Spilt Tea

Shortly after being moved into Lab 318, I was taken to a prototyping company for a meeting and to check up on some work they were doing for us. After seeing some of their model making spaces, we went into their meeting room and sat down. As is customary in China, they brought tea out to us in disposable clear plastic cups. At the time, I was looking at the furniture and thinking how it was so uniquely Chinese and I was trying to work out some characteristics that could be represented generically.

One of the secretaries (or something like that) came out with the first two cups of tea and placed them on the table. The cup that she put in front of me was a little crushed but I did not react to that. I then considered sliding it over to one of the people sitting further from the door but I did not, I just listened to the Chinese as they talked about they work going on between Lab 318 and this company. I could not understand much as my Chinese was still quite poor at that time so I was listening carefully for any word that I could pick out.

Suddenly there was a sound as the cup of tea in front of me keeled over and spilt its contents on the glass table. The water spilled off the table and down to my left foot which was on the ground directly under the table’s edge. At first I moved quickly to avoid being in the way of the water but my sock was already soaked. I was asked if my foot was okay and I responded that it was not too bad. I calmed myself and decided that the pain was not significant. I have done this in Kung Fu quite a lot so it was not completely new. As I sat I decided that it did not hurt enough to be serious and decided that I could ignore it. I think they offered to let me wash my foot or at least take my shoe off but I did not want to disrupt the meeting and I did not think it was very serious so I just told them it would not be necessary and went back to trying to listen for Chinese words I knew and trying to extract the meaning of their conversation.

As we left I noticed that I was a little more shaky than usual and on the drive home I decided that I should have a proper look at my wound when we got back to the lab. In the car I sent a text message to a friend back at the international dorm saying “tea no foot, pain!” I meant to write “tea on foot…” but the predictive spelling on my phone is not always accurate. After that, we discussed finding apartments in Hangzhou because at the time I was thinking of moving out of the dorms to cheaper accommodation.

When we arrived at the lab I walked in and sat down as quickly as possible. I then removed my shoe and on of the guys from the lab who spoke better than average English came over. He was outraged when he found out that I had been so burnt and not done anything. As I removed my sock I managed to also remove most of the affected skin. The lab members then decided I should go to the school hospital so I gathered my things. They found keys to Ying Fantian’s car and Blake, the boy with good English, drove me there.

The hospital smelt strange and a few people let me go before them in line as they thought my burn looked serious. The doctor agreed that it was not a good idea to have avoided washing it. I then went to a nurse who dressed my wound and told me to return the next day for redressing. My colleagues then drove me home. They had to go back to the lab so they left me at that point.

After settling in to the new pain, the dressing had reminded me of what I was feeling, so I called the friend that I sent the text message to and explained the situation. She went and bought me a few things and then came to my room. One of the things she tried to get me were some flip-flops. However, when she went to a nearby supermarket and asked for the appropriate size, she was laughed at and told that no-one needed shoes that large. She then explained that I was tall and western and then they understood how such a large foot could exist but the still could not help the fact that their shoes were all much smaller. As a band-aid solution, she bought me a pair that were a few sizes too small but still the biggest that were made. We thought I could get some larger ones latter on and the ones she bought were quite cheap. I am actually yet to replace them but that is another matter.

The day went on and we went to a restaurant for dinner, but the food was not that good. At that point I could still walk, just not very fast.

Photo Management Software Lecture

I have been running tutorials and subbing for teachers of CAD and a few other software packages since high school because it is something I love doing. In China, most of the people I worked with were quite good with CAD programs but were interested in photo management packages. At the time I was testing out the Adobe Lightroom Beta and Apple's Aperture and a member of a Photoshop training team, Jiang, asked me to do a guest lecture on these packages and how they can be used.

My role was to demonstrate the use model and then show some quick work flow techniques.

This was an interesting learning experience because in some ways it failed to work as expected. First of all, I was presenting about 2 Apple-only packages to people who had no interest in ever using Apples and secondly I was speaking about photo management packages to a crowd of people interested in image manipulation and generation in Photoshop. These photo management systems are designed for photographers and studios and all the tools that I was talking about were oriented toward that sort of work flow. I think that the talk I gave was dry and perhaps a bit boring but the real problem was that my audience was interested in something quite different.

At the end of it Jiang came up and said, "I guess I expected something else, but that software seems interesting." What I learnt from this is that it is much more important to know what people are looking for than to do a good job. I also learnt that it is a lot harder to listen to someone speak for a long time when you only understand half the words they are using - not that that is a surprise, but it was the first time that I had talked for an hour and then found that most people were still thinking about the beginning.

The Real Introduction to Lab 318

Lab 318 is essentially a commercial design studio based within ZJU and run by members of the design department. It is populated by students from the fourth year of the undergraduate program and masters students, as well as including a number full of time employees. We are made up of a few core teams that generally participate in different kinds of work. However, we often cross pollinate and most people work on at least 2 teams at any one time. The focuses of the teams include electrical, manufacturing, innovation, commercial work and competition work. During different times of my stay I worked on 4 of these teams but spent most of my time in the innovation group. We would often break a major project between the teams to either get multiple outcomes from one brief or to build parallel work flow. Out clients range greatly but during my stay we were gradually moving toward a more innovation centered work flow so we held preference for jobs that would call for this.

Changing Work Places

One day, after the mid-semester, week-long May First holiday, I got up and left as usual to go to the Creative Group room where I worked. On my walk there I ran into a boy who I had met when I first met ZJU students. His name was Blake and we said hello and he said something about some lab being closed and that I should go somewhere else. I did not really get the message and we were walking in opposite directions so it was disregarded. When I arrived at the the room it was locked, which was not a huge surprise but not normal, either. I had a key so I let myself in only to find that all the computers and everything else of value had been removed. I was a little shocked and called one of the lab coordinators, Chen Zhiliang. He said that over the holiday the Creative Group had been dissolved and that I was to be moved into a different lab. He then said I should go home and that I would be contacted about where to go later.

I waited a few days and was called by one of the other lab members. He asked me to meet him and he walked me to Lab 318, where I would spend the rest of the year working. At that point I was a bit lost as to what was going on here and there but I moved my stuff over to the new lab and started going there every day. This was the beginning of a very new interaction with ZJU.