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Notes from conversations with an un-informed journalist. A few days ago I was having a twitter exchange with a journalist who had written about the need for India to have more Design schools. Actually the person is not a journalist but a doctor turned art appreciator / collector who is writing on design.
This journalist put up an article with the title that China has 400 design schools and India has only 2. The headline put me off so much that I decided to give her a lesson 101 on the state of design education in India.
You can read the article here: China has 400 design schools, India only 2.
The points that follow were a result of conversations with the ‘journalist’ , a few other designers, and myself.
It is unbelievable that a media house like the Times of India group, which runs the Economic Times (ET) business newspaper would care to publish an article which is so misinformed. ET is widely popular business newspaper and the impact of such a improperly informed research would be large.
Many people who commented on the article pointed out that India has more than just 2 design schools. Anyone interested in Design in India would tell you that there are many more. It was left to the reader to guess which are the 2 design schools. There are more than 10 design schools, in India; which I know is still low, but still the article should not be so misleading.
So me and another friend set out to find the person who had written the article. Got to know the twitter handle of the person and hence followed a twitter exchange in which we got to know the further misconceptions that people have about the Design education in India.
I mentioned . . . → Read More: Be a Design Evangelist
A few days ago I got back from Delhi. The design community headed to the first version of the India Design Forum, which was held at the Le Meridian hotel in New Delhi on the 9th and 10th March 2012. Amongst the attendees were a lot of people form Europe, some form the Americas and some participants from Indonesia also. With the amount of buzz that the word design, design education, design driven startups and anything related to design is creating in India, the event holds a significant position.
To the IDF
This was marketed as the first International Design conference in India, which actually its not, but lets just ignore that for the moment.
This post is not meant to be a press release of the conference and neither a summary of what other people spoke, but just a personal reflection on the event and a constructive criticism for the event .
First the positives
The organizers had done a great job in getting a very good list of people to attend as speakers. That itself must have gathered a good crowd. So full marks to the organizers to at-least reach out to the folks who otherwise would not have graced a design event in India.
I was impressed with the organization in terms of its venue selection, (you would be foolish not to like a posh 5 star hotel) , the effort put into the whole planning out and the scale. I have seen and been to bigger ones outside India, so this was good to see here as well. The halls were really big, the stage was awesome and so was the audio – visual facilities to help follow the speakers well.
The conference started with the pretext that design should come out of its elitist . . . → Read More: Notes from the Indian Design Forum 2012
Just came across this clip from the participants of the IxDA conference.
Watch it and you would realize why we are a confused lot!
We live in interesting times. Did you know that many people now access their Facebook profile the first thing in the morning and It is difficult to communicate with some people, because they are not social media savvy.
In an interesting info-graphic of a recently published research titled “How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds“, it was observed that, over the course of the last ten years the average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes to a staggeringly short 5 seconds. That’s right! Just 5 seconds! People around the world spend close to 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month, and there handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day on Twitter and 250 million tweets per day (Oct 2011). Those are huge numbers!
In such times, there ought to be better strategies for Social Media engagement for individuals as well as business. Almost as prevalent as blind social media evangelism is the level of fatigue and ennui around it.
Driving social Media or being driven by it ?
Understanding the Why
Information as the building block for Social Media Platforms
In my opinion, one of the key influencers of the Social media phenomenon is around the word Information. In an article first published in 1995, advances in computers and data networks inspire visions of a future “information economy’‘ in which everyone will have access to gigabytes of all kinds of information anywhere and anytime. Ten years from now we may find the economic institutions of the information economy a similarly unremarkable part of our day-to-day life. (The Information Economy: How much will two bits be worth in the digital marketplace? – Hal R. Varian, 1995).
I would like to believe that the Social Media is a direct consequence of this information economy and its main drivers are . . . → Read More: The Social Media Fatigue – Life in the Information Economy
Here’s the new issue of the Social Technology Quarterly, published by Kuliza. Features one article by me on ‘The Social Media Fatigue.’
Social technology quarterly Vol 1 issue 3
View more documents from Kuliza Technologies
The year 2012 promises to be very exciting for designers. There has been a lot going on irrespective of what field of design you are in. There are more opportunities to start up due to available Design focused startup funds and Angels who want to invest in Design centric startups. Designers have become one of the most valued and sought after commodity in the Silicon Valley, and the demand is often more than what the Design schools are producing.
The solutions that the designers are now catering to solve include cross platform, experience rich solutions to solutions that have a high social impact. The need of the hour is to become good problem solvers and the gamut or problems that is being addressed by designers independently and also in cross expertise teams, is huge these days.
Here’s an interesting presentation that I recently came across that talks about the 100 things to watch out for in 2012. I am confident that designers would play a significant role in many of them too.
JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2012
View more presentations from JWTIntelligence
One of the amazing things about being in Bangalore, is that you are always surrounded by some amazing people, who are so passionate about what they do. It is no wonder that it is the Startup city in India and you get to meet amazing entrepreneurs. Dhiraj and Peeyush from Canvera are two such folks!
I have been a loyal Canvera customer since quite some time now, and was recently at a Tweetup organized by Dhiraj and team. It was something that I could not miss, especially when the a thing on the agenda was to show around the Canvera’s production facility. As a photographer, it is very simple to just see the final output in the form of a photo book. But it has always fascinated me to know the level of complexity that one goes through to get a book that is more like a piece of art in itself. The awesome books that come out are a treasure of memories and a testimony to that is that all my clients who have received the Canvera photobooks have loved it!
Needless to say, all were amazed at the amazing facility in terms of the equipments that are being at par with the best in the world, the quality of paper and the processes in place.
What impressed me most was the attention to detail that is paid at every step. Whether its in the consistency across printers or the lamination of the pages or the cutting of paper or the multi level quality assurance checks or to ensuring privacy of the customers and the photographers.
It may sound easy, but when you get to know that all these have to be done in a maximum turnaround time of 48 hours, you are left amazed! Moreover the challenges that . . . → Read More: Why I love Canvera – notes from a Tweetup.
Everyday I log onto twitter, I read about someone complaining about a problem they are facing with a particular service that they use. In almost realtime, a lot of others who face similar problem simply re-tweet the initial tweet about the complain. What this could result to is a negative publicity of the service, to the extent of a fear of losing a customer. In almost no time, there are the representatives from the company in context, replying to the tweets and assuring of a quick turnaround to the customer’s concerns. If that is not enough there are social channels that people reach out to, these days when they do not get a response.
That’s the new age customer relationship management and goes by the term Social CRMs. A lot of debate goes on the legitimacy of the phrase Social CRM. On one side of the argument, there are the believers who think that this is just another fancy term, riding the Social Wave, and on the other side of the argument you have people who swear by anything social and believe it to be of an immense value add. I for one do think that SCRM is here to stay, and it can only promise to grow with more and more businesses adopting social media technologies.
I deal with design and through this article I wish to seek out the challenges that designers face and should consider when designing for Social CRMs. It may be noted that these are just an indicative list and not a definitive one. With changes happening almost everyday (Facebook introduced the Timeline as I write this), the challenges can only increase.
In the earlier days of the traditional CRMs, the engagement with the customer happened around three domains, ie. a. Sales, b. Marketing and . . . → Read More: The designer’s challenge to Social CRMs
Read the second issue of the Social Technology Quarterly, published by Kuliza Technologies here.
Social Technology Quarterly (Volume 1| Issue 2) View more documents from Kuliza Technologies
They say that the Social Media Technologies is the in thing right now. Some call is fashionable, while some call it a necessity to keep up with the times, while some see a real value add in it. While many companies adopt it, not all understand it completely. It is now well accepted that the Social Media Technologies (SMT) are an integral part of the marketing budget of any company. The adoption of SMT should be tied down to a business need and an assist with the business processes. Apart from the usual goals of increase in sales, the one thing that the social media technologies has done is, making the consumer more informed and help them in taking decisions that are influenced by a gamut of reasons. Come to think of it, the advent of SMTs follow a similar pattern. resulted in the way the audiences are exposed to media. We consume stuff in a different way than we used to in the days prior to the SMTs. To support the claim of Social Media technology being omnipresent in the lives of many now, one has to understand where this comes from.
The notion of followers
Over the course of this article, I wish to do a construct of the notion of the Social Media Technology as a new kind of media. I shall refer to Bolter and Grusin, amongst others to understand why the notion of the Social Media technology is a New Media that plays out on the notion of remediation. I shall be looking into this with the example case study on Social Commerce and how the notion of media and Social media is changing and will continue to change the way we do our commerce.
Marshall McLuhan one of the greatest writers on media . . . → Read More: The Social Media Construct – a case in remediation
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