#techyizu

[davidatsg]

#Chinaccelerator #shanghai #startups #peoplesquared #jingan #techyizu (at 静安寺)

[designerjourneys]

Designing for Scarcity - Part 2

Design - Designing for the passenger experience Richard Mullane, Senior Associate at Hassell

Richard, an urban designer was involved in landscape design for the Binhai transportation hub Tianjin in China. As people are moving from one city to another, it is important that different cities are accessible to get to. Occasionally, a passenger will transfer from high-speed rail to the subway to get to their final destination. Tianjin Binhai station are one of the stations that allows this transport interchange. The growth of both modes of transport are expanding rapidly.

Project Scope

When Richard was involved in the project, the scope of the project expanded for good reasons. We need to understand why people are leaving cities in a human context and maps don’t illustrate the reasoning apart from the trend itself. The original brief involved designing landscape to make it look nice. However, they haven’t considered designing for people in the most essentials needs - how to people interchange between metro and high speed rail? It is common for people to arrive with bags yet there are only stairs and no ramps. 

Underlying Design Principles 

One of the main station design principles is to take people to a space, open it up so they can make a decision on where to go next. In Europe, US, Australia you see that it has been designed purposely this way to accommodate the movement of people. However, in China this was not well understood.  A few of the top ones identified in Australia includes:

Design Direction

Based on the movement of people, they had to ensure that there is a better space for arrival and then easily identify which direction they want to go next. It is important to have some reference to the outside world and natural lighting through the windows to convey this.There were three main moves identified - the central ramp going up, two side ramps heading down and two circulation atriums to accommodate for people’s movement. It was also just as important to cater for people waiting for someone and allowing some space for this too. 

For the landscape design, they have seasonal planting to give a sense of temperature and add character to the place so it’s more than an underground space.

It is more than just a plaza, it is complete public transport experience. More details of the project itself can be found here.

Solution - Using IT to transform the building industry for materials & waste

Raefer Wallis, Founder at Gigabase.org 

Raefer has been in China for 13 years as an architect with a great interest in building green homes. He identified one of the biggest problems is always in materials, not only is costly but it becomes a waste overtime. One of his solutions is becoming a third party entity to validate materials so it can potentially be reusable. He also mentioned:

“There is no such thing as waste, it’s a resource that is intentional or not'

There are two definitions that is directly applicable to resources: 

Efficiency: making more out of less

Durability: making things last longer

We always try to minimise waste. However, minimising is dangerous as we will just delay the issue of the negative impact. He also gave the example of beating your child and how minimising the pain of the beating will only delay the negative impact of your child in the long run!  As a result, we need a different approach. Raefer suggests to look at good things at they do and maximise those. An example is the forest as a factory:

We need to be aware waste is a resource to someone else. We need to help people save money by influencing developers to the type of materials than matters. Raefer’s company is all about creating demand for good material at the top, they will be ranked like the Google’s search results algorithms. By doing this, it sets the stage for material banking to allow for materials to be recyclable.  The HSBC building in HK is made up of reusable materials that it is possible to dismantle and rebuild it. It is profitable for developers who know how to take building apart. Therefore, we can look at it as a bank of materials for the future. 

He ends his presentation with two questions:

1. How to turn waste as a resource and maximise it?  2. How do we make developers make more money doing the right thing?

[tracyupdate]

Shanghai Barcamp 2013

Last Saturday was Shanghai Barcamp 2013, organized by Techyizu

Barcamp is an unconference - it's free to attend and anyone can sign up to give a talk or host a discussion.  I chose to speak about education reform, particularly about the need to reconsider how we think of the role of the student in education.  I hear a lot of talk about goals, standards, curriculum, teachers, but I don't hear so much about the students themselves.

I hosted two talks, 30 minutes each.  In the first, I shared a story and some opinions, then opened it up for questions.  In the second, I realized that my first talk, in its emphasis on transferring my ideas to the people present, was somewhat hypocritical to my message of reconsidering the role that students are expected to play in their own education.

( https://soundcloud.com/meiflower/education-reform-shbarcampmar2013 )

So, following the model of one of my favorite classes, I signed up for a second session where I opened with the question, "What makes a good student?"  I hoped that by starting fresh and building from our ideas of what components are important towards that end, we could gain some insight in how to promote those kinds of things.  We did not end up with any list of comprehensive categories, but we did come upon different ways to challenge the question itself and gained some insight in the process.

Feel free to add to the discussion :)

************************************

( I'm hoping to make a collection of this and future Barcamp talks: https://soundcloud.com/meiflower/sets/shanghaibarcamp )

Here are some resources that have been significant to the way I view education:

"Learning to Be a Sage"

Chu Hsi/ Zhu Xi

"Teach a Kid to Argue"

Jay Heinrichs

( http://inpraiseofargument.squarespace.com/teach-a-kid-to-argue )

"A Mathematician's Lament"

Paul Lockhart

( http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf )

"Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics"

Liping Ma

"Science is Play"

Beau Lotto, Amy O'Toole

( http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/26/science-is-play-beau-lotto-and-amy-otoole-at-tedglobal-2012/ )

"Blackawton Bees"

( http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168#aff-1 )

Blackawton Primary School, Blackawton, Devon, UK

[vividberlin]

Shanghai | day zero

Designing Shanghai 2012

If my week-days were busy, my weekends usually packed, literally. This last Saturday was no exception either. 

And since I have to dutifully record a journal for the school assignment, I might as well share this particular Saturday. If UX or creating human centered design is your thing, then the Designing Shanghai event might be in your alley of interest. 

Back by popular demand, this year UX Day Shanghai was held by Techyizu at the Haworth on 南京路1788号. This is one of those grass-root initiated event where designers, thinkers, hackers, students, and basically anyone who's interested in creatingbetter shanghai, get together and try to push for more design thinking for social impact.

The one-day workshop basically structured in two parts, morning talks by renowned innovative and design firms like frog,  IDEO, CBI China Bridge and Continuum sharing their insights, approach and methodology. Then followed by afternoon workshop where participants/teams are dispatched to do a city-wide research & rapid prototyping exercise, exploring solutions across digital, physical and service design. And upon returning to the venue, teams will synthesize their research, brainstorm solutions and create rapid prototypes to share with the rest of the group.

After successful initial prototype last year, we decided to focus this year challenge toward 'Social Inclusion' by ways of making Shanghai a better city for people with disabilities. 

I was mentoring on Design for Mobility, which basically focus on tackling the challenge around how the city infrastructure are generally not as friendly as it should be to those with physical disabilities. Navigating sidewalks, overpasses, public transportation access could be very difficult (if not damn near impossible) if one is on wheelchair, visually impaired or older than 50 years of age. 

Another design challenge that we were keen to tackle were: 

Elderly Care in an Aging Society (Shanghai population is getting older and there aren't enough attention being paid to its senior citizens) 

Designing for Special Needs in Education (think school and better education system for Autistic children, for example)

Employment for the Disabled (How to overcome the rampant discriminations over people with disabilities in China and give them an opportunity to have better lives)

The research locations were spread across the city; from newly erected space designed for disable persons, elderly house development, to school for autistic children, to metro stations (for mobility), to equal employment opportunities around pocket of districts in Shanghai (job centers), etc. 

The goal of the UX Day Shanghai is not to push any agenda to the decision makers, even though that would be ideal, but is more about creating awareness.  Believe you me, some teams actually came up with pretty decent (innovative), if not daring, recommendations that are worth exploring.

The key takeaway from this exercise, is not only to 'connect the dots'  but also for us to be more aware of the environment and the place in which we live in related to others and society in general.

And yes, anything big should start as simple as an idea. 

[vnsavitri]

Photos of Designing Shanghai Workshop

Organized by TechYizu, Designing Shanghai was the first prototype of User eXperience design challenge event in Shanghai, held on November 5th, 2011. 

The UX-DAY was a full day event in which participants are encouraged to tackle various design challenge around the city, from navigating the unique cultural phenomenon at Shanghai marriage market to road safety issues, from shopping experience to services at Chinese hospital, etc. 

There was a good mix of turnouts from both local and foreign talents, including the 11 year old boy wonder, Gilbert Chan a.k.a. the robot maker, as the youngest participant.

I was involved as part of the organizing committee with TechYizu,  as well as team facilitator/mentor on the d-day. My team, 上海民工 (Shanghai Worker), choose to tackle a design challenge that cover the UX in Chinese Hospital. Here's the presentation deck that the team put online and was chosen as Slide of The Day on Slideshare.

All in all, it was fantastic day! Not too shabby at all as first event prototype, kudos to all mates at TechYizu for making it happen! So lookout for more awesome UX happenings in Shanghai in the very near future!

[vnsavitri]

Short time-lapse video of @techyizu UX-Day: DesignINg Shanghai workshop - http://t.co/UDpcSnY6