Skin over skeleton

Last few days were mentally busy and full of unstructured thoughts. Folks see me walking around with a cup of tea. This is beautiful phase in product design. Made me think...

Design is like Paleontology.

You excavate for bits and pieces, try put together bigger pieces that make sense and stand true within themselves. Then comes the skeleton and you try to imagine it in motion and put skin onto it. You try to figure the ambiance in which this creature must have lived and try to decipher his body in motion and his responses. User experience design in spirit is so much alike.

Paleontologists do the discovery. Fossils are a way to understand what must have existed.

While more like natures way of working, design tries to foresee different trajecotries of evolution that might work. Its fab way of worshiping the god by practicing his art. :)

Madam Q

They say about British people that all they like to do is watch football and reality shows and stand in a que whenever where-ever possible....
With we Indians the story is different .... as with everything else...I saw a nice yellow strip at one of the airport boarding line ... "Please wait for your turn" .. it looked so alien and culturally misfit to find it there... we like to huddle around, a ticket or whatever is the object of desire should be a priced earning at the end of intense struggle. that use to keep us alive ...those little victories..but used to leave us tired and annoyed and conveniently oblivious towards the bigger questions of life and spared us with pseudo-intellectual vanity that people in rich countries often find in their lives.
In one of the bank cash counter, people don't pay heed to such lines, so the rifle holding multitasking security has to stand there and make sure they do.
Some time I feel, isnt so counter-intuitive that the countries and cultures which are scarcely populated have habits of queing up while with us, the more the crowd the more chaotic it tend to get. Sense of organization and order is also a cultural conditioning... it is very unnatural to us..or not conditioned as yet ... some of the inherent behavioral and cultural difference between western and eastern civilizations are at the root of divergent development and growth trajectories we took.....this fact is emphasized beautifully in Jerad Diamond's book...Guns Germs and steel.

That aside...coming back to yellow strip. New 'feel good' factor in urban India brought with it so many such alien ..not quite grounds up.. artifacts and constructs... which seems to be quick marker of being developed but it is a big time misfit with the minds that has seen it both....the past and the fast changing transient present...a hazy snapshot that is whizzing past...

There are some things new technology brings with it... which is inevitable...but some are nothing to do with technology..they just follow the suit...At time like to call it non-contextual design copied inappropriately.

TOI and our thought trains

The other day I was talking to my brother who is aspiring to get into a Business school. The topic of discussion was GD sessions that are conducted during the Management Entrances. One of the topics given to bunch of 10 candidates is "Morality is a creation of weak to control and deter strong" and initial thoughts that are heard would boggle anybody with sane mind.

One guy gave an example of how Dhirubhai and how he (not even saying) allegedly build an empire using corruption while others took shots at the similar examples. Now it is absurd in so many ways ...first you quote an heresay, second it is not even close to point under discussion. It seems guys in their eagerness to 'talk' loosing a ability of active listening. Other thing evident is inability to talk in terms of concepts and abstractions or making statements which shows chain of reasoning and logical/rational bent of mind. Most talk like a typical Times Of India article, shallow in its way to drive home a point...look what you did to our best brains...!