For his year-end wrapup, Steve Portigal (a smart consumer-behavior consultant whose name will be familiar to readers of the comments on Grant McCracken's blog) "went to several online
sources - BoingBoing, MetaFilter and Core77 -
and skimmed their archives of two random 2004 months,
February and April. I used these sites as triggers for
stories that seemed cool when they broke but eluded my
memory by the time December rolled around." The results are interesting, as are Steve's thoughts on why cultural stories don't stick in our memories for long. And what did he remember? "My own design-y
experiences from this past year - experiences that
affected me emotionally and intellectually (either
positively or negatively."
