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. :)

Talking of android UX

In Google android,when you pan the desktop, the desktop background image (the seashore view) moves little slower than the icons and widgets thereby giving it a feel of depth. Such a simple but really intuitive thing.
Desirability in UX comes with such small details !!

Polyester Prince

A day journey by train, legs stretched out on side berth, pleasant windy weather cooled by late monsoon showers and a book that grips you from page one. Sometimes things do work out! The book is ‘Polyester prince’ on life and times of Dhirubhai Ambani. Somehow got my hands on this book. It is systematically ‘banned’ in India for reason unknown. Written by an Australian author in dispassionate way, crude at times to an extent that one feels how ‘indian’ness is looked upon by an external eye.
My image, so far, of the protagonist or RIL for that matter is through recent biopic by Maniratnam. When started dealing in stocks in around 05, I have been told by those with established portfolios how good a pick Reliance is. Indeed, Reliance do give a huge gain, ‘on-paper’ as nobody want to offload it but gain nevertheless. In recent times, feud between the brothers and mammoth wealth accumulated through different subscriptions were also fresh in mind.
It might be mistaken to be more of the financial accounting history than a biography. It runs you through a narrative of the events that occurred and the actors of the plot, a plot as dense as it called out to be Textile Mahabharata of that time which influenced the course of politics. So intermingled was the government machinery of licence raj and the industry at large that it looked like one single complex.
Dhirubhai’s financial wizardry was illustrated in many places. How he used different accounting years whenever company hit some trouble or profits were plummeting, How the clause of the non-convertible debentures into equity stunt used to finance the debts of reliance ever expanding ambitions, how he managed to ‘smuggle a whole plant’ in spare parts when aam junta was wary of going through green channel with a watch or an imported sari for wife. How fictitious companies under names ‘Isle of man’ were floated in Tax heavens and loans were taken to finance the buying of the reliance shares, how these funds were used to defend against the bear attack on the reliance shares by cliques of brokers.
The deeds and gimmickry goes to an extent of Ekta Kapoor soap rich with scheming saas-bahus and revenge seeking characters. The rivalry of Dhirubhai with Indian express’s R Goenka and Bombay Dying’s Nusli wadia was told in rich in the details. How Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Goenka’s protégé and journalist with deep understanding of accounting, managed to launch series of attacks on the company in a land mark piece of investigative journalism in the history of India, how CBI harassed him instead for his sources (since RTI rule was not then), How the murder plot of Wadia had involvement of PR manager of Ambani’s and how the whole case was archived out of the public memories, how he used of CBI head Katre as one of the ‘reliance’s people’, How then finance minister Pranab Mukherji at time to time secured the interests of a business house is narrated with finer details or. No wonder it is banned in India! So true, Indians are hypocrites as Amartrya Sen says.
In his account of events in 80s through early nineties, author seems to be honest enough to separate rumours from factual data and nowhere had he tried to sensationalize or malign an image.
It is a must read for those who want to go beyond the surface level understanding of corporate world and its manipulation of stock prices. The tightly interwoven plots and subplots reveal how each actor is out there to seek his own political gain or business gain. It’s like living experiment in game theory. There are some great gossips on Bollywood like Tina and Anil affair and then marriage, or how the defence deal or ‘Matinee idol’ accounts saga of bachchans which VP Singh used to secure his interests in UP politics, how the takeover bids of L&T failed but later Reliance could get his hands on the tech-giant.
Going back in time and empathising with this ambitious Kathiwari entrepreneur who had little background except support of his community, one gets amazed of his zeal and resourcefulness. A truly inspiring story. It’s a journey of a person who made up his mind to reach the top of the textile business and did that in 10 years and beat the established parsi business houses like Birlas, Tatas, Mahindras or Wadias in their own game. At times he went overboard and influenced, manipulated the governments as they came and gone. In US corporate lobbying is part of open politics, but with judiciary and governments still maintains a good set of controls. But India is different story.
After having read this book and history between the line, and when I recall the cinematised portrait of Dhirubhai in ‘Guru’, the image left in my mind is now wrinkled and with dark streaks, like the picture of Dorian Gray.

Cognitive surplus and Roadies...

Why do people like Mtv roadies this much? Led me to think. These days stories and movies are getting too hard to empathize with. Not every other person is a homicide detective or masked vigilante. So there is this vacuum to be filled in at prime time. Audience at these hours seek to meet their ‘cognitive surplus’.

There is certain idea floated by sociologist and thinker, Clay shirky, called ‘cognitive surplus’…(designers too are fond of this word, if we want to order bheja fry in Irani hotel, we would ask for cognitive tadka!). I see a good deal of substance in this observation. A man would like to spend his faculties in pursuits of different things in a day. What he calls cognitive surplus may sound like a heavy word for ‘free time’. But it is more than that. Of course what we do with our free time is only thing where one exercises choice. The rest of the activities are becoming so basic and commonplace that even expressing affection is also getting packaged in different forms and ready off-the-shelf.

In his book, here comes everybody (have not read it but read about it) he says, in 70’s cognitive surplus was a need which was met with soaps and sitcoms, but now it is an asset at work, as one finds it as a prime driver in collaborative authoring like Wikipedia. A concept also promoted in the book, wisdom of crowd.

Talking of sitcoms and soaps, we have it in our own K series and now let me stretch it to today’s reality shows like Roadies. Every one watch them and like to talk about them and give an opinion and feel included in the ‘game’. We hate them but still we watch it. Its most vicarious pleasure in seeing somebody doing things you would not do yourselves either ‘cause they are taboo or you do not have balls.

These shows result into engaging experience (?!) to many is ‘cause of one fact. What the characters in this show script is just a little bit more than average acceptable behavior.

They want the behavioral envelope to be pushed just a little bit not too much, like in a meeting or coffee conversation I score by saying this, or I could have done that.
Reality shows and the people in them try to recreate the similar situations resulting into consciously scripted situational entertainment around the emotional needs of this audience.

Mtv audience is one of the most brash and exposed lot. To make them stick around this channel, they are always in need for freshness in ideas and thinking. I used to like it for that. But with reality shows and catering to ‘needs’ feels like going out of hand.

I am not a big time Tv fan, but whenever got time in front of it, I surf channels till I drop dead. I get my quota of sitcoms through p2p and watch them in one-go one after the other like stress eating.

The form of entertainment we are subjected these days, there is need for filtering and suggestion mechanism to bring up the good from mediocre. Till the time I am better off with my pc.

Usage patterns - mobile phones

When piggy chops say shaking her bootie, "it’s not just phone, it’s who we are", it does make a lot of sense.
On an average, the time we spend on phones is reaching the point where it will match other competing media like cable TV, broadband computer. There lies the big opportunity. This comes as a boon to the so far poor ignored baby of the group will be more than happy if eyeball ear-time seeking corporations pay for their usage at the cost of embedded ads.

If mobile phones are the defining innovations of this era, then missed call is our own Indian low cost contribution. (instead of an Indian phenomenon of our generation) It’s about many things like affordability, power structure - "let him call when he is free - I can wait", who needs the most - "it’s his work, let him call me."

I don’t like model of this missed calls. it has too much redundancy.
It involves disconnecting the call, redialing it back. Why not to get rid of this by allowing to have "collect call" option,
I see my phone ringing and it says "collect call from xyz" and I receive, but it gets charged as if I called him. Simple. saves my navigation time.

India is fast becoming urban and the shock of change is softened by this cell phone bridge. Sam Petroda did it with 1 Rupee coin box and that is nicely augmented by “receive only” cell phones. This is the bridge that connects a displaced laborer to its remote village, and an IT nomad to his near and dear.

if you ask a house maid, a dhoodhwalah, an IT guy, a college goer to draw the navigation as you perceive it will all be so different. each got different level of stickiness with different features.
For doodhwalah or paperwalah, his contact list may be his clientele.
For a illiterate, last three numbers is the identity of the person on the other end. A clear design implication could be numbers shown in the way that uses this fact.

Cell phone is a shadow that follows you, gives a best way to excuse yourself from a group whenever you want, how much long you want it.
its an easiest self analysis tool for aspirants in interviews and leave it on and later on find where you lost the plot.
its a best and easiest spying tool for wives and girl friends. just pick up the phone and see what he or she is up to.

We still lack many things ... we don’t see things or we don’t want to see them as it does not fit in business model... incumbents would never try it and entrant faces uphill task. What one need is a innovation cell within giants that keep eyes are ears open to the usage trends in the emerging markets.

Why don’t we build a multi-user feature... typically for lower middle class where a phone like a PC is shared asset and it is carried by 'who needs it most at this hour" basis. So you get a number and its derivative and with a OS level change, these derivative numbers will kick in as per user selection in the phone.
Like a evolution of computing from personal to cloud, when I see how mobiles are evolving, they are driven by marketing than user needs, they want to mimic handheld PC than inherent mobile ubiquitous needs. whatever can be stuffed in that form factor is finding its place in final stank list. oh I can easily fit in a IR device, ...who uses it for crying out loud.

Like Mercedes Benz defines the farthest point in the stylizing for a generation. Rest of the herd try and aim their trajectories to it in surface styling. We need pioneers of that kind who set the bar high enough. iPhone did that with touch factor to some extent.

I strongly feel, Need to hold something to ear is one big No No for me.
this is first to get rid off when you want to put that farthest point.
I have seen a projector based keyboard sometime back, can we build the same for the phone.

Imagine a face appearing with whom you can talk. projector resides at the inner band of wrist watch and lets you project it on palm of other hand.
For hands free version you just put it down and project it on any surface.

I saw an ad today of multi-touch that lets you play piano on touch-screen of the phone. Imagine with the projector the limitation of 4 inch by 3 inch goes away. You can even play drums on this.

It can easily port the content of web with least changes in the wrapper “container of the content” since now the form factor is “stretchable”. You can browse web like in a dual monitor J

What I am writing must already be invented the way far eastern countries are adopting the mobile tech. But appropriateness for its audience is the key thing in design and one just cannot lift up a design and use it here in Indian market.

Google has a knack of doing the right thing at right time. They are entering the emerging markets when whole world is focusing on deep pockets US/EU markets.

Google started it with a voice enabled service on its no. 80041999999, for India and it give results with a fair amount of accuracy to normal queries like cab service etc. I don’t know what they plan to do next but I see a big eco-system of services evolving around it. It’s a baby with big hopes and big potential. Imagine once you establish a phone number in the heads of one million people, you need ways to “extend the brand”…may be last 3 numbers will change to search specific commodities like hotel, bus, electrician and all you need is register it back to Google’s server that I am an electrician operating in such and such area. It would capture the un-organized sector which is right now “loosely connected” with cell phones.
Do you notice how Volve bus operators optimize using a bunch of jobless people with cell phones and a shrewd orchestrator plus a scheme well understood by all (I know at the cost of frustrated and annoyed customer). In India cell phones made these people “intelligent agents that transmit back information” in an multi-agent system. Google can hold it all together and can orchestrate a productivity revolution in this market. Airtel / Idea etc are not thinking out of box. They are happy with margins and customer base. Some are moving or making a cautious attempts to move to holy grail of convergence when broadband-mobile telephony-entertainment will be through single pipe. Don’t know when will this happen. With recession dawning the bitter truth to these companies, it is now more farther than it was.

Like any other ‘stuff’, cell phone is a status-quo. I am not saying anything new here. Earlier days, having a house used to give that respect and social standing. It’s an extended identity and sense of permanence which so many people of different strata search and find in different things. For the lowest rungs now cell phone is doing it. Having a number is something. It’s getting counted. Its license to be included. I feel we are not doing enough. We are not doing it right.

Euphoria around good cause like literacy projects are just ad gimmicks used by leading cell phones companies. Nobody generates content and such things remain white board ideas or idea whose time has not come because I want some other ‘thought leader’ to come and show me how.

A mature Devnagari text or Indic script messaging is still a distant dream. Far east did not let go their past and heritage in their idea of development and progress. Middle east can afford it so long oil is there. No other BRIC nation is doing it. But we devalue our cultural markers in the name of progress. It’s like once my friend Anchal said, to drive faster and lose weight dumbass driver is shedding carburetor and engine. What will be left and how far will you go.

everybody loves zoozoo!!

Isnt it?.. each sporting event is taxed with drab dull bland ads..while "this year in televisions near you".. we got a beautifully crafted series of ads by Vodafone which I just love.

Another rip off, now in brand design

Both got similar tag line, both got yellow, black and white. One a news channel trying to find its place in the crowd (although they got some good chat shows) and other world leader in antivirus.
I dont understand whether it is a chance occurance in the probabilistic world of Brand identity design or Is it another desi rip off. The resemblance is uncanny, isn'te ?

Designing for India is like designing font for ransom letter

I dropped into Pune after a gap of few months. When I left, the whole city was undergoing construction and road widening.
The deal was to have the city (some parts of the city) ready for the youth game events. But the city municipal corporation in their usual style kept missing the milestones and then somehow on the eve before the d-day fixed the ‘stuff’ to adorn the roads; even the paint was wet when guests arrived.
Think of a bachelor’s house and girlfriend drops in unannounced, how the things are shoved under the bed, tucked under the pillow, forced into overflowing cupboard, giving a temporary look of tidiness; it’s the same.
But it is a city, a larger living space we are dealing with. It affect the mind and psyche of its inhabitants and it feels bad when you look at such gross misuse of power to decide in what kind of place 'we' live in.
When I look at the graphics and visual identity designed for the youth games; it’s like crude, unfinished makeshift thing. Giving insights into how bad we are at detailing or how insensitive we have become to the visual and the visible aspects of the things around us. I am not a kind of person who believes in real design is what comply with the taste of Europe or few cartelised bunch of people. But it takes deep dive into the collective consciousness of the people, which we forgot about as a design community.
I remember we discussing kitsch as a way of ‘filler’ design back while studying design, think of how meters in the auto-rick are adorned or small town furniture are detailed by stuffing the motifs and elements with no regards to the end result.
Our lack of taste or lack of ‘consistent’ taste with definite personality is visible in every aspect. May it is a result of the fact that we are not a homogeneous society anymore, we are one 'big layered cake' if they like to call US as 'melting pot'; or it reminds me of one sanskrit song we used to taught in texts about 'Sthala-pistatakam' a dish like theple (guju) where all ingredients maintain their tastes . We are bad at discovering the values and mores that are so much authentic and original. The days are of fusion and not khichadi.
In our childhood, we used to hear “Pune thethe kai une” (rhetorical – “what on earth you won’t find in pune?”) now i guess i know the answer. We lack good designs.

Small is beautiful...Green is elegant

11th hour is part 2 of inconvenient truth.. Al Gore’s impressive documentary which makes you feel ashamed for being lifelong consumer of fossil fuel and raises hazar questions on the life style we got getting accustomed to without even having the pangs of irreversible destruction we are causing.
We all know Leonardo de Carpio, the man who has a public image of being sensible and earnest about things he does. And after Al gore he is the right choice of voice that binds these plethora of freewheeling interviews. Tthese sound bites are just long enough and crisp enough to communicate what a one whole book worth has to say.
I mean 2008 is heating up with the so many sane minded people coming out and making their voices heard. Obama appointing Steven Chu as a energy advisor, makes one hope for some path-breaking changes in world in which we live today. We have seen millions of people getting affected by food shortages like never before , unprecedented floods and storms and draughts.... all the result of haphazard use of fossil fuel, trapping of too much of green house gases in biosphere, leading to rise in average temperature causing arctic ice to melt. Its caouse and effect even 4th standard kid can understand took us wiping clean of half the O3 umbrella and 3/4th of rain forests to learn. Right now we are witnessing a tipping point and if we don’t stand up to that, we will not live to see the future. It’s basically you are not saving the environment , it will continue to live but then human won’t be there to see the aftermath 'cause it won’t be a livable anymore. There are so many catchy lines in this: Introspecting US academicians quoting Churchill, “Americans often do the right thing, but only when they exhaust all the other possibilities”. (make sure you turn the subtitles on even if you are watching it English. Made me remind of, not long ago, we have George Clooney’s Batman, in which a middle aged environmentalist woman was portrayed as a villain and laughing stock of the whole party. Seriously, we have come a long way from there.
Central theme of this documentary is nicely punctured with 3-second video-clips of natural events and somber voice over that adds to amazing effect. Hearing about what we notice and but chose to ignore sometimes makes us be conscious of the gravity of those things
‘Go green’, but how? Kindly package it for me, for the masses.. what can we do at my level.... may be run a blog/website where people suggest tricks / hacks / strategies to reduce ones carbon footprint. Unlike Americans we are not big fan of SIGs special interest groups possibly because we already have so many cults and sects and are a divided society. Of the top of my head, we should make a PIL in consumer court to start putting carbon values (how much green house gas this product led to into the environment in its making) on the products and we stick to buying those which are the least...market forces are the strongest, there is no denying once it comes into effect. All you need is right push in right direction and it will self-evolve. So far the oil lobby driven the geo-politics and the wars and the tensions in the second- half of the 20th century, but Obama promises some change in the time to come. As an Indian we should be ready to gear up ourselves with the values of frugality and 'small is beautiful’ and ’green is elegant’ attitude. Gosh, it worth a Tantra T-shirt slogan. 
Otherwise our politicians will sell us off as a dumping ground of the greedy and set-in-their-ways so called immature developed countries.

Lurkers... any thougths... what can be done to drag the hand s of clock backv inot the time frmo the 11th hour...

Why do we like designer stuff... or do we?

I have been pushed to see something bizzare by the subject line of the fwdee...






interesting isnt it..!!
Don't tell me that its hard to quickly say what's the time. I know its not that usable. but thats not the point. Its a design with personality and may or may not get thumbs up for being usable. Now here lies the tricky part which involves how a designer steers through such moments of decision where he has to drop fancy attribues of her designs and make peoples lives easier but mundane and less interesting. Thats the reason Mac designs have a definite personality. I heard they don't bother too much when they go ahead with their usability studies. There is One maxim that a camel is a horse designed by committee; I would extend it further, using a a overly normalised product by bunch of designers is worse; resulting interaction must feel like romancing with a family and not a person.

Alas, there are moments when the inner designer get immensly satisfied...

the other day in a similar mindless browsing spree landed at IDSA awards... here is one winner from IDEO : Heimspiel (german for "home play" ) .. so many amazing subtle design changes ..Ideas such as bringing a light element to a door edge that allows the light to spill into the room as the door rotates around the hinge, a radiator control knob that begins to illuminate in response to the radiator's warmth, door knob allowed to 'sink-in' if it has "do not enter" sign ..like a disbaled button... feels like a smooth fusion of Product Design and interaction design...


going through it made me conscious ...like a suddenly-vision-corrected-person-coinmg-out-of a-spects-shop.

the whole thing reiterates what a real design effort can turn into rather than a I-wrok-for-bread-n-butter work one gets accustomed to and start getting habituated to.

Some works are really outstanding.. check out ... IDSA awards

Thoughts on pot

Quantum of solace se yaad aaya... that’s what are we missing in our lives... at least let me speak for myself... I heard all the bond movie names are picked from such cheesy words from Ian Fleming’s novels...

The constant turmoil that we live into.. I mean... every dig we take on internet starts with Google... it is a new world’s web address bar... for a while think about a scenario where you are living in a room and everything you want involves a hunting ... long ago we used live in simpler times... where a book finished used to linger in our minds for days... quoting that used to be way of enjoying it... calling bro from other room and reading him passages were the fun part... something is getting lost today..maybe there are distances.,...maybe people we care about part... and there comes a need for talking with many at a time ... we are constantly hard pressed for time....
I go blank in front of blank screen and get careful and politically correct and filter my own thoughts... but true me do meet me sometime.... thoughts come rushing in...
It peaks when I am on my morning 8km run and climaxes when I am taking hot showers on my back...(my lord, ye baat note ki jaye..ye insaan aaj kal sexual metaphors bahot use karne laga hain)
But I feel the blog should not give away ..but should talk about the things that culminate out of your intense brooding over a thing, thought, issue... it should surface with more clarity than clutter.

Things I like to share I get it in that ephemeral moments when my mind is completely light and feathery .. watching over the steps one after the other and thinking nothing else... i fact these days...we hardly do anything for a prolonged period of time... something is always there to disrupt u .. a buzzing cell...talap for tea/coffee... somebody at the door... unwanted mail alert... ... we tend to get something close to this thing..that higher state of mind..on pot(I don’t have that experience as yet but my friends from arts school tell me) or on the pot... (assuming some invest good amount of time for the ROI sitting there) ... some find such lighter moments... moments of clarity in their sleep ...at 4 am... my Prof Bapat.. use to say.. sleep after a good wrestling with a tricky design problem and let the mind synthesis it ... and in the morning..it will be all clear and crystalline for u... they call it “let me sleep over it”..

For me this part of sleep comes not at 4 am but pretty late in the morning... and that supposedly design breakthrough moment actually turns out to be sleep breaking moment ,,,..

I see I write in a muddled up manner, try to be relentless. It reminds me what Sean Connery says to his prodigy in ‘Finding Forrester’ ... Don’t stop ... Keep writing...Don’t stop even for a moment.. it is a key to good writing.... but ... when unlike the seasoned writers it should be good to be able to write one full page of your state of mind... I admire those who can do this..may be through a diary .. sometime they are the one who use it to motivate themselves... for people like me.... by constantly pushing myself .. as to show me what u are capable of.. this results into a constant watchfulness I would say till the level beyond which it is difficult to call healthy.... blog is on such poking to myself... I don’t believe in mass media but I blog...I believe the key to good conversations is knowing how the listener is responding... and growing into that conversation in such a way that you both discover something more valuable and connect... sometime I feel there can be a nice tool one can develop that creates a collage of my conversations with many into a coherent publishable feed... so i tell my friend.. about this movie... and then about how was stuck in traffic... it would be nice to extract that conversation into something others like to overhear and add... no....not a chat room.... we don’t want more chaos to what we already get exposed to... we don’t want to land up in the privacy law suits also. ..

Permission Interfaces for better dialogs

We loose our innocence every passing day..we call it learning the ways of the world...
so is designer goes through this maturity curve, he learns the ways of the world; undones all the notions when he was fresh out of design school. We used to have these rosy ideas about appropriate design... we still do but in more pragmatic frame of mind.
I was under the the deep influence of design bible "design for the real world"by victor papanek. I used to look at the marketing efforts and their right hand mercenaries for all the dirty work - the advertisers, in utter disdain. I still think its a bad use of creativity.
As papanek opens his book with a line - "advertising is world's phoniest profession which tries to influence people to buy things they don't need with the money they don't have and to impress the people who don''t care."
And now here I am reading this book "Permission Marketing". It teaches you how to bait a stranger to be a friend, and then a customer.. of course I am not out there to sell anything. My whole focus is this books emphasis to use of the web for 1:1 with masses as against traditional interruption marketing techniques of the conventional mass media.
But it is good to learn from things you feel unethical and immoral, right? so When sachin says he wont endorse cigarettes one feels good about him..
neways...in this book Seth Godin succinctly take you on to changing nature of marketing efforts with time and media...what amazon did to web and how its changing the ways businesses are done.No, its not going to be another dotcom dud. Web is mature now if it is not already said enough. Core values and mores of the permission marketing is so very relevant to UXD since its finally the UIs that get influenced by this pitch and approach. And finally out there on web and its clutter and overload of information - you are in a selling business..may be not a commercial product or but of course an idea or a sequence to do things.. wherein step by step permission interfaces are more desirable than in your face interruptions.

Era of Keywords

A walk with colleagues after lunch is a mine of crazy topics..we were talking painting..a pro in that field made a passing reference at a technique called ..'Wet-on-wet', I made a mental note...to look it up. And it opened up treasure of fixes for all the little dilemmas I had in past while dabbling acrylic paints in awkward way.
We live in the era of keywords... an inquisitive mind can embark on insightful journey with few right words up his sleeve. Gone are the days of hand-holding and sharing the hard earned wisdom of worlds. Kids today, all they have to know is type in that bland empty text-bar and reach a particular bit of information in no time.
I get a feeling in sometime there would be some nerdy high-school competitions to find a piece of information using Google and then boasting their way to glory by how they picked those specific bunch of keywords to slice n dice and reach the finish line. No wonder MS is flirting with Yahoo for their share of search market.

Call for ideas... everyday traffic problems

One of my colleague from work was very excited and happy...thing is he worked on a proposal, a solution for traffic congestion at the cross roads.. ..everyone gets pissed but he went little further and tried solving it....got an article published in daily and one fine day got a response from traffic commissioner...such public-govt administrative partnership is although something most logical..but happening just recently ...and is very encouraging,...

My friend was pretty sympathetic with the conditions at this traffic control room.. "they work 12 hrs a day..continuously answering a beeping radio...following up an orderly on certain case ..dictating certain purchase requisition to a clerk who is getting words handpicked from the whole cluttered mingled conversations"... in fact .....As in good ol'days, from changing the lane if policeman is seen coming to partnering them on such solutions, we have come a long way, at list in patches.

Other thing I noticed that we are starting to voice our concerns using Web as a Social Platform ..there is a trust and hope developing that my voice will get heard and not as a chance incidence like a message in the bottle floating on a web cloud. Today Orkut community provides, although in some make-shift way, a social tool for special interest groups like 'Save Pune traffic' groups to virtually come together.

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.

Resurrected...

My site is up again... go visit www.amitrathod.com
want to add a mini-feed of this blog to the site. I got to do little Googling for some code snippet.
Other thing I am planning to add is thumbnail view of portfolio, nobody cares or likes to read long passages, pics can result into much wider browsing of pages than could possibly facilitated by a menu.
Also felt like adding my latest bookmarks . These days ones' personal browsing history run into millions but it is at the same time becoming a thumb-print of who you are.

Paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz

Some time I wonder books of this kind are a nice amalgam of research papers we hardly bother to read in first place, although author brings us the insights from these references in a framework of this book ..which try to develop a theme around the current overabundance of choice in every walks of life.... and which is not empowering us the freedom of choice but wearing us down,...

there some nice references to concepts like price anchoring - some pricing tactics followed to create an artificial feel of choice and good bargain, psychological ledger of our buying and spending habits, framing etc,
...

an easy read like a stroll in a park,,,, with many insights on its way...
happen to come across this book as a part of quarterly book review we often do in our small design group at work... it definitely a must for those deal in consumers domain or design websites for commodity selling.