Shanghai Calling

City fo Sound is a great blog at the above link...Some really nice observations about contemporary Shanghai. Also a few links to work I really admire alot.

The work of Sze Tsung Leong is truly great and inspires me. If we are talking innovation then these images tell a story we should all be reading :) Powerful stuff!

I loved this reference to Koolhaas on Chinese cities:

"The Chinese city is for me a city that has built up a lot of volume in a very short time, which therefore doesn't have the slowness that is a condition for a traditional sedimentation of a city, which for us is still the model for authenticity. Beyond a certain speed of construction that kind of authenticity is inevitably sacrificed, even if you build everything out of stone and authentic materials, and that's a kind of irony. For instance, if you look at the color of the stone of the new Berlin, it's the color of all the worst plastics that were produced in East Germany in the 1960s. It's kind of a weird color of pink, a weird color of light yellow ..., they're artificial. There is no escaping the artificial in the new architecture, and certainly not in large amounts of architecture being generated at the same time."

I never tired of the above view from our apartment in Shanghai. For me it formed an endlessly fascinating - like Sze Tsung Leong's pictures of destruction/creation/transformation.

The dangers of blogging?

We live in conservative times - as opposed to interesting ones I suppose...I'm not sure if readers will be able to get to the link so I quote in full from the Sydney Morning Herald [16/8/2005]:

Blogging's immediate impact doesn't add up for Deloitte
By Rob O'Neill
August 16, 2005

Big four accounting firm Deloitte has put corporate blogging on the back-burner following robust internal discussions about the company's online strategies.

A proposal to start corporate blogging on leadership issues was put forward by the firm's director of digital marketing and communications, Ryf Quail. But senior partners were concerned about legally protecting the firm, which is bound by a partnership structure.

Mr Quail says he started the debate to stimulate discussion about Deloitte's online future. Mr Quail, who came out of Deloitte's web development arm, Eclipse, says that with people such as Rupert Murdoch talking about blogs, he decided to formulate a plan to spruik Deloitte's message.

"The big technology companies were using them but there was not a lot of activity in the consultancy space," Mr Quail says.

He describes himself as an "extreme outlier" in favour of blogging at Deloitte.

He made his proposal and the rest of the firm then became involved in the discussion.

Chief marketing officer David Redhill says he recognised the tension between a professional services firm pushing the boundaries and the huge responsibility the firm has to be discreet about its clients.

As the debate escalated, he says he and others became concerned the firm could be opening a can without knowing "what was at the bottom of it".

He was aware of blogs getting people in professional positions into a lot of trouble. "Our holding pattern should be risk-averse and watching how it develops," Mr Redhill says.

The concern is that once a post is made to a blog, it is there forever.

Mr Quail says blogs have to be immediate. If the content had to go through a risk assessment system, immediacy would be lost, with content being posted weeks after it was written.

"In a corporate sense, the more racy and immediate a blog, the less you can allow it to speak for your corporation," Mr Redhill says. "There's a lot of potential power, but risk-managing a blog seems to me to be a contradiction in terms."

Partnerships are subject to many regulatory regimes. Individual views cannot hold sway over corporate policy.

"I don't want one partner speaking on behalf of a firm I'm part-owner of," Mr Redhill says.

There are a lot of specialisations within such a firm and public commentary should be left to those with that expertise, he says.

Breaking down experiences

I have a friend who always says "Break it down buddy!" when asking someone to examine a situation...

By empathising with the people who will be using a service to the extent that we look at the whole context of that use, we can gain insight into the experience.

It is actually something I have been coming to terms with for some time now in relationship to my interests [and consequent projects] in the area of developing e-education within the context of design studies. In 2000 I was asking the question "What would kids in China make of the resources we are developing?"

I know the answer to that now because I went to China to find out.They want experiences not interfaces...

Now in 2005 I'm asking why is the user buying this product/service? What is their life like? How do people integrate this product into their life? How does it feel to use this service?

UX applied to services

From the website of the Design Management Institute
this article applies thinking to the UX involved in product design. I see application for these strategies across the Service Design process as well. People "use" services. I'm looking for more material about the design of services so if you see any please let me know.

Viewpoints - Designing From the User’s Experience

By Peter H. Jones, Redesign Research

In summary, several guidelines are suggested from these points:

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Consider whether UX makes sense in your environment and organization. Ask designers and researchers what they know of the concept, and what it means to your product design process.
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Expand your concept of “user” to embrace the work practices and lifestyles of the customer for whom you are designing products. Invest in research that reveals their authentic experience. Use rapid ethnography, field research, and in-depth onsite evaluations to understand the context of work or engagement within which your product will be adopted.
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Use research methods that fit your projects and organizations. Review the methods used by innovation leaders in your industry to advance your UX research practices. Select from these to inform product decisions during the design process (use brief, iterative phases or parallel customer research if necessary to manage scheduling).
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Find ways to (simply) communicate the in-depth discoveries about your users and communities. Draw up personas (profiles), workflow scenarios, and rich pictures from your research findings. Build a user experience knowledge base that contributes to new design thinking from your team “living with” representations drawn from real user experience.
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When researching user experience, consider all the touchpoints and interactions surrounding the product, including its initial discovery, the initial interpretations about its use, and the impact of brand on experience and perception. Learn about the full lifecycle of customer experience - how the product will be found, shared, reused, or returned to over time.