Branding a Design : Designing a Brand - the case of Branding versus Design

I remember asking my significant other this hypothetical question. If she were to undergo a blind test of choosing between two similarly and outstandingly designed bags, one by a brand that she is comfortable with, and the other, of a brand that she would not be caught carrying, which one would she select? And this is given the hypothetical scenario that both the logos or brands of the bags have been removed. Though the answer is inconclusive, but I do wonder whether a person's preference for a certain way that a particular item is designed, and his eventual and perpetual liking for a certain particular design, or sets of design, has anything got to do with nature!

I ask this because as I was watching a documentary from the Discovery Channel on how the physical, mental and social growth of an infant develops over the years from birth, what surprises me from the episode is about how at an early age of between 4 to 8 years of age, a child has already a nurturing inkling of what kind of person would he or she be liking, or have an affinity towards when he or she grows up. Though not necessarily be ending up as a life partner, what surprises me is perhaps this nurturing liking for a certain physical way that a potential partner will look like, or of how he or she would have a certain trait or character, that perhaps would be the differentiating factor of making someone a potential mate...or not.

Now that just makes me wonder whether deep down in our most innermost of recesses, and perhaps in the deepest and non-conscious parts of our cerebral cortex, we might just have this trigger of sorts that would draw us to a certain brand, item, or perhaps even design. Could this also answer the dilemma, and perhaps potentially a research area of sorts that I have been looking for an answer to, that perhaps in each of us, there is this certain nurturing element that does compel us to like or dislike a certain design? Like the saying that 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder'...perhaps the concept of beauty is indeed within our own subconscious mind that has been programmed for us to behold...or NOT.

Design Education: By the Young, For the Young

It is indeed enlightening to see how my younger batch of students seem to perform this year, somewhat a little iffy at times, but more often, a little too eager at times to go ahead and finalise their design ideas, as opposed to the more composed, collected, and planned way of doing things that is a trademark of more mature, or even more adult design thinkers. But perhaps that is how design thinking for the younger folks are all about, getting right into the thick of action of doing things, rather than having a deep and thoughtful process. Or perhaps I should be looking at how I could marry their innate desire and need to be doing something right away, with the more elucidating practice of deep thinking, reflecting, ideating, prototyping, modelling, and stuffs like that, in order to make their design experiences an even more enriching and meaningful one. It would indeed be a challenge, but I guess with the various experimental lessons and tools that I have done so far, and have put in place in my past 6 years as an educator, I am very confident that I would be able to find and package an attractive design thinking, teaching and learning model that would be a peculiar trait of SST, perhaps a good model, not necessarily a perfect one, but good enough I hope, to be able to be identified with the SST branding that I would be proudly be part of in a mere 4 weeks or so.

The oxymoronic nature of Search 2.0

It's been a while since I last blogged, and well yeah I guess I have been busy with work lately, but hopefully with my swansong project coming to an end in a week's time, it would be nice if I can get the hang of blogging about the things that really matter to me...among others.



First off, let's just start with the recent announcement by Microsoft on their new search engine, their Search 2.0 that they nicknamed Bing. Interesting to note how a simple task of finding data and information has indeed transformed how the internet have evolved over the years, and have somehow too, evolve the way people use it. Now one interesting thing to note about this new concept of Search 2.0 is the need for greater relevance, or greater customisability of the results of the search engine for the end users. It would be interesting to see just what the hype is all about, but my concern here is not so much on the searching end of the equation, but more so on how things are organised. Would the enabling and pervasive use of such intelligent tools make Organise 1.0 obsolete? I mean really, if we were to think about it, with such an intelligent search engine, we would just need to store all the data into a single huge folder (either literally or metaphorically speaking as a vast majority of us here don't organise our files this way, but just for argument sake), and then let the engine do our work for us whenever we need to search for ANYTHING that we have stored. I mean really...that will indeed give a whole new meaning to what I would like to call 'Organised Chaos'.

Which perhaps bring me forth to another great idea, that perhaps any software company out there would like to take up as a challenge. As a follow up to my oxymoronic argument above, can you please then develop for me a software tool that allows me to put stuffs into only 1 folder, and then through some reverse-searching algorithm of sorts, the software will then organise the stuffs for me, whether be it pictures from my nephew's birthday last month, or my vacation trips, or files that needs some form of confidentiality and should be marked under 'confidential'. I mean I wouldn't really care how the software tool organises my data, but as long as I am able to retrieve them, and retrieve them quickly, that is all that matters. And I don't mean having a tool that would require the user to put in place tens of tags of that particular file, because if Organiser 2.0 is intelligent enough, it will be able to discern and make out the tags for the file itself. Can this be done? Hmmm?

Design Enligtenment

Bill Buxton in his book, 'Sketching User Experiences', has managed to elucidate some aspects of design, and especially so in the areas of user experiences. Many a times, designers have failed to understand the basics, and of the importance of getting the design right, and even having a branding value. Bill has managed to provide examples of how design can be made better, even in its infancy stages, through the use of rudimentary tools like paper and post-its. And what makes it even more interesting is how sometimes good design is something so simple to achieve!

One idea that I would like to highlight, and perhaps draw some parallels to in the areas of design education is in the concept of (n+1). In this section, Bill highlighted about the ever increasing, and sometimes even exponentially increasing costs that companies incur as they move on to produce their (n+1)th iteration of their current line of product. Logically speaking, one would assume that with every new iteration of a mature product, be it software or hardware, one can assume that costs would be cheaper, but the reverse instead holds true. Drawing comparisons to the design education, or in a general sense, the education field that I am in, what interests me is that as we tend to move into this obsession of compiling a list of best-practices, one must not forget that at times, the (n+1)th iteration of this practice might actually be prove to have the negating effect, rather than the intended one. My worry is that at times we are so consumed and concerned with attaining or coming out with list of best practices of our own, that we forget that at times, the early iterations of the thing that we are doing, is in fact THE best practice, and of which further iterations are no longer going to give us the same kind of results, or worst still, the same level of satisfaction.

Perhaps like what Albert Einstein used to say:
'Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.'

The dichotomy of being a Leader

It has always perplexed me about what is THE X factor that makes one a good leader. Is it about the charisma of the person itself...is it about his or her ability to lead and provide that leadership towards a better eventuality, or perhaps is it about being able to have the vision and necessary wherewithal to push ahead with decisions, whatever or however hard a bitter pill it might take to swallow, and living and breathing later on to tell its tale? Well, seriously I don't really know, because I don't think I have an answer. But what I do know about myself, and my role as a leader is to be able to at least have the ability to envision what I want the organisation that I am leading to be heading towards, and to provide that support, and perhaps even be the first one to roll-up my sleeves and 'dirty' my hands to ensure that the ship will stay its course, and be able to reach its destination. And I do think that I am one of the most objective person around, or at least I think I am one of the most objective people that I know. And I am glad to be able to objectively state that my style of leadership has never been about being the most popular guy around, because that is not part of my agenda! And in fact I don't think my conscience will be clear if I adopted that approach, because it is simply not in my mental or metaphysical nature, to be wanting to take the lead in any leadership popularity poll of sorts. But it does saddens me that claims and counterclaims that have no basis seems to be the order of the day at times, but then again, do I give a hoot to them? Seriously I don't, but I guess this is just part and parcel of being a leader, and hopefully I can be a good one, and NOT a popular one!