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.

Red Dot 2006

This was an effort that the Creative group (and later some other ZJU competition teams) put towards the 2006 Red Dot Concept Award competition. This competition is open so we spent a lot of time looking for a good approach.

My role on this project was as an innovation team member. During the course of the project I did a few specific things for the team including a few "Getting Out of the Box" sessions and another "Looking for Need" workshop. Details on these are below:

1. "Getting Out of the Box" sessions: These were a number of occasions designed to press some of the importance of leaving the lab and seeing more of the world to get more informed design outcomes. We walked around some areas of Hangzhou for quite some time, documenting human behavior and looking for weak signals and discussing design needs that we were seeing or experiencing.
2. "Looking for Need" workshop: This was a workshop where we discussed finding the need behind a design and finding a need before creating design. The goal was to start to introduce some of areas of interest for our Red Dot submission to find some problems that were not too big to tackle.
   

I was not part of the finishing team because by the due date of this project the Creative Group had dissolved and I had been moved into Lab 318. I was then busy with other projects and a new team was created to finish up the Red Dot submissions.

I was only really involved in this project for a few weeks but during that time I became a lot more confident that I had something valuable to offer others and I became a lot more able to speak publicly and without prompts. I think I also learnt about managing group projects and working towards a team ideal a little better. These things mentioned, I think I learnt more by watching the other student's approch to the project than by my own experience. They worked so much harder and did so much more contextualizing research than any other group of designers or design students I had ever worked with. I got the impression that they were really interested in their work and they they were really interested in winning. I found out later that this paid off.

Design Boom: Shelter in a Cart

This was a group approach to a Design Boom competition titled Shelter in a Cart. The aim of the competition was to develop a cart for homeless people that could be used both to move belongings as well as provide shelter for the owner.

My role on this project was as a member of the core innovation team. In this role I helped manage other parts of the team and helped people contextualize homeless situations around the world. I also ran a workshop called "Finding Need" that aimed to help people look at ways to find problems that are not too hard to solve. I was asked to do this because I had been working for a company in the United States doing a large scale feasibility study on a management work over that required me to find problems within the current system that were solvable within the context of the desired change.

I was not able to be part of the finishing team as I was out of town on another project during the time of the final push.

I think that I learnt a few things from this project, but what has seemed most valuable was the knowledge that things I know and have learnt through experience or formal education can be useful for other people. At the time of this project I was struggling hard to overcome the language barriers and although a few member of the team were quite good at English, most had quite a bit of trouble and at this point my Chinese was non-existent.

Creative Group

After about a week of waiting to be placed in a working environment I was called by one of the first students I had met and he chaperoned me to my work place. I talked though the nature of the group and a short while later it was lunch. After lunch, the guy I already knew had some stuff to do so I returned to the lab to finish up the day with the rest of its members.

The group I was to be part of was a team of about 10 students all working to win as many competitions as possible. Although there was no full time management, a member of staff would occassionally come in to offer a hand. The rest of the time 1 or 2 of the students would keep the team moving although most of the members were also working on their own projects in their spare time. They had a great track record!

We participated in a multitude of competitions and I was given a key. My colleagues were also interested in my work and when I showed them they asked me to give a few talks about a some of the things I had done.