Pedalling the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct

Built by Thomas Telford in 1795, the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries the Llangollen canal at a phenomenal height of 126 foot above the River Dee. Walking over it is an experience you remember. The moment you step out along the 1007ft chasm and look down, your legs feel like jelly and (at least in my case), the only way to reach the other side is to hang tightly onto the railing and fix one’s eyes on the other end.

The British Waterways Canal Guide writes enticingly that “the excitement to be derived from crossing this structure by boat is partly due to the fact that, while the towpath side is fenced off with, albeit widely spaced, iron railings, the offside of the canal is completely unprotected from about 12in above the water level.”

So, inspired by this, we drove up to Llangollen last weekend with our 17 foot Winsome pedal boat on the roof. We launched over the bank at Chirk and pedalled Winsome the 3 or 4 miles to Froncysyllte and on across the aqueduct to Trevor. We had a great time but the actual crossing of the aqueduct was slightly disappointing. It was certainly a far less thrilling experience than crossing by foot – in fact neither of us felt even the slightest hint of vertigo at all. We were left puzzling why this might be. Our conclusion was that, from the boat, we couldn’t look vertically down, only at an angle and that doesn't induce vertigo. It’s also possible that, by sitting in a boat, we didn’t have any of the usual fear of falling.

I tried to find some commentary on this effect on the Net but, so far, have only found a bunch of aircraft pilots swapping stories about their fear of heights. They are quite entertaining….

“Any kind of flying, I'm fine. That includes open cockpit microlights, gyroplanes which are like aerial motorbikes, and even hang gliding (though I never got beyond tethered flight). But I have trouble climbing ladders, and when I went tall ship sailing I absolutely refused to climb aloft to the crows nest. No-one could believe a pilot would be almost the only person who never went aloft even by the end of two weeks, but just looking at other people up there made me feel sick. Fear of falling? I don't know, but it makes more sense than anything else.”

“Bizarre. I thought it was just me! I can't bring myself to ride my bike over the Dartford Bridge (I can just about get myself to drive over in the car), yet the other day I was quite happily doing a tight turn over it at 1500' whilst looking down the wing and thinking 'there's that bridge I can't ride over'.”

Meanwhile, I wonder what swimming over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct would feel like and whether anyone’s done it.

Winsome Pedal Skiff

This is the 17 foot Winsome Pedal Skiff which we have been developing with Nick and Matt Newland of Swallow Boats of Cardigan. This is the prototype. The product version is due to be launched in August 2006. We've demonstrated her at 4 Boat Shows and pedalled a few hundred miles in her in a variety of locations including: Monmouthshire and Abergavenny canal, Llangollen canal, Norfolk Broads, Teifi Estuary at Cardigan, River Thames at Henley and the River Severn at Worcester. She was reviewed in Autumn 2005 by Watercraft Magazine.

Winsome, Gender and Technology

We’ve spent the last 3 days at the Thames Boat Show marketing our pedal skiff ‘Winsome’ which we’ve developed in partnership with Swallow Boats Ltd.

Winsome (named after my late aunt) is a 17 foot elegant pedal boat which two people can propel in a relaxed and laid back fashion whilst sipping wine or reading the Sunday papers. You can see more about the product here.

The Thames Boat Show focuses on traditional looking wooden boats and kits and the clientele is usually fairly heavily dominated by men often trailing slightly reluctant looking wives and kids. However, we were delighted to discover that Winsome seems to appeal to women just as much as men – maybe even more. I was also intrigued by the fact that the visitors at the show revealed such marked (but familiar) gender differences in the kinds of questions they asked about the boat – both before and after they tried it out.

The men focussed on the technical questions – “What gearing ratio are you using?” “What size is the propeller?” “How many knots will the boat do?” and “What material is the gear box housing?” Meanwhile, the women (equally engaged) focussed on asking about the kinds of places you could go in such a boat, how many of the family could come along and the kinds of trips we had already done.

This is exactly in line with research studies I have done recording men and women conversing about a range of technical artefacts. Although the popular view is that men are more interested in technical artefacts than women are, we actually found no disparity in the levels of interest. The difference was that the men’s interest focussed on the technology itself – its features, its performance and how to operate it. In contrast, the women showed little or no interest in features or performance. They enthused about the uses they had found for an artefact – i.e. the interesting or useful things it enabled THEM to do.

We are hoping that coincidentally with Winsome, we have designed a product which engages the interests of both genders – it involves some novel and intriguing engineering AND can take you to novel and intriguing places!

Remembering "The Facts"

I have to confess to being an avid follower (although rare contributor) to various Welsh rugby chat lines although I think it’s my love of psychology rather than my love of rugby which keeps me glued to these discussions.

I particularly enjoy the heated debates about “what happened at the game last night” – how can two parties who both (in theory) witnessed the same game (albeit wearing different coloured shirts) produce such wildly different “factual” accounts of what happened? I can understand there would be differences in interpretation between the two sets of supporters and certainly differences in the perceived significance of various incidents but it’s the differences in the reported facts about individual performances which intrigues me.

So, I was interested to read a few weeks ago about a study by David Pizarro at Cornell University. He told experimental subjects a ‘true’ story about a man who walked out of a restaurant without paying the bill. Half the subjects were told that the man left the restaurant because he was a thief who regularly stole. The other half of the subjects were told that the man rushed out because he’d received an emergency call on his mobile ‘phone. A week later, when recalling this story, those who had been told the man was a thief remembered the restaurant bill as being 10-25% higher than it actually was. Those who thought the man had rushed off to deal with an emergency recalled the bill as being lower than it actually was!

So, it seems our memory for facts can indeed be altered depending on the attitude we hold towards the key actors in any event.

My late father, who suffered from fronto-temporal dementia, used to relate to us increasingly distorted factual accounts of his day to day life. He once told me how the previous day “two young men grabbed hold of me so hard that one rib bone flew past my right ear and one past my left ear and I hit the ceiling so hard I stuck there by my hair”. In his case, my father seemed to have reached a point where his mind would fairly freely construct a ‘factual’ story out of nowhere to ‘account’ for his strongly positive or negative attitude towards individuals he had encountered. His memory for events seemed disturbingly bizarre at the time. But, on reflection, maybe it was simply a more extreme version of the way all our memories work – we start with a gut level emotional response (blood chemistry basically) and construct (or at least adapt) the ‘facts’ to match the feelings.

Now back to the rugby chat lines…

The old ones are the best

I usually write this blog about once a week. But on those occasions when I feel that my last week’s blog was particularly interesting or well-observed ;) I experience some reluctance in “overlaying it” with today’s more recent offering…. It feels as though the articles “underneath” will now never get looked at – especially the ones right at the bottom of the pile.

But on his Long Tail blog this week, Chris Anderson was reflecting on the power of search engines in discovering archived content. As Anderson points out, our thinking about information has been dominated by the newspaper model – new information is the only thing which matters and the only thing we pay attention to. We don’t bother to read what it said in yesterday’s newspaper – however good the articles were. In contrast, Anderson points out that search engines like Google are ‘time agnostic’ – what matters to them is relevance as measured by the number of links a page of content has acquired. Quite rightly, this reflects the level of other people’s interest in that content and the significance they attached to it. And, obviously, the longer any information has been hanging around (if it was interesting or useful at all), the more such links it will have gained.

So, the blog I wrote some months ago (which I (at least) still consider to be the most interesting!) could well be the one which people (who have never encountered my blog) are the most likely to find via Google and read. And that could be true even in a year’s time. I like that.

Mind you, maybe, this model wouldn’t work for someone whose theories about the world and human nature evolve more quickly than mine do.

Buying art in TK Maxx

Yesterday in TK Maxx, I watched a lady browsing art. The art, in this case, consisted of a selection of framed prints, limited editions and a number of original canvases. As one expects in TK Maxx, the subject matter, style and quality of art on offer was much more diverse than would be normal in other art shops or departments.

The shopper in question seemed really attracted by a Thomas Kinkade style oil original (unnamed artist) in a realistic landscape tradition. But suddenly she put that down and switched her interest to a signed limited edition print by a known contemporary artist which was semi-abstract and modern in style. As far as I could see, the two pictures had absolutely nothing in common (see above) apart from sharing roughly similar prices (~£25). The shopper happily placed the semi-abstract work in her wire trolley and moved on.

I was left wondering – had she come to TK Maxx to look for art? Did she know the kind of art she liked or was looking for? Did she have both kinds of art in her home already? Was she maybe swung by the fact that she could acquire a signed limited edition for a mere £25? – in terms of the art world, this certainly represents extraordinary value.

The research we have done suggests that consumers typically enter a shop (or website) and rapidly scan the range of products on display in order to locate “the kind of stuff they like” (be that art, furniture or clothes). They then ignore the majority of products on offer and concentrate their attention on that much reduced search space which matches their taste. This obviously minimises the cognitive load of shopping – especially for items which need to appeal to one’s aesthetic taste. But TK Maxx doesn’t enable you to do that. The store provides no grouping of the clothes, home furnishings or art by style, label, fashion or taste – only by functional category and size. Given the diversity of their sources and the rapidity of their turnover, it’s difficult to see how else they could operate.

So, I’m left puzzling over the following questions…

Do TK Maxx’s regular customers have a very different cognitive ‘sorting’ strategy when it comes to shopping for aesthetic items like clothes or art? or

Do they have or a much greater tolerance for large and complex search spaces? or

Do they possess a much more eclectic (or at least less rigid) set of aesthetic tastes? or

Are they more confident (than the rest of the population) in constructing their own unique taste combinations, i.e. their own personal ‘brand’?

I don’t know.

Maybe, it’s simply that TK Maxx actually reflects the essence of retail therapy – i.e. the goal is to browse, find and acquire “a bargain” – the nature of the product itself is not the goal.

I hope there may be a chance to explore this at some point and find out.

Enjoying the moment (or not)

Having endured the Llanelli Scarlets losing 3 rugby matches on the trot in the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting (as I am forced to do from time to time) why I pay good money to “enjoy” such experiences.

Well firstly, I did enjoy anticipating each of these matches and the bigger the match, the more intense the pleasure of anticipation. So, I certainly got some enjoyment there.

Secondly, I know that IF we had eventually won any of these matches (and that was a real possibility in all 3 cases) then, having gritted my teeth for some lengthy parts of the match, I’d have revelled in the memory of it for some while afterwards (up until our next loss in fact).

So, paradoxically, maybe one’s enjoyment of the actual 80 minutes of the match itself is the wrong bit to focus on!

It turns out there is some truth in this – even for pleasurable experiences. A series of studies back in 1997 showed that people’s expectations of pleasurable experiences (such as holidays or day trips) and their recollections of them afterwards are both more positive than their experience of the events whilst they are actually happening!

And Kahneman, the hedonics specialist, argues that the “psychological present” only lasts somewhere between 0.5 and 3 seconds anyway – so maybe “how it feels at the time” is rarely the point! Most of our experience of life is either in anticipation or recollection – it’s very difficult (and maybe even somewhat disappointing) to live entirely in the present!

Also, according to the empirical evidence gathered by Csikszentmihalyi, the activities which people say they enjoy the most are the ones where they experience ‘flow’, i.e. they are so absorbed in the activity itself that they effectively lose consciousness of that present moment. Presumably, they can only really tell you how good it felt on reflection.