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Podcast Enterprise: S1E07: Mudd's Women

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Today’s episode, we’re focusing on Mudd’s Women, I’m gonna give you a small gist of this episode. The USS enterprise is chasing an unidentified cargo vessel and the cargo vessel is meandering this way and that, and flies into an asteroid belt. The USS Enterprise is forced to cover this ship with the deflector shield to prevent the ship from disintegrating from the asteroid hits. Eventually as time goes by the captain of the ship is transported into the Enterprise and he turns out to be a very interesting conman who calls himself by some other name in the beginning. But eventually his name is revealed to be Harry Mudd. And this guy, he is smuggling women across the galaxy to various colonies. And these women who are with him, three of them are with him. They’re very, very alluring and seem to have a peculiar hypnotic magnetic effect on the men of the Enterprise. And even on the captain.

These women confuse the men and they’re not able to focus on what they’re supposed to do. Because the Enterprise shielded Harry Mudd’s now destroyed ship from the asteroid hit, the lithium crystals that the Enterprise runs on is destroyed. They have to go to a mining corner to get more lithium crystals.

Harry Mudd uses this particular trip to try and leverage something for himself. He tries to trade the women for the miners on the planet. Eventually everything goes wrong for him. And the women are released from his custody and yeah, it ends in a very amusing note. There’s also reference to a peculiar drug called the Venus drug.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Ask the Design Thinking Doc - Not so heavy books to read

What are some books one could read to learn Design Thinking? The answer can be contradictory. Since, Design Thinking is a skill, is best learnt from on-field experience. However, without knowing what Design Thinking can do, the on-field experience may not be so rewarding after all.

So, what books must one read and not read to attain expertise in Design Thinking?

This post will answer that.

Design Thinking, as a skill, can be learnt by practicing the methodology on real world problems. I run an online course on Design Thinking on a Govt. of India platform called SWAYAM where close to 40,000 learners have learnt Design Thinking already.

What I have got in return (apart from lots of love 😍) is the variety of questions that have been asked by so many curious learners. This Ask the DT Doc series can be helpful to anyone – a beginner, intermediate or advanced learner of Design Thinking. (Also checkout https://dt.balaramadurai.net for the book on Design Thinking)

This post will cover the question “Please suggest some awesome and not that heavy books to read?”

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E05: The Naked Time

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Today our episode is a fun episode. I really had a good time watching it. What is our episode for the day?

Today we are following the Naked Time.

And in this episode, USS Enterprise, it goes around a planet called Psi 2000. This is a frozen world. That’s begun its process of disintegration. So in the beginning you see Spock and Joe Tormolen. They beam down to the planet’s surface and then they find that everybody on this planet is dead. All the scientists that went down there to investigate this planet, they’re all dead.

And they’ve been found dead in peculiar positions because the engineer is dead at his post. Somebody’s in the shower with their clothes on. So there are some weird happenings on that planet. And then for some weird reason, Tormolen, he rubs his nose after touching something on the planet’s surface and he puts his hand down, unprotected on a table surface, and then he’s infected with this peculiar infestation.

Nobody really knows what it is. And then, plot follows these characters as they go back to the Enterprise, the infection spreads. And then what this essentially does is it brings out hidden thoughts and emotions to the surface, which makes the characters behave very erratically and almost drunk.

One person, a certain individual he takes over the Enterprise. He tries to do some really, really strange things. And then the captain has to take control back. He switches off the engines and then Kirk has to switch the engines back on, but then they have to do it in a controlled implosion. Finally, the infection is contained and everything is back to normal.

However, there’s a twist at the end. So that’s my brief summary.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E06: The Enemy Within

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

In The Enemy Within, the USS Enterprise sends a couple of crew members down to study a planet called alpha 1 77. And while there geological technician Fisher, he falls down some rocks or something, and he has an injury and Kirk sends him back to the Enterprise.

But then when he gets back to the Enterprise, Scotty notices that there’s a strange magnetic substance, yellow substance, like a powder, sticking to his clothes and he advises him to go and get himself decontaminated. Shortly after that, Kirk beams up to the Enterprise.

And then the transportation room is empty. However, you do see that the transporter works again and a shadow Kirk materializes. Something like an evil twin apparently, because he seems to have all of Kirk’s violent personality traits, magnified hundred fold. This episode follows both Kirk and this negative Kirk, those two halves that, form the whole, as they navigate their way through the Enterprise. Negative Kirk creates all sorts of problems for the positive Kirk, including attempting to assault Yeoman Janice Rand. As we’ve seen certain other Star Trek episodes also, somebody tries to take over the Enterprise.

In this case, it is the negative Kirk. Somehow or the other, the two have to be brought together. And then this episode ends.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E04: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Today we are going to be discussing Where No Man Has Gone Before.

This is essentially the second pilot of Star Trek that was submitted to NBC. And in this episode, we find the Enterprise heading towards the edges of the galaxy, where they pick up a very strange distress signal from a ship that they thought had disappeared in this ship had disappeared 200 years ago.

As they begin to investigate the distress signals from the ship they managed to take into the Enterprise, the disaster recorder of that ship, which is called the SS Valiant . When they go through the recordings, they find that that ship was in turmoil. They were going through some very weird occurrences. They were at the edge of the galaxy. They had crossed the edge of the galaxy and they were looking into some events involving ESP extra sensory perception. While the Enterprise is looking through these recordings, the Enterprise itself goes through the edge of the galaxy.

They face a magnetic storm, they hit a peculiar barrier and then two crew members are affected by a strange energy field. And because of that, the two crew members, they start acting very peculiar. One of the crew members starts having God like powers, and then he becomes a threat to the entire human race.

This is the summary of the episode.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Ask the Design Thinking Doc - Be an idea Ninja

Creativity is elusive when you want it the most. When we asked in a classroom “Who is the most creative person that you know?”. None of them said it was themselves. Because all of us think we don’t have in us what it takes to be creative. So, how does one become more creative? Even better, how does one become a Ninja in creativity? I wake you up in the middle of your sleep and still you are able to generate ideas just like that. How is this possible?

Design Thinking, as a skill, can be learnt by practicing the methodology on real world problems. I run an online course on Design Thinking on a Govt. of India platform called SWAYAM where close to 40,000 learners have learnt Design Thinking already.

What I have got in return (apart from lots of love 😍) is the variety of questions that have been asked by so many curious learners. This Ask the DT Doc series can be helpful to anyone – a beginner, intermediate or advanced learner of Design Thinking. (Also checkout https://dt.balaramadurai.net for the book on Design Thinking)

This post will cover the question “Genrich Altsheller’s 40 inventive principles and 76 stan[d]ard solutions”

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Podcast Enterprise: S1E03: Charlie X

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: The USS enterprise, it makes a rendezvous with a cargo ship that calls itself, the Antares.

And they’re going to take a board, a young man from that ship. So right from the very beginning, you see that the captain and the first officer of the Antares that is Captain Ramart and Tom Nellis, they are quite nervous, a little bit fidgety and not quite there when they bring this child aboard.

He’s 17 years old, his name is Charlie Evans. And then as this episode progress, as you realize that Charlie has had a very unusual childhood, he essentially raised himself on a planet, that had an alien civilization that’s supposedly gone extinct because there are only legends about the civilization.

And then Charlie essentially raised himself. As I said, he’s got these weird powers. He’s very needy. He’s very possessive. He’s socially extremely awkward. And he’s also extremely intelligent. And eventually it turns out that the aliens they’re not extinct, they found Charlie alone and they gave him certain powers.

Charlie misuses these powers because he doesn’t really know what to do with them. And as a story progresses, you realize that the aliens, even though they allowed Thetas, they’re called you realize that even though they gave these powers for Charlie to survive, they did not give him any. Affection, which is essentially what drives this character to certain violent and weird and possessive acts.

He cannot adjust to human society and he has to leave. So that’s a short summary of this episode.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Solving the assignment vs learning problem - A design thinking case

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Sowmya Rajendran and her team worked on an interesting and pressing problem with the students. I invited her to write a guest post on the topic - Assignment vs Learning.

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Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Analyze

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

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Decontamination of water - A design thinking case-Empathize

In the recently concluded Karmic Design Thinking workshop, Rajib Kumar Bannerjee and his team worked on a responsible and interesting problem. I invited him to write a guest post on the topic - Decontamination of water. This will be a series.

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