“Can I borrow your pen for a moment?” I asked my colleague. It took him few minutes to search his backpack full of books, mp3 player, mobile phone, a thumb drive, music CDs, headphone and office ID card to find an old age Reynolds ballpoint pen. I needed to fill up a form manually and then I realized, ‘sheesh’, I could write faster on a key board.

Nowadays, I find it really difficult to find a pen when I need it badly. Moreover, I even find it difficult to write ‘traditionally’. It wasn’t the case seven years ago when I was a student, and a pen was one of my fundamental needs (food, water, shelter, clothing and a pen). I remember running back to my hostel during exam time to collect it. I was sure not to find one, even from my best of friends out there.

So what happened now? I was one of those persons who used to go out in the following manner:

1. Pickup  wallet and check money
2. Pickup my favorite pen and put in shirt’s pocket to show my sincerity
3. Pickup my bicycle’s keys and walkout

Now the sequence is different

1. Pickup wallet and check credit cards
2. Pickup mobile phone
3. Pickup laptop
4. Pickup keys and walkout

Where is the pen? “Well I don’t need it, and even if I do, I’ll find it somehow” I always answer to me.

I did a quick analysis of various scenarios where I always used pen and nowadays prefer to adopt alternate solutions

This is a brief list of scenarios I could immediately think of, and I am sure there could be more. Though I don’t see a major impact in my daily life in ‘absence’ of a pen, I still feel guilty about it. When it comes to writing, I have observed some changes which I would like to rectify. Sometimes my own signature looks fake to me. I feel uncomfortable with the fact that in actual writing there is very little room for rectifying errors. I am overcautious and write slow, as if I am driving my car after ages in midst of a narrow lane.

I have a very high regard for those who write on paper fluently, effortlessly and confidently. Which I feel is difficult to achieve in a digital world, where all your mistakes are being treated as an overlook and rectification is very easy.

Since more and more people are becoming part of the digital ecosystem, I really wonder what will be the future of handwriting analysts, calligraphy artists and all those associated with the written script on a physical sheet of paper. I also wonder, if a person like me who have lost the flair of usage of pen, could be analyzed on various parameters of handwriting to identify personality traits?

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?

I am probably not the only one who followed Mumbai so closely during those crucial 72 hours. I spent my last few days flipping channels to know more and more, feeling anxious for those stuck inside the death dungeons, following twitter on one side and getting angry at the same time.

Initially I did praise the contribution of our news media, social media and email trails. However, when my mind was settled somehow, I realized that I do have a lot to comment upon all those who were a part of this information flow. I am not really trying to point my figures at any specific media group or a person; I feel there are few lessons we should learn and try to re-evaluate ourselves and see if we could help prevent any major glitches in a similar event of emergency. 

Lesson 1: Keep away from the site and let people do their job

If one happens to witness similar incident, we should try to follow some discipline and keep the access road clear for smooth movement of Police, Force, Ambulance and Fire Engines etc. This would really help expedite any rescue process.

Lesson 2: Why do you need to know everything immediately?

Our media channels should realize that they do create hurdle during these kinds of operations. I saw at least five footages where police and security personals were begging news reporters to go away and requesting them to do their job.

Lesson 3: Media channels need to collaborate on common messaging.

You must have noticed more than 100 camera’s / microphone and a bunch of tangled wired on the ground. Imagine a stampede, these wires, cameras and tripods will definitely add to the casualty. My suggestion would be to allow only 2-3 nominated camera operators on the site and let all media use the same video / audio stream. Finally, keep the entire areas clear at least for a kilometer from the site.

Lesson 4: Blog, Tweet and react responsibly.

I found most people tweeting and blogging on this topic very aggressively. I found myself in a highly panicked state when I went through the massive twitter feeds. I could not avoid it since it was the most updated source of information for me. However, there were many bloggers deliberately trying to provoke the blogger / twitter community. Do not share false assumptions and trigger ‘Rumors’ which are no good but add to the chaos.

I feel that a little self-discipline amongst us during these crucial moments could make a big difference. However, I wish we never see the same day again.