I just happen to be blessed with a wave of good ideas that hopefully would be able to make a difference to how Mankind will conduct their businesses in the future, for the benefit of the environment. Hopefully this can be an impetus to something more!
1) Lifelong customer relationship: The concept of selling by perhaps major retail and departmental stores when it comes to home electrical appliances for individuals could perhaps be better tweaked. Instead of trying to focus on only individuals for their purchases and focusing only on the short term gains of closing that sale, retailers should go beyond and look at the totality of the purchase. Sell the entire experience of using an array of appliances to the entire family itself, instead of only the key decision-maker of the family. Instead of selling the microwave oven to the mom, sell the array of accompanying appliances like the oven, the refrigerator, the juicer, the coffee maker, in fact, sell the experience of using it all! And here's the kicker, offer a lifetime replacement warranty, so that when a newer product, or model, or version of whatever that they currently have is offered, allow them to be exchanged, perhaps maybe at a discounted price of the new product. This perhaps is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) taken to a whole new, lifetime levels of sorts. What these means to the user is some degree of familiarity in terms of branding, you know about how we ourselves, when we were growing up, are used to certain brands of cornflakes, soap, hair cream, etc. I mean what this basically means is the idea of more than just offering an experience that goes along with the product, but more importantly, an experience that attaches emotional significance to what the product/s means to the end user!
2) Hyperconnectivity: With things going wireless seeming to be the norm here, it is only a matter of time when appliances are going to be connected in one way or another to create that rich experience of hyperconnectivity. What one can even tweak further for a more environmentally enriching experience is perhaps to enable some form of a green indicator of sorts between these appliances at home, so that when Jack enters his room during a hot summer day, the air conditioner will be on automatically at just the right temperature for him, and maybe perhaps if his homework is due, the computer would switch on, and his TV would be off. Detecting moments later no particular movement in his room, the sensors might want to turn the air con to a more economical mode, and switch off the computer too! Mom or Dad would perhaps be alerted to Jack's state, and perhaps go and have a look if there is something out of the ordinary...perhaps he is on the verge of having the flu, of perhaps he is just plain tired!
3) Active packaging: Packaging should be more than just a means of offering information or protection. In fact, why not offer the packaging as a part of the user's experience of the product itself! The charging unit of that cordless handphone set also double up as its packaging when Dad bought it last week. Or did I mention the Plasma TV...the box actually doubles up as a mini-foldable lazy chair, for all of Dad's lazy football evenings! Or perhaps, the bottle of the chilli saucee is actually a free vase thrown in! Get a couple of them and wah lah, you would have a very stylish arrangement of vases for your flower beds! Or how about edible 'paper' plates, which I think is currently available, but of which its use is not that pervasive yet. Wouldm't it be nice to be able to save up on cleaning time, plus the water bills, when one plans to hold a party to celebrate an occasion?
4) Designing for the 20%: Sadly product engineers are very much the propagator of this constant need to have as many functions as possible fit into as little or the tiniest of space available. I mean wouldn't you be comparing the various technical specifications when one considers his purchasing decision for a mobile phone? The marketing people here tells us that the sexier the shape of the phone is, plus the more packed the functions that are availabe in the phone on offer, the better it seems to be! I mean ask yourself, how many of us would use the entire array of functions made available to us. Have you ever seen the number of buttons on the remote control of your TV? I'll bet that most of us would only be using around 20% of the functions! Or how about some of the things or services that are available to us! Do we really need to be offered with an array of choices, a whole lot more! The book 'Made to Stick' says otherwise. I guess its better for one to just stick to basics, and perhaps, just perhaps, for the sake of 'mass customisation' offer only 20% of their products to those who really wants that much more!
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Innovation Protocol - Day 1: User-centred design - 1st posted on 23rd Sept 2007
The past week has been a most enlightening, yet humbling experience for me, especially in my professional capacity as a design educator. I was involved in yet another one of those training sessions, but this time with a difference! It was just a short 2 days training-cum-workshop organised by the Idea Factory, but yet it does leave some remarkably lasting impression on the power and potentials of design, where its impact and place in social re-engineering is concerned.
Besides the usual first day briefing on the training objectives and such, what the workshop requires us to do as participants was to be engaged, and I meant it in a more 'immersive' sort of way. We were supposed to be broken up into teams, and to take stock of the greying population issues that are fast becoming the social problematic norms in most developed countries, including Singapore. What follows was a visit to one of our potential clients, an elderly/disabled who is wheelchair-bound, and who is suffering from various ailments. On a footnote, this experience sure reminds me of the one done by Jane Fulton Suri, the Chief Creative Officer at IDEO, during one of her social/user-centred experiments on re-engineering a patient's experience in a hospital.
We managed to take a lot of pictures during the visit, and the link to these pictures are in Flickr.
The team's first impression when we reached the house of our client was the relatively steep staircase that greeted us. I think it must be one of the steepest accent that I personally have made, and I am not THAT old yet! And to think that this is located in one of the oldest housing estates in Singapore, sure shows the failing of some of our urban planners in the past, when the primary considerations of housing was more to provide the basic necessitities of housing, rather than aesthetics and/or the future-proofing of housing design. I hope that any urban planners from any developing countries that are reading this, should strive for a balance that incorporates design functionability, and future-proofability, for lack of a better term, since they would eventualy reach a state that a country like ours would be, i.e. a growing greying population, and all its ramifications
The interior of the housing design of our client, Mdm K, was relatively large, I guess due to the relatively generous offerings by our urban planners when they were considering housing design, way back. This is a stark contrast to the newer housing that are being offered, where I guess, and I am really feeling strongly for this, that the architects that designed and planned for our public housing should actually take up one of these courses, to really give them an idea on some of their ridiculously-designed HDB flats! Anyway, back to our client, no doubt the furnishings and basic layout of the room does potray the relative simplicity of the dwellers, but this definitely does not hide the fact that our client and her primary care-giver are seriously in need of a better living condition.
Our client, Mdm K, is down with Parkinson's and has been wheelchair-bound for the past 12 years. Her primary care-giver is her loving husband, who, as the team have brought up before, is the epitome of a loving husband! I mean for someone to be totally be the sole care-giver, to be the one that takes care of her needs, including preparing her meals, bedtime, shower time, and all the usual basic routines of daily living, and doing it for 12 years, and to top it all off, to do it when one is himself not that physicaly capable all the time...I mean isn't this what TRUE LOVE really is!
The team manages to catch glimpses into the daily routines of this exemplary couple, their daily cleaning routines, what they do to while away their time, the somehow fixation on daily routines through the placement of wall clocks in each of the major areas of interaction, the sadly deteriorated state of some of the furnishings in the house, and in fact, the ever-decreasing population of the fishes in the fish tank also struck as as a reflection of the kind of time, or lack of, that the husband has in the pursuit of his other daily personal space and time!
The team, and myself, was struck at the way things are centred around the routines of our client. Notwithstanding that the design of the house was nowhere near an ideal one for the wheelchair bound, but somehow one would observe the user-centricness of some of these details. Like the placement of the house and other keys near the doorway, to I guess, minimise the search routines of the house keys in any given day; the arrangement of the furniture in the house which are all stacked up close near the walls, which somehow potrays the necessity of wheelchair movement, rather than one of aesthetics, which would seem to be the pervasive domain in a typical Malay/Muslim household in an average Singaporean Malay household; the placement of mirrors at the main 'expressway' of the house, which brings out to mind the need for basic human dignity, to look and feel good, in the mirror, even when one is incapacitated; the lack of newspapers and magazines and the somewhat more explicit arrangement of the radio and TV, which somehow gives one a small peek into the usual source of entertainment and/or information (this does disturbs me a little as I interviewed further as it seems that this seemingly lack of informational resources might just be one of those things that can actually hinder them from having a better quality of life, from giving them the usual distractions like 'hentaming' the goverment :), or just as a means to be able to take stock of whats happening around them, rather then the usual self-centricity that is actually having more of an adverse effect, rather than otherwise!); the ingenuity of MAN, even when they are old, through the use of the doorbell system as a means to seek and sound off for help; the seemingly clean look of the window grille, but yet equipped with a complete curtaining rack system, which demonstrates that this house, in her former more glorious days, seems to be well-decorated with nice-looking curtains (from our interview further, we were told that Mdm K was a seamstress before!)...and a lot more little details that I think would be better left to our own humanistic interpretations as one look at all those pictures!
So what was the takeway that I had, as I left their place! I think beyond the usual design issues and all its social ramifications, more than anything else, I do feel a certain sense of nostalgia! Why would you ask...I guess I can't help but be reminded of the household that I grew up in, when I take a look at the physical state of the house. And more importantly, in that short 2 hour session, I had my most valuable life lesson that I would ever have...ever, and that is on the meaning of TRUE LOVE!
Besides the usual first day briefing on the training objectives and such, what the workshop requires us to do as participants was to be engaged, and I meant it in a more 'immersive' sort of way. We were supposed to be broken up into teams, and to take stock of the greying population issues that are fast becoming the social problematic norms in most developed countries, including Singapore. What follows was a visit to one of our potential clients, an elderly/disabled who is wheelchair-bound, and who is suffering from various ailments. On a footnote, this experience sure reminds me of the one done by Jane Fulton Suri, the Chief Creative Officer at IDEO, during one of her social/user-centred experiments on re-engineering a patient's experience in a hospital.
We managed to take a lot of pictures during the visit, and the link to these pictures are in Flickr.
The team's first impression when we reached the house of our client was the relatively steep staircase that greeted us. I think it must be one of the steepest accent that I personally have made, and I am not THAT old yet! And to think that this is located in one of the oldest housing estates in Singapore, sure shows the failing of some of our urban planners in the past, when the primary considerations of housing was more to provide the basic necessitities of housing, rather than aesthetics and/or the future-proofing of housing design. I hope that any urban planners from any developing countries that are reading this, should strive for a balance that incorporates design functionability, and future-proofability, for lack of a better term, since they would eventualy reach a state that a country like ours would be, i.e. a growing greying population, and all its ramifications
The interior of the housing design of our client, Mdm K, was relatively large, I guess due to the relatively generous offerings by our urban planners when they were considering housing design, way back. This is a stark contrast to the newer housing that are being offered, where I guess, and I am really feeling strongly for this, that the architects that designed and planned for our public housing should actually take up one of these courses, to really give them an idea on some of their ridiculously-designed HDB flats! Anyway, back to our client, no doubt the furnishings and basic layout of the room does potray the relative simplicity of the dwellers, but this definitely does not hide the fact that our client and her primary care-giver are seriously in need of a better living condition.
Our client, Mdm K, is down with Parkinson's and has been wheelchair-bound for the past 12 years. Her primary care-giver is her loving husband, who, as the team have brought up before, is the epitome of a loving husband! I mean for someone to be totally be the sole care-giver, to be the one that takes care of her needs, including preparing her meals, bedtime, shower time, and all the usual basic routines of daily living, and doing it for 12 years, and to top it all off, to do it when one is himself not that physicaly capable all the time...I mean isn't this what TRUE LOVE really is!
The team manages to catch glimpses into the daily routines of this exemplary couple, their daily cleaning routines, what they do to while away their time, the somehow fixation on daily routines through the placement of wall clocks in each of the major areas of interaction, the sadly deteriorated state of some of the furnishings in the house, and in fact, the ever-decreasing population of the fishes in the fish tank also struck as as a reflection of the kind of time, or lack of, that the husband has in the pursuit of his other daily personal space and time!
The team, and myself, was struck at the way things are centred around the routines of our client. Notwithstanding that the design of the house was nowhere near an ideal one for the wheelchair bound, but somehow one would observe the user-centricness of some of these details. Like the placement of the house and other keys near the doorway, to I guess, minimise the search routines of the house keys in any given day; the arrangement of the furniture in the house which are all stacked up close near the walls, which somehow potrays the necessity of wheelchair movement, rather than one of aesthetics, which would seem to be the pervasive domain in a typical Malay/Muslim household in an average Singaporean Malay household; the placement of mirrors at the main 'expressway' of the house, which brings out to mind the need for basic human dignity, to look and feel good, in the mirror, even when one is incapacitated; the lack of newspapers and magazines and the somewhat more explicit arrangement of the radio and TV, which somehow gives one a small peek into the usual source of entertainment and/or information (this does disturbs me a little as I interviewed further as it seems that this seemingly lack of informational resources might just be one of those things that can actually hinder them from having a better quality of life, from giving them the usual distractions like 'hentaming' the goverment :), or just as a means to be able to take stock of whats happening around them, rather then the usual self-centricity that is actually having more of an adverse effect, rather than otherwise!); the ingenuity of MAN, even when they are old, through the use of the doorbell system as a means to seek and sound off for help; the seemingly clean look of the window grille, but yet equipped with a complete curtaining rack system, which demonstrates that this house, in her former more glorious days, seems to be well-decorated with nice-looking curtains (from our interview further, we were told that Mdm K was a seamstress before!)...and a lot more little details that I think would be better left to our own humanistic interpretations as one look at all those pictures!
So what was the takeway that I had, as I left their place! I think beyond the usual design issues and all its social ramifications, more than anything else, I do feel a certain sense of nostalgia! Why would you ask...I guess I can't help but be reminded of the household that I grew up in, when I take a look at the physical state of the house. And more importantly, in that short 2 hour session, I had my most valuable life lesson that I would ever have...ever, and that is on the meaning of TRUE LOVE!
rebirth...at this site
I've decided to consolidate my rants and ramblings using the blogger platform, instead of having sole webbie for this. Perhaps it is the trouble of maintaining a website that is not generating any income or perhaps I simply do not have the resources...yet, to keep up. But whatever it is, I still do believe that my 2 cents worth of ranting, will help to at least make a difference to somebody or someone out there!
I'll be reposting some posts that I've done earlier in my previous site, or at least the better ones. Hope you'll like it
I'll be reposting some posts that I've done earlier in my previous site, or at least the better ones. Hope you'll like it
Monday, April 9, 2007
We live in a cynical....cynical world!
I've received news of the death of one of my design trainers, Jackson, a couple of days ago. Saw in the papers that he was involved in an accident that led to his demise. Felt shocked I must say, and to think that just a couple of weeks ago, he was there sitting in front of me, and we were discussing on a modified programme of sorts on design, for my sec 3 students. And talking about students, late last year, I happen to come across an obituary for one of my classmate, way back in primary school. Can still remember her as cute, and one who is willing to lend a helping hand when one needs help. A fellow prefect, I guess that much thought I have of her, and no less, good thoughts indeed, is enough to make us aware of how short life is. So short, that at times, I do wonder why do people really want to make enemies, and why people really want to get over the heads of others, just so that you can be ahead yourselves. Such narcissistic behaviour, though never a domain of any religion, do somehow get into the general fold of even those religious sort! Hmmm, but then again, this is just the sarcastic me talking.
Like what Jerry Macguire said towards the end of the show..."We live in a cynical....cynical world!"
Like what Jerry Macguire said towards the end of the show..."We live in a cynical....cynical world!"
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Of David and Goliath…
I happen to watch the making of the movie “300″, and read the reviews and the interviews of the making of the movie in today’s papers; basically a story about how 300 Spartans managed to put up a fight against an army of 1 million Persians. Seems apt that my entry tonight is entitled that then. Anyway, the main thing that somehow caught my eye was whether it IS based on an actual event, or just a figment of the writer’s imagination. Hmmm, can’t remember his name, but it is like ’something’ Miller..why can I remember his last but not first name, because they have the same last name as the famous designer, Herman Miller. Anyway, the papers mentioned that it IS based on an actual event, but it is only mentioned…like in one short paragraph out of the entire article. And given Hollywood’s record of depicting stories on actual events, somehow everything seems so suspect! No mention of its factual occurence was mentioned when I watched the “Making of the movie version” on TV though. Hmmm…strange! Sorry for my somehow piqued appraisal, it is just that I do have enough of the biasness potrayed by the media when it comes to religious concerns.
But enough about movies, let us go on to my other love too, besides my significant other that is, Rugby! The boys played very well last Tuesday, beating ACS Barker in a fairly tough match. Second round of the competition seems to be just as tough if not tougher, with the team being in the same group as other teams, who are just as hungry, if not hungrier, to win the title. Somehow or rather, I just got this feeling that we might just be able to inch our way to the top 4 of the Cups this year, but that is just a hunch! The last time I felt this, which was 2 years ago, the boys lost their matches when they can’t afford to, and managed to get back up again to clinch the Plates! But hey, like what I told some of my colleagues, the ball is oval…indeed it is even more UNPREDICTABLE, both literally and metaphorically speaking. Don’t believe me, try catching a rugby ball in mid-air and letting it bounce ONCE, or even TWICE, and you know what I mean. In fact to up the ante just a teeny weeny little bit, why not have a go at it but this time with 15 testerone-induced and even maybe hormonally-charged boys rushing at you. And then you’ll just know what I REALLY MEAN! 
Professionally the above title also aptly describes the very situation that I am facing in my professional capacity as a leader. Somewhat, no doubt that I do have passionate, dedicated and professional teachers, who are willing to experiment and try out new ideas and concepts on teaching more effectively, but then the results perhaps have betrayed me for the past year or so. Sometimes I do wrecked my heads, looking at ways, or thinking of things that the team can do to perhaps get us out of the results trough. A lot of perhaps, a lot of trial and error, a lot of…basically trying out ways and methods that best suited for us to get that results that just doesn’t meet us at the right corner. And how is the title best describe this…well perhaps it suit most suitably in terms of our teaching experiences. Having youth, in this case, metaphorically speaking, I do have teachers who are rather “young” in terms of their teaching capacity and experience, can be both a blessing and hmmm…I don’t think I can call it a curse, because I don’t think it is that. Let us just say that perhaps sometimes, this youthfulness do let us down in certain ways. And in this context is how I see sometimes my role is fitting in into the bigger scheme of things. I guess, just like the different stages of group formation (if I am not wrong, there’s like 4 or 5 stages, can’t seem to remember what are they though
So how can the small inexperienced “David”ian department like mine is able to stave off ‘attacks’ by the mighty “Goliath”? How can David survive the onslaught of Goliath, armed with only the slings of “youth, inexperience and a greater desire to experiment” I don’t think I do have the answer right away, but I guess being nimble does help! That, and by refocusing my energies and thoughts on what the department has, that others doesn’t. Looking at what the department can offer, that others can’t. Looking at the value-add that the department’s programme can offer, that others can’t. And to see how this value-add, can, within the whole grand scheme of things, be used positively, and synergistically, to eventually get us out of the results trough, and hopefully…no….not hopefully but to eventually, give us the results that we truly deserve.
And with that, let us swing the sling guys. Let us face the might of Goliath and…ye who shall face the might of the giant and prevail, let victory be the sweet taste of thy’s hard labour!
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