new piece of the painting is put in place. Somehow they manage to keep track of where they are, and keep everything to scale. (Click on the images for large versions.)

In this photo you can see one of the artisans doing what takes a lot of the time, trimming and arranging each individual tuft with a pair of scissors. It works like this: when then the wool is first woven in place it is left rough-cut, and then they come in and trim each tuft individually to height. This allows a thick tapestry that is soft looking, like a painting.  After this, they then go back and wiggle the individual tufts back into alignment with the very tip of the scissor blade. Here, she is working on smoothing the edges of the grapes so that they look nice and round.

Lastly, a close up of the spools of wool. There are thousands of shades that have been optimized over the centuries. Essentially tapestry making is a digital process - a finite color palette and pixels, with colors often “dithered” to create blends.

Perhaps you’ll give Microsoft a bit more flexibility with its Vista release  

I’m going to be on vacation in Paris for the next couple of weeks. It’s sweltering hot there, but who cares? Chances are I won’t post much (if you can call once a week posting “much”!), but you never know….

I’m just about to head out on a vacation to Europe, which of course entails a long plane trip from San Francisco and extended bouts of iPod surfing. If you fly a lot, you really owe it to yourself to buy some better headphones than those that come with the iPod. In my humble opinion, the iPod stock headphones are pretty poor, and in my ears are quite uncomfortable. Like most bud headphones they also let in a lot of ambient sound, which on a plane flight means two things: no bass, and you have to crank up the volume to potentially ear-damaging levels to be able to hear very well. On a long flight, this isn’t pleasant or good for you.

Noise-cancelling headphones such as from Bose have been one solution to this. While these can be quite effective, personally I find them too bulky/heavy, and dislike relying on more batteries.

An alternative is noise-isolating earphones. These get inserted in your ear canal and seal it off against ambient sound. They typically have about a 25db cut in external noise, which is enough to make it difficult to hear people talking to you (good or bad, depending on your circumstance), and it also makes airplane drone largely disappear. Putting them in and wearing them can take some getting used to (and I suppose some people will never like them), but the benefits are well worth it. You can listen to your iPod at virtually normal level on an airplane, and the earphones have sound isolating qualities even when not actually listening to music, which helps you get to sleep as well.

My personal favorites are made by a small company named Etymotic, which started life in the hearing aid businesses. I use the model ER6i (pictured), which is designed specifically for the iPod. They make some more expensive models, one of which I tried as well, and the sound quality was truly phenomenal, but the price was higher than I was OK paying. Give me a pair of ER6i’s, an Eagle Creek inflatable lumbar support, an eye cover, and I’m all set. 11 hour flight? Bring it on.

Shure also makes a number of models which are quite popular, though personally the narrower, longer shape of the earbuds on the Etymotics suits my ears better (the Shures are wider and stubbier). I also had some problems with the jack connection on both sets of my Shures (one replaced the other under warranty, but then developed the same problem after the same 6 month period), but many other people like them.

I bought my Etymotics from Headroom as I like their attitude, their service, and their prices, but you can buy them from quite a few places.

I’m excited to say that I project that I was heavily involved with has come to fruition, and has been written up in Businessweek (which quotes me quite generously ). It’s the Turbochef speed-cook oven, a very high-end double wall oven that can cook foods in speeds a fraction of their normal time (such as a 12lb turkey in 42 minutes instead of several hours). Unlike earlier fast-cooking methods such as microwaves, I can attest from personal experience that Turbochef’s oven turns out dishes that are at least as good as those cooked in conventional ovens. This was a really challenging and interesting project to work on, as I enjoy cooking and the culture of food, as well as figuring out how to make high tech products fit into people’s existing lives and ways of doing things.

This was a real 360 degree problem. To understand its whole scope we did a broad range of research to arrive at the insights that led to the distinctive design: ethnography, retail interviews and shadowing, talking with pro-chefs and caterers, talking with kitchen designers, taking cooking classes, researching changes over the last 50 years of food’s relationship to culture/technology/gender roles, and using the oven itself to learn its differences.

A number of speed cook ovens have been on the market for a while, but none have been very successful. In fact, Turbochef provided us an older oven based on a variation of their technology (sold under another brand) for us to use, and use it we did for frog’s traditional “coffeetime” that all frog offices do at 4pm. My colleague, Pilar Strutin-Belinoff, worked up a great array of recipes for us to try in the oven for a week, and it gave us a great lesson of using the product first hand, and what things we really needed to work on in the interface.

Though the unusual looks of the oven (more on that in a moment) are what grab attention first, the interface was a huge challenge. Speedcooking ovens work in a fundamentally different way, not just in terms of their technologies but also in how they affect your cooking style and the timing of your dishes. Figuring out how long to cook something is more complicated than usual as you cannot rely on normal menu instructions. The cooking temperature and method (convection, forced air, or microwave) have to be varied algorithmically over time, which requires knowing exactly what’s in the oven, both in terms of composition and weight. The interface had to gracefully accomodate all this complexity in a way that helped occasional cooks feel comfortable and not make enthusiast cooks feel shackled. The interface design team at frog, led by Cordell Ratzlaff, did a great job.

The industrial design was led by Andy Logan, and the look of it is stunning (and the pictures don’t really convey the sensuality and massiveness of the design). It intentionally harkens back to older stoves like Wedgewoods, which was something we found in our in-home visits that people really had fond memories of, and they really preferred that softer feel to the hard-edged modern ovens. (Check out the slideshow that Businessweek has handily provided, you’ll see a lot of these “euro” style ovens.) There are many details I love about the design, not least of which is the analog clock.

Businessweek makes passing mention of the business challenge of this project also: Turbochef was a commercial company trying to enter the residential space, which is a very difficult thing to do in this industry; there aren’t that many precedents. It’s not well known that Viking actually didn’t start out as a commercial appliance manufacturer, they have conjured a well-crafted story giving that impression (and done very well with it). Wolf is one of the few to have succeeded. But I think Turbochef is in great shape to succeed as well. The oven was a hit at the big kitchen appliance show K/BIS earlier this year, and it’s exciting to see how it will do in the market.