Designing Interactions and Bill Moggridge

When we visited IDEO they had mentioned that there would be a book opening for Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge and that they would be going. We were very interested for obvious reasons so we went up to Shanghai again to attend this even as well as view a Design Korea exhibition.

We caught quite an early train to Shanghai and spent all morning looking at Korean design companies that were interested in providing work to the Chinese market. There was also a lot of student work some of which was breathtaking and quite a bit of other technology related stuff being put on display. It was quite a nice event and it included a few of the big companies like Momo Designs and Samsung. After this, we went shopping in Shanghai for a bit and then had lunch at a rare western restaurant. Then we walked for about 2 hours to the place the book opening was to be held. It was a small gallery and studio used by a local design and art group.


Some of the robots from the Design Korea Show

The talk by Bill Morggridge introducing the book was quite interesting and we got to meet up with a lot of the people we knew from IDEO from our previous visit. One of our team won a copy of the book. At one point, I was introduced to Bill but I didn't really know much about his work at the time so I did not talk to him for long.

The event was quite interesting and when we finally left we caught a slow train home that got in to Hangzhou at about 2 am.

In retrospect I obviously should have had some thing with more impact prepared for my interaction with Bill. He was kind and easy to talk to but I had been too busy to do any background research on him so we just talked about immediate things. I was not astounded by this man.

IDEO WEDO UDEO

After having returned from my summer holiday and then getting settled in the lab, people had started talking about changes that may occur and developments of the lab which may cause it to become more innovative. As I have discussed, a lot of it's work up until this point was more like that of a classic design consultancy. They have had a bit of competition in this sector and are interested in moving meta to get a competitive advantage. In discussion about this with some of my colleagues, I was reminded of that well known company IDEO and remembered they had a Shanghai office. I decided it could be interesting to pay them a visit and I knew that they were generally interested in seeing students and that sort of thing, so I sent them an email. The email address I had for them was defective so I tried a few other things to no avail. However, a few weeks later Soumitri and Simon were in town and Soumitri mentioned that he had the address of someone in that office through another friend. He gave it to me and when I sent the new address an email I got a response within a few hours. They were interested so we worked out a good time for everyone and made our visit.

The time we spent with them was interesting because we did not go with an idea of what we wanted from them and we did not go with anything to show them. They ordered some food for lunch and asked us to introduce our practice. They then talked about what they do and how their office in China interacted with the global company.

I was the team leader of this endeavor as I had originally expressed the interest. My involvement included initiating contact and scheduling as well as developing and managing relationship. Though we intended to continue the project, it is now over as many of the core people involved are no longer part of the lab.

This may not seem like a project as such, but if it is approached in that way the whole thing becomes a struggle to communicate well and offer a good client to costumer relationship. We never decided what service was going to be provided by whom or for whom but we had an interaction that needed to be managed. So I think we can think of it as a project.

Immediately after leaving the IDEO office all the Chinese students I was with started talking about how they thought this company could not work with Chinese clients very well and how it did not match the fast-paced nature of the Chinese market. This is of course true and I spent some time talking to a few IDEOers about this problem. In the coming years they are interested in opening up this office to participate in the Chinese design market more completely.

I learnt a lot from this little project. I learnt that people do respond to an honest request even when they are a design company that most designers look up to. I also learnt that everyone needs help thinking, even IDEO. Of course I also learnt a lot about how IDEO thinks and how they select people for jobs which may one day be important to me. This task built confidence and understanding in me and the team and has helped a few of the lab members get jobs and recommendations for further education programs.

As IDEO is a kind company, they gave us a few souvenirs including copies of the Art of Innovation in Chinese and The Ten Faces of Innovation in English.

After IDEO we went shopping and then to IKEA before returning home to Hangzhou that night.

Materials and Form

This project was a book for Ying Fantian that would be published under his name and the names of the editors. The book was to be oriented around the topic of modern materials and how they can be used in design tasks. Although the book was not well defined at the start of its writing, by the end it was to be something like a reference text designed to offer a standardized information model on the topic at hand.

My role on this project was as an assistant editor. My tasks were to help ensure that the English components were grammatically correct, to generate content at times and to offer suggestions on structure and style of the information used. In addition, I was extensively involved in the translation of parts of the text that started in Chinese.

This project was rather peculiar for a few reasons, but I guess the main one was that when I came aboard the task I was asked to do was to paraphrase an existing book on materials and put it in a usable format. It was then to be put directly into the project database. Following this, I was given another text with accompanying images and I was asked to extract articles again to expand our project database. These articles were slowly gaining Chinese counterparts as one of the other members of the lab translated them. At that time I was given the task of correcting other articles that had started in Chinese and then been put through the Google language tools to make them into rough English. I did a few single articles like this then just as I left the lab one Friday afternoon I was emailed a few documents accounting for about 200 such articles. I was going away that weekend and would not have my laptop so I spent most of that night working with another native English speaker from the international dormitory to translate as many as we could before I left. At the end of all this we had a huge bank of materials information in Chinese and English with images that had been sourced from a variety of locations including other books and undocumented websites. What I found peculiar here was not the fact that it was a lot of work to write a book, but that in China we did not have to make a bibliography or anything like that and we seemed not to have to think about credits on the images. On a few occasions I tried to ask if this was actually the case and the person I was working with would try not to understand as much as possible. (I am also guilty of having done this at times during my stay there.) I did not mind that I was participating in what we in the west call plagiarism - it was just an odd way of doing things and I was not too used to it, so I asked questions some times.

As it may sound, I was not well informed about some aspects of this project, and was not involved in it's management at all. The person in charge was not in the lab and the person in the lab working on the project was doing all she could to fix things up in the time frame and with a small budget. She was basically doing everything except the English half, which is what I did. She was not the best of project managers and most of the time I had no idea what was going to happen next.

I think this project changed the way I look at books. Firstly, it made me realize that writing a hundred pages is not that hard. Secondly, I was shown firsthand just how useful it is to have good information sources. Thirdly, I was exposed to back-end practices and fourthly, it was made clear how not to do a project like this in the future. Being a design student who has trouble sleeping because I often can't stop working, I was continually thinking about ways to do this task better and ways to make it more useful for the end user. Sadly, I was not able to do much to affect these aspects as the project was quite rushed and I had very little say.

In the end I think the book has not yet been published. I am not in the information chain on this project so I may never know what's actually to come of it.