Contact me at bala@balaramadurai.net.
A speeding boat whirred in the Arabian Sea in full tilt. The horizon showed off four or five desolate islands right at the edge of my view from the balcony at a nice cozy resort in Tarkarli, Konkan Beach, Western India.
I wanted to see what happened to the speeding boat. Did it stop or did it continue at the same speed? These questions become important when you are on a holiday doing nothing.
To refresh on stuff - Rethinking Design Thinking and What is Karmic Design Thinking were things that I talked about earlier.
The broad design of this form of design thinking consists of these four stages:
I. People Orientation (or System Orientation)
This is the stage in which we acknowledge the deficiencies in the system and try and find out about what is it that people are going through. Or if it
is a device or a service, our job is to figure out what is it that this system is doing.
The “Aahaa” moment that design thinking is probably much older than only a few decades. That moment came to me when I traveled to an ancient set of Buddhist caves in India. These caves are located in central India and are at least 2000 years old. Ajanta caves, as they are called, were lost to humanity for about 1000 odd years before a British soldier rediscovered the caves in his hunting expedition. If you are planning on visiting Mumbai or Pune, I would highly recommend visiting these caves and spend a few days admiring these beautiful caves.
Let me stoke your curiosity. I have an important reason to write this series of posts on Karmic Design Thinking. Please promise that you will be patient.
Design is ubiquitous and is all around us. A tree is designed to bear the entire weight of the tree on that one single trunk. Ok, you can really say that, well, design is a conscious process. In my opinion, designs evolve naturally, either by nature or by human intervention. And since we are all part of nature, it is one and the same. Talk about talking in circles.
My Website and Blog
Wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress.org are very nice and easy to setup. I helped my wife aladybird setup her travelog website - funderfulworld.com on a self-hosted wordpress.org installation. However, there is a big problem that I faced when it came to Wordpress installations.
They are CPU hungry.
If you are paying for the hosting then there sure is no problem, since you get unlimited CPU time. However, if you are a cheapy like me, then the free hosting sites scowl at you thrice and throw you out like an uninvited guest. All I did was to devour some of their CPUs by adding a few harmless plugins to my Wordpress installation.
3 innovation facilitators - Murali Loganathan, Prakasan Kappoth and Bala Ramadurai discuss about the laws of technology evolution.
http://trizindia.org/profiles/blogs/8-triz-evolution-trends-applied-to-mobile
This is the link to the original blog post of the podcast. Also check out this link to the Corning Gorilla Glass story - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/ff-corning-gorilla-glass/3/
Image Courtesy: http://cdnimg.visualizeus.com/thumbs/40/6f/art,ball,black,and,white,crystal,light,planet-406f5e2182df35968727c56552e97dc6_h.jpg
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I have been looking around for suggestions and tools on syncing google drive and dropbox. SkyDrive offers 25GB, so I thought, why the hassle of maintaining so many of these. The problem statement is that of - How can I have just one copy of my files, but have so many services backing up my files. Right now, all I have is about 5GB of stuff…
The raging debate in our team has been whether students (our team picked out undergraduate engineering students in
particular) are capable of generating blockbuster ideas for a thriving business/startup.
Before giving you both sides of the coin, I’ll tell you an anecdote about a large company trying to figure out what makes creative minds
creative. This large company was really curious to find out the real mechanism which made the creative minds work. So, they did surveys and profiling
to figure out (Education, cultural background, family details and so on) what was really happening in their minds. Zilch! They came out with no
concrete patterns or reasons for the creativity in their organization.
Second round was face to face interviews to see if they were missing out something obvious. After a few interviews, they hit upon the key insight that
they were looking for - creative guys thought that they were creative and the not-so-creative guys thought that they were not creative. Period!
Nothing else! (As a side note, this is what neuro linguistic programming (NLP) is all about :))
With this background in mind, I go back to the original debate of whether students will come out with ideas. Sure, the students who really believe
that they are creative will crack any problem given to them. The ones who think "Oh no, this is not my cup of tea to rub shoulders with the likes
of Edison", will remain in the sideranks reading success stories of the creative world! I am going to build on this idea and will confidently say
that the ones who believe in students, will find them to be intensively creative. While if you choose to believe that the students are not creative
will find them to be unimaginative.
I choose to believe in the former and will continue to work with the young’uns to recharge my batteries :)
After several weeks of search for a decent app for Dropbox (storage for the cloud) on my outdated, outclassed, neglected Symbian Nokia E52 smartphone (Yes, fellas, it is a smartphone, even though it doesn’t have Android or iOS on it), I hit upon the right solution. Ok, let me backtrack a bit and describe to you my system of storage and how I want to carry my world with me- Here it is. What I have now is my “smartphone” doubling up as my USB device, since I thought that if I had a reliable Nokia Dropbox app, that would make syncing a breeze.
She certainly was not his boss, neither did they have any sort of agreement written between themselves. In fact, this was the first time, they had met. Till that moment, he was a maverick, picking up whatever he wanted from the retail store. It was evident to all who cared to look at his activities, that he was not interested in buying any of the stuff that he picked up. These actions were becoming routine - pick up a few items and leave them on the floor for someone to put back on shelf. The store employees were fine with this. How come she had a problem? How come she wasn’t doing any of this even though there was so many opportunities to do so?
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