Zing Gang and a Workshop

As part of our preparation for the Red Dot competition the creative group went to Zing Gang, a larger newer campus of ZJU, to do a workshop on innovative pipelines for groups.

Before we started they showed me around the campus for a while. It was quite beautiful and very spacious although not quite complete. Between classes the rodes teamed with students and bikes and during classes they were baron with almost no one walking around. It is enclosed but so large that walking through it would not be convenient for most people so the only people there were students.

The aim of the workshop was to help students work together on innovative or concept rich projects from a western point of view. I was talking about a few ways of looking at tasks and breaking them up to create better work hand offs within long projects. The method I was discussing involved having various meetings involving the whole team to ensure continuity and being true to the intentions of other project teams within the group.

Before I started talking we walked around to find a good place for everyone to sit down. There is a body of water in this campus so we thought sitting near it would be nice. I found a tree and tried to climb up and sit in it so I could look over the group better but as I swung on the first branch it broke and I fell to the ground. This was quite amusing and we eventually decided sitting on the ground would be safer. On later attempts of climbing on things I was cautioned as people reminded me of this incident. Perhaps one day I will learn.

After introducing the ideas we did a trial run with a slightly reduced work flow as we only had one afternoon and a team of about 20 people. We started with a finding need exercise in which people would conduct random interviews on the streets of the campus during lunch time. After a while we presented findings back to the group and moved on to information processing and then brainstorming.



By the end of the day we had a lot of concepts and were all tired so we went to a restaurant just outside the campus and had a big meal. That night I went to a Korean drinking party that turned a bit risqué before ending with an underage American boy passing out. I for some reason offered to carry him off and which was quite a ordeal. Eventually I got home to find that I had had some form of food poisoning and was quite ill for the next day or two. I miss China.