Last month, our office gang planned an offsite to Bangalore’s first and only eco resort, ‘Our Native Village’. It was a journey that took us back in time… to a place where time seemed to stand still…

The Green Activity

Inspired by the fundamental theme of the eco friendly resort ‘Our Native Village’, our team in the office planned this activity to revisit our roots of a simple and green lifestyle. The key goal was to ideate and surface out simple and effective ways to make our workplace greener and eco friendly. We found that, though most of us are usually aware of the simple ways to save energy and optimize the usage of non-recyclable stuff, we tend to ignore them in our daily lives.

This activity was very successful and teams came up with very interesting ideas, which most of us could easily apply in our homes or at the workplace and contribute towards a ‘Green’ environment.

Objectives

• Go back to the basics of rural life and get inspirations from the ‘Native Village Resort’
• Work in teams and come up with ideas on ‘How to make your workspace/home greener and close to nature’
• Share ideas with the teams and identify effective ideas
• Start applying the final ideas and observe the changes

Activity Details

Four teams were formed and asked to join in the complementary tour of the ‘village resort’. Teams took pictures and made notes on various ‘objects of inspiration’, such as Solar Panels, Windmill, Biogas for cooking, eco friendly swimming pool and many more. 

Individual teams then brainstormed on various potential ideas and concepts. We learned that though many concepts were common knowledge for most of us, novel ways of adopting this knowledge to today’s world proved to be an interesting challenge. We used paper sheets to write-down our ideas, a faux pas we later realized, given the theme for our activity, we should have gone for whiteboards instead! Nevertheless, each team came up with excellent and unique set of ideas.

The best part was the final session where we formed two fresh teams, the ‘Good’ team and the ‘Evil’ team. One representative each from the previous four teams formed the ‘Good’ team and the rest formed the ‘Evil’ group. Two people took over the roles of observers, diligently noting down the good ideas that were not dismissed by the ‘Evil’ team. The Goods were brave enough to share their ideas and face the criticism from evils. In the process of convincing Evils, the Goods came up with very good rationales on the ideas and their feasibility.

Outcomes

Many great ideas surfaced out and here is the list of many potential ideas. There are things one could apply on personal basis other are mainly applicable at office facilities level.

Lately, I came across an interesting blog called failblog.org.  As name suggests, it’s surely not a failed blog. Instead, it is very popular and contains fantastic videos and images of products, services, people, behaviors etc., which fails to do justice to their intended design. Not surprisingly, I did agree on the existence of most of the product on this blog. However, there was one specific video which made me to think more about it.

This video shows a person addressing people in a restaurant, using a wireless microphone. Sitting next to him, is an old lady enjoying her meal. This lady is very much engrossed in the meal, totally unaware of the person’s speech.  The person suddenly offers the microphone to the old lady for her comments. Surprisingly, at the very moment, the lady is expecting something else. It’s nothing else, but a Pepper Crusher.  Just imagine her rotating the upper part of the microphone to dispense black pepper.

Have a look at the video.

The situation is definitely funny and the lady was obviously embarrassed. But was this really her problem?

I don’t think so.

I have observed two mindsets for this kind of situation. Either blame the person (or rather make fun of them), or blame the product, like most designers or usability experts do always. I personally found this situation rather strange. I cannot directly blame the product, because I have never ever seen people getting confused between a pepper crusher and the microphone. Also, I didn’t see anything wrong in the way that old lady reacted to the microphone.

I see a major influence of the context in which the lady looked at the microphone. At the very moment she was offered the microphone, she was enjoying her meal. And being totally unaware of her surrounding, she could not expect more than someone offering something related to her ‘context’. In this particular situation, the perceived affordance of the microphone was changed due to the change in ‘context’.

This triggers a question. Can ‘context’ influence the perceived affordance of a well designed product? I do not have any specific research data to support my claim, but I strongly feel, ‘Yes’.  Here are some of my observations:

1. Imagine a person trying to kill you and you need to defend yourself. Most likely the affordance of a flowerpot or an ashtray near you will change to a weapon
2. You are travelling in a crowded bus, and suddenly driver decides to apply brakes. Your reflexes force you to grab the hand of a stranger next to you. In this ‘context’ the affordance a ‘hand’ becomes a ‘support handle’
3. You are walking on the road and it starts raining. You quickly look for cover and in most cases you might end up using your bag, books or a briefcase as an umbrella 

There are more examples like this for sure. Here is one more example of a person hurting himself by a hot electric iron while mistaking it for a mobile phone. Here, you must observe the ‘context’, which is more important.

This is a great learning for me personally, and I am convinced that having a deeper understanding of various contextual usage of a product would help me design products effectively.

Any comments?

While writing this blog, I would like to mention that I am a big advocate of a good design, however I would like to share today’s incident which came as a surprise to me.

Just like any other day, I took my car out and felt a little trouble in reversing it for first few seconds. At first, I didn’t bother and started driving. It was a pleasant drive for next forty five minutes till I noticed few people staring at my car. I didn’t bother again, since I already have a nice dent near front headlamp, big enough to grab anyone’s attention. Finally, at some point one anxious guy came and asked me to come out of the car.

On coming out I found that one of the tires was completely deflated, and I had been driving my car in the same condition. I felt really bad for my car and at the same time, I felt really embarrassed with the thought in my mind that how many people might have seen me driving like that. Somehow, I managed to change the tyres with the help of an Auto driver.

Now that I am out of the trouble, I am a little concerned about this incident. How could I not feel even a bit, that I am driving with one tyre completely deflated? Is this my ignorance or something else? It cannot be former, because I am a new driver and I cannot afford to ignore smallest of the indication of trouble in my car. Finally, I realized that I am mostly dependent on the various indicators on the dashboard which keeps me updated of fuel level, engine temperature, door ajar, speed etc. There are other indicators like, vibrating noise if the gear is not in position or door is not locked properly. Interestingly, there is no indication of the status of air pressure in the tyres. Is this the problem area? Probably not, or at least not the only reason.

My car seems to be designed for comfort and pleasure of driving. The noise levels inside the car are very low, individual suspensions are given for each tyre while driving on potholes, good engine bhp to drag your car easily on an incline. However, I personally feel, these three points which I just mentioned actually contributed to this situation. I was so pampered with those comforts that I could drive my car at a high speed on a highway with a deflated tyre. This could’ve been fatal. Thankfully, one usually cannot achieve red zones in the speedometer while on Bangalore roads.

I have spoken to many drivers and most agreed that, the best way to drive safely on Indian roads is to have some ‘feel’ of the road while you drive. This is the reason electronically controlled power steering rarely gives you that ‘feel’ as compared to hydraulic power steering. Similarly, sound-proof interiors are fantastic, but the road dynamics can be better understood if you can hear some level of outside noise.

I must admit that pleasure and comfort were key parameters for me when I bought my car. But now I feel, I would also look at a design on other parameters as well. For example;

• How does your car react in grave situations?
• Does it create sense of emergency or not in that situation?
• Does it tell you what to do immediately to prevent the situation?

Personally, I would not mind if my car vibrates heavily and create a sense of urgency. I would expect this to happen rarely, but similar actions should take precedence over all other comforting elements in the car.

As a designer, I strongly feel that a design cannot be fully successful unless fundamental requirements are met. In my case it was control and feedback mechanism, which was dominated by the pleasure and comfort.