Constipation of needs, diarrhea of ideas

Disclaimer: I may be a little emotional here, but I think its okay. After all, this is my blog.

I am beginning to feel a pain in my stomach, as I read about some of the "innovations" described by Tom. Like, designing a beach-chair that automatically turns based on the direction of sun. Or like a smart highway. Give me a break!

I am challenging my yesterday's thoughts. We don’t yet live in an "experience economy". Not even close. When we are talking of economies, we are talking of an entire cross-section of people. Is it safe to assume that there would be no dial-up in a few years? Well, I don’t know. But, I can say a resounding - No, if we just think beyond Uncle Sam.

Designing in a world of scarcity is so different from designing in a world of surplus. As a student of human-computer interaction design and as a citizen of the third-world, my challenge would be to use my design skills to innovate the bridges for the digital-divide. That would be real innovation for me.
On a lighter note, I am reminded of this "Astronaut-Pen" joke that I heard long back:
"During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, NASA decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of $1 million U.S. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth.

The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil."
I think the greatness of innovation is also its simplicity. Like, say Google. Just look at what they have done to the internet. I am disappointed that Tom doesn't even mention about Google anywhere. And, still manages to talk of innovation.

Experience the "Experience" Economy

I liked Tom's mentioning that we are slowly moving towards an "experience" economy. We have slowly graduated from a commodity-economy (get stuff, make stuff) to a product-economy(get 'packaged' stuff - quick and dirty, is the mantra) to a service economy(we can do that for you, sir) to an experience economy(come home to a new world). He uses a child's birthday cake metaphor to explain this. From baking our own cakes for a birthday to experiencing a birthday party created exclusively for you by an anonymous group, we have infact changed a lot.

Call it advanced capitalism or whatever, but yeah, we all want rich, genuine experiences and interactions, whether we are having a Starbucks Mocha or visiting Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas or boarding an American Airlines. It’s the age of verbs, so concentrate on it, says Tom. Connect with people, or your business gets disconnected.

Tom makes a good point - It’s important to strike a balance, toss in too many features, and you are out. It’s like a movie that has too much to say, too many stories and too many characters. We don’t have a very high attention span, especially when I have so many options.
So, the businessmen who don’t have a clue what I am talking of, here's what Tom says, they have to do:

"Follow your customer's journey. Break into components. Ask yourself.. how can I make it a better experience? There's nearly always an opportunity to create more excitement than you think, whatever it is that you make or sell.
Designing new experiences is about figuring out a way to connect with people."

Innovation at the Bottom

My last post made me think: if innovation didn't matter to people at the top, why doesn't it matter to people at the bottom?

Ordinary employees don't care for creativity because they don’t live and work in an environment that encourages a creative lifestyle or work-ethic. Their minds are tuned to work, as the master wishes.

So, if master believes in creativity, things can change. The trick for the master is how to manage creativity in an office environment.

I am beginning to believe that every business has a creative side, whatever it sells or makes. It’s just waiting to be tapped. It flourishes, as Tom notes, only when the environment spawns a culture to encourage it. The masters should create systems that encourage the employees to embrace the realities of everyday situations through risk-taking and creative thought. The systems should build into itself a tolerance for occasional failure and an appetite for simple discoveries. These systems can help every employee fight the barriers to innovation: company's and employee's mindsets, how people perceive and use products/services, rituals/superstitions of a culture etc.

I think I am repeating myself. But, so is Tom... he is giving so many examples of innovation that I am beginning to feel sick as a designer. What have I done till now in twenty five years of my I-want-to-be-creative-and-useful life. When will I actually live one? What am I waiting for?

Forget it. The point is straight: Be Creative, and let people around you Be too. Business or no-Business.

Innovation at the Top

Alright, let me step into the shoes of a CEO of a toothbrush company. I am Mr. GoodDay. I own and run GoodDay Toothbrush Corporation. My last quarterly results showed a 33% increase in net-profit. I am happy and I make everyone concerned happy. Still, I am told I need to innovate. Hell, why do I need to innovate a toothbrush? Innovation is costly and tough and irrelevant.

Probably, this is how Tom Kelley would respond: Innovation is a mind-set. You need to innovate because creativity sells. Innovate or perish. It cannot be costly; it can only prove to be costly by not adopting it. If you look around, you can see that there is always an invisible (or visible?) score for innovation. How do you know that your customer is really happy?

Enter Me, the customer, and the daily tooth-brusher. I am such a bad toothbrusher that I need to change my toothbrush every two weeks. I still brush like a child, and I still crush it, because I am half-asleep even when I am brushing... it’s as if I am resisting getting up. Why hasn't Mr. GoodDay been able to deliver a good tooth-brush to me? I think I would buy a BestDay Toothbrush today.
The point is: there is always a scope for innovation. By simple observations like "smaller hands need fatter toothbrushes", IDEO was able to help Oral-B innovate a toothbrush for children. Tom calls this their "being left-handed" principle, which is to develop empathy for consumers' who might be radically different than you are. Build this empathy into your strategy, and sales improve, and so do all other S's. If you want to survive the future, there is only word: Creativity.

Creativity can be fast and easy too. Tom illustrates this through the example of IDEO's innovation on a shopping-cart. They entirely redesigned and created a new shopping cart in a rapid-fire 5 days time. They used ideas from roller coasters and baby seats to create the child's seat, incorporated a scanner to pay for items directly, and several other common-sense features.
Agreed, not every business has the capacity or need to do 'fast' innovation like IDEO. But, every business has got to find its own ways to build creativity into its system, to explore, enjoy and survive.

Tom Kelley suggests a methodology that works at IDEO and believes would work for any product-development. He tries to engineer a 5-step model to manufacture creativity, using verbs: Understand, Observe, Visualize, Evaluate and Refine, Implement. These verbs seem to address most of the problems that I had with traditional software-development methodologies like waterfall-cycle model, which were noun-based. But, I believe, each of these verbs applies well in any company that sells a product or service. These verbs need to be built into the organizational environment through various "free-spirit" systems.

Anyways, I may be talking crap. But, I am still reading the initial pages of the book. :)

Reflection Journal-2

Okay, so I am blogging alright.
Resolutions make sense sometimes. :)

So, I was thinking of the last semester.

There were several obstacles - designer blocks, team blemishes, ego clashes, wasted hours, misunderstood problems, romantic ideas. All are tied to each other, and sometimes something as reliable as the Decider's protocol doesnt work. At the end of the semester, I was sure that if this is what being designerly means, I call it quits.

Given all the mistakes that happened, I encourage myself to take an analogy to swimming -
“What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning -- and some of them many times over -- what do you find? That you can swim? Well -- life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”

Replace life/live with Design.

So, here's what I have learnt from my mistakes:

1) Collaboration is at the heart of interaction design.
2) Design process is as important as the Designs.
3) Design problems always have a context.
4) Creative insight, and analytical thinking.. always mix them in the right proportions.
5) Prototype ideas and user-test them EARLY.
6) Don’t re-invent the wheel, re-design the wheel, if you may.
7) Empathy with the user is not as obvious as we think it is.
8) Be interested in everything in life.

So, lets start swimming.

By the way, I got the project I wanted to work on: The Museum of the Person. I am happy.

Reflection Journal -1

It was a wonderful HCId-2 class.
It’s rare to feel good after a 3-hour late-night class.

I just wish this continues. (But, I just wish my portfolio was reviewed too. Pretty amateurish, but I think it would get better as I get better.)

Initially, I had lot of misgivings about the sequel to Marty’s class: HCId2.

Typically, I would expect a right mix of theory and practice, individual and team-work, from this class. Looks like that’s the way it would be. I feel quite relieved.

Last semester, Marty said, just as you learn swimming by swimming, you learn design by designing. So, go… and design.

Now Eli says, at the end of this, you know if you like being a designer. I am scared!

Sounds like a nice climax to a one-year long discover-yourself motion-picture of an individual striving to know what he wants to do/design in life. ;)

Like everyone else, I want to do my capstone, applying HCI and design skills to the area/domain I really care for.

I don’t really specialize in anything, and that’s been my problem. I have always had this vague sense of doing some community-building, synergising beautiful narratives possible through traditional media like photography, movies etc. and taking advantage of the inherent stengths of new-media (like uncovering untold stories through blogs etc.).

I have also been doing some discussions with some of the journalism faculty. (Sandeep Junnarkar has been doing this site: http://www.livesinfocus.org/ which recently got reviewed by BBC, and is cool stuff.)

During today’s presentations, “The Museums of the Person” looks like a good playground to crystallize my ideas.
If this class is preparing me for the capstone at some conscious (or, sub-conscious?) level, I think I will learn a lot if I do this project.

Let me just hope for the best.

All three – Eli, Kevin, and Josh - have very good ‘visual’ and ‘community’ sensibilities. I hope I can learn good stuff from their experience, and get my knots un-entangled –as much as I can.

All the more reason to be in SF...

AIGA + Apple Lecture Series : Why Good Design Matters
As part of a partnership, AIGA SF and Apple Computer, Inc. have teamed up to give AIGA members the opportunity to show the business community the power of design.

On the third Wednesday of each month an AIGA member will present a special program at the Apple Store in San Francisco's Union Square.

This week its a talk by Kevin Farnham, CEO and David Lipkin, CFO, on
METHOD INTERFACE DESIGN INNOVATION: Building Brands and Profitability

Oh man, what am I doing in Indiana?

Related Link:
http://www.aigasf.org/events/event_apple.html

'Internet will revolutionise the film industry'

When I got introduced to the BitTorrent technology, I was like - WOW! Hey, but that's Napster reborn... what happens to the copyrights? History tells us that no one can prevent people (including me) from using these P2P technologies, if they really want to. So, does that mean that internet is killing the film industry?

Something always told me that we can fight it out. People wont mind paying a few bucks for a movie they want to see, if its priced rightly and available promptly(which is driven by market forces eventually). We could create an effective online distribution mechanism by creating an internet video library which offers clean interfaces, instant search and better, customized control over the programming of the content(unlike the P2P), which would eventually woo people away from P2P.

Getting the studios adopting such distribution mechanisms soon for big-budget Hollywood flicks is understandably risky. But, this is just a great chance for the entire landscape of independent film-makers across the world, who are struggling to make a mark in this big-bad world of films dominated by the studios. Now, they can directly corporatise their films (without any acceptance by a studio or a sugar-daddy) by interaction, feedback, customization and sell/share films directly to anyone with a computer and a broadband. So, the question remains, who's going to spearhead the revolution? Who will do to video/movies what iTunes has done to music?

Google Video looks like the answer. It has the potential to shake the traditional DVD/Multiplex distribution model. Lets see if DVDs are eventually replaced by .gvp(google-video format) files.

My two-weeks old nano is already outdated once Google started its "Save for iPod Video" feature. Ipod Video looks like an effective catalyst too.

However, the aspirant independent film-maker in me shouts with excitement - "Google, well done! Again!"

-Vamsi.
---
Related Intereview with an independent film-maker:
'Internet will revolutionise the film industry'

Speaking Shadows

I dont know why, but I have always been intrigued by shadows.

Shadows to me are reflections of reality - good or bad.

As a student of design and as an amateur photographer and as an aspirant independent film-maker, shadows are my pursuit.

Whether its designing things for a better world, or shooting the objects in the right light, or
making films that 'speak out' to the audience, I am always speaking shadows...

Movies for 2006

My 10 most eagerly-awaiting-movies-in-2006 list:

Bollywood
Rang de Basanti
Don
Shiva 2006
RGV ka Sholay
Fanaah
Munnabhai meets Mahatma Gandhi
Phir Hera Pheri
Corporate
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
Vishal Bharadwaj's Othello

Hollywood
The Da Vinci Code
Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
Superman Returns
Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction
Evan Almighty
Cache'
Final Destination 3
The Brazilian Job
Failure to Launch
Casino Royale

Let there be resolutions...

After the last post, I get this feeling that everyone gives resolutions a sneaky thought at some level. Like I found myself, asking these questions...

What's my To-Do this year? What's my Wish-List this year? Where do I want to be this time, next year? What are the new things I am gonna do? What are the old things I am gonna get rid of? This sort of mind-dump goes on with everyone, right?

My To-Do:
Work on a portfolio to be proud of
Get a challenging internship
Learn to script, shoot and edit videos of good standing
Visit India sometime
And, ofcourse to Blog regularly :)

My Wish-List:
25+ inch TV, DVD, Home-theater so that I justify my Netflix account.
Camcorder
An SLR Camera for amateurs
A Tripod
IDEO Cards
And, how about an Intel-Mac running a Micrsoft-Vista :)

Where do I want to be this time next-year?
In pretty good shape with my capstone, applying concrete human-centered design to an area that I deeply care for. Its important to me that I dont re-invent any wheel or address superflous issues.

What are the new things I am gonna do?
Blogging, of course.
No kidding, but be everywhere I am expected, 5 minutes early. Its time dude, to get away with the Indian Standard Time. :)
Be extremely organized.

What are the old things I am gonna get rid of?
No more long personal mails. Be crisp, clear and sharp. (Mails are not a medium for expression, Blogs are!)
No more complaints on teams. (If you really, really feel there is a problem, you really, really can solve it.)
No more mindless, extended talks over cell. (Addictive phone-calls are good time-killers.)

Resolutions? What are they?

I have always wondered- what the heck, new year's resolutions? They dont quite work, do they?
Lets see.

I proclaim:
"Let there be MY blogs."