.

.

Best of Book Bag picture cloud

The Book Bag spring collection Issuu is out now!

A book-like book for the book-like Book Bag…

 

What’s [the] Issuu?

This blog is now on Issuu!

Haha okok sorry for the oh-too-many “This blog is now on ____!” posts… It’s just darn fun to play with all these cool, new online tools to spice up the blogging experience (and the reading experience too!).

Issuu is a digital publishing website which let you upload and share print materials on the Internet. Embedding books, magazines, or articles on your website/blog gives it a cool, page-flipping effect like so many of the recent e-books on the iPad. It’s also for reading digital publications, like magazines and comics. Something like the Facebook for digital publishing, I guess… I love how all these new tools are based on the freemium model, so that poor guys like me could use them for free and have a cool blog post.

 

Latest Issuu of the Book Bag lite out now!

Well… meet the Book Bag lite:

As you can see, it’s really a ‘lite’ version of the original Book Bag, with no RFID technology, no unusual ‘floating’ hands to pique public curiosity, no “open book look” to give users the look of carrying around half-pen books as if they were in the midst of reading…

I’m not bitter, I really am not. Hahah.

The main idea is still there – it looks like a book in order to be used like a book, i.e. ‘borrowed’ (users no longer have to borrow the Book Bag lite as part of their loan quota, since there’s no RFID tags) when borrowing other books, ‘returned’ when returning books. So I guess in essence, the Book Bag concept comes down to being a natural part of the reader’s reading experience journey.

 

What’s next?

So I was wondering how to go on from here, now that this project is coming to a close. After all, this blog really was a project-based account of a design journey, so when the journey ends, what happens next……? I think in the following few posts, I’ll be reviewing the design journey, what were some of the things I enjoyed, what I found challenging, anything worthwhile learnt – stock-take, so to speak.

After all that, what happens depends on how the contest results pan out…. if there are positive results, perhaps this blog will get to live a little longer? Seriously, I’m still not sure about the lifespan of this blog really, and what to do with it…

Any suggestions? 😉

 

This blog is now on Prezi!

A ‘moving’ story of the Book Bag…

OK I kid. Actually, this cool, zooming Prezi presentation showing the ideation behind the Book Bag had been around since the beginning of this project and blog (see 8 Jan 2011 blog post “Brainstorms & Ideation“).

But I only just found out how to embed the Prezi presentation into WordPress – thanks to an enlightening post by Panos from wordpress tips blog. So here’s the cool, zooming presentation on how the Book Bag came about, embedded for your viewing ease and pleasure! 😉

 

Next: meet the Book Bag lite!

Hi. My name is ___, and I’m a bibliophile.

Mugshots of things brought by attendees at a Bibliophile Anonymous gathering hosted on the Book Bag blog.

Nah… it’s just a random collection of book-shaped or book-inspired things seen on the Internet. Sources are linked to the pictures. I think I’m becoming a bibliophile!

 

The encore ends, & a new story begins…?

Not disqualified, but not meeting criteria either…

Transcript of dialogue, part II:

NLB:
Thank you for your detailed explanation and valuable feedback. We have received your Book Bag prototype and must say that your design is very unique. If there is an opportunity, we will re-visit your prototype.

We will not disqualified any entry (including yours) as we value all participants’ efforts and support. However, it is our responsibility to highlight to participants if their entries did not meet the key contest criteria as this will comprise a high weightage in the total score. All entries will be evaluated by a panel of judges.

Once again thank you for your support and participation.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Me:
Thank you for taking the time to review the Book Bag and clarifying the situation. I would love to hear any additional feedback from the judging panel, if possible.

I’m also looking forward to future opportunities to work with NLB on higher-order design / design management – of business systems around products/services – such as the possibilities proposed through the Book Bag.

Just to let you know too – I am also in the process of considering an additional, separate submission of a different design.

Thank you for your taking time to reply! 🙂

So what this this all mean?

 

The righteous pain of the entrepreneurial designer

Early communication is key

This is a key lesson for designers who dare propose design pieces as a larger business proposal to clients without getting prior buy-in or feedback – your client may simply not want your extra effort! Or they may have other business goals in mind which they didn’t share with an outsider. Or they simply think a designer’s place is only to design pretty things and isn’t about making business proposals. Or they may just not be ready to hear what you are proposing and had to brush you off so that they could move ahead with the project. Or they found you meddlesome in their inner operations. Or or or…

No matter what the reason, to be truly effective and innovative, all sides and stakeholders have to buy into it, or else an idea dies at the seedling stage, no matter how ground-breaking or game-changing the innovation is!

I guess in this case, unlike typical outsourced design projects, there wasn’t the privilege of seeking early buy-in due to the contest format. I wonder if there had been anything I could have done earlier on that could have prevented a U-turn like that… though my feel is that the answer would have been the same, even if I had clarified earlier. And I would have still went ahead to design this Book Bag anyway, as I believed in that it’s the best solution to a real-life problem (not the artificial limits set for the sake of the contest). I had bore out a hope that the Book Bag solution would be potentially mind-opening that it could bypass the administrative barriers…but I guess that wasn’t realistic enough.

The truth is…in the corporate world, implementation is the other half of the battle for innovation where the odds of success are even slimmer (than the success of creation of innovative ideas). The other “faces of innovation” – so aptly put by Tom Kelley in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation – are the “Organising personas” such as the “Hurdler” and the “Director” who can overcome the obstacles and make the other half (the implementation half) of innovation truly happen.

 

Next move?

I’m considering the Book Bag submission as submitted and under consideration for the contest, though I’m not sure how open-minded the judging panel might be in assessing it.

I’m also thinking of sending in a similar but ‘dumbed down’ entry. It feels a bit like betraying the originality and intention of the Book Bag, but does it? I think I made my point through the submission and the email dialogue to and fro, advocating for the holistic perspective behind the Book Bag concept. And there’s little else more to do, but to sit and wait for the stars to align and the “East wind to blow”, as the famous Chinese proverb so said. There may be some conceptual weight left to leverage yet, through a second separate entry. If  the ‘lite/free’ version gets through and gets popular widespread buy-in, then people may want to buy the ‘HD/paid’ version for more value. This is the freemium business model so popular with web-based services such as Skype, Flickr and apps in Apple’s App Store, and analogous to the situation perhaps…

So……another long design journey of the Book Bag version 2 or Book Bag ‘lite’? NO!!! That would be too painful and painstaking. I’ll build on the work done already, and let you know soon if it’s even possible!

 

 

 

 

The design story encore

“Design is an opportunity to continue telling the story, not just to sum everything up.” — Tate Linden.

Indeed. Just when this design story seems to be coming to a close, an encore performance reveals itself. Read on:

 

ne fine day, I opened up my email inbox and saw that NLB had replied to my email submission. Here’s what they said,

 

 

 

“Dear Jason,

Thank you for your entry and the efforts took to create the brown bag.
Perhaps the contest requirements are not clear and thus cause some confusions. We are sorry about it.
We are looking for a design that will convey the message to encourage library users to return the bag after use. The winning designs will be printed on reusable bags similar to those shopping bags sold by NTUC and Cold Storage.
Hence, would you like to re-submit your design since we have extended the submission deadline to 31st January 2011.

We look forward to your support and participation.”

I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I angry or anything. I really wasn’t. Somehow, I was kinda expecting that this would happen. Why? ‘Cause I knew what I proposed was beyond the design brief, but with right reasons. This came as a surprise to the client, hence it’s no wonder that they would reply as they did. In an ideal scenario, as designer I would have discussed and negotiated with them right at the onset of the project (ideation phase) for a design that goes beyond mere stylistics/aesthetics, as I had done through the Book Bag proposal. Taking into consideration the business, technology, people  aspects around a product design, I had quite simply designed a business proposal rather than a product; the Book Bag was a higher-order sort of design, with the “product” as just one of the means of achieving a particular business goal. Sometimes this is called design management.

This is the kind of design that I’m really passionate about, as it’s more holistic in perspective and encompasses EVERYTHING. I’m tired of the pigeon-hole specialisation and compartmentalisation of the modern work-place. Just do your part and let others take care of the rest. Work in silos. Be efficient, but be emotionally removed from the larger picture. I wish to overcome this epidemic sense of myopia and tunnel vision in our every activity and our work, and to challenge myself and others to re-seek that fulfillment that comes from being part of a larger purpose.

So anyway, here’s my reply, not in retaliation nor anger, but in passionate advocacy to clarify the larger perspectives behind the Book Bag:

Click on image to read zooming version.

 

Next: the design discourse with NLB continues…

Let’s get emotional!

If you can’t feel it, you won’t want it!

 

I just read Built To Love: Creating Products that Captivate Customers (by Peter Boatwright & Jonathan Cagan), which said,

“…as consumers, our responses to rational features account for only 15% of all the decision we make. The rest of the decision process operates subconsciously, where emotions dominate. The result of the traditional marketing approach is that customers experience a “sense” gap.”

Elsewhere, Emotional Design (by Donald Norman) talks about how the emotional aspect of decision-making is absolutely critical and functional in our everyday lives, otherwise when faced with a wide spectrum of choices and all rational attributes weighing in equally on every side, we’ll be crippled to decide on which option we’ll prefer. Yaaaay hoorah for all die-hard shoppers – now even scientists agree with your impulse buys at the great once-in-a-lifetime sale… hahah.

But Built To Love also talked about the difference between “associated emotions” and “supported emotions” which a product evokes. Associated emotions are the emotions which marketing campaigns show, but not necessarily something which you yourself feel when using the product. For example, take those many “man-ly” ads of smoking, which may not be an emotion which many smokers relate to when they smoke. Supported emotions, on the other hand, go hand in hand with every interaction with the product.

So after reading all that, I wondered what emotions might the Book Bag evoke… Of course the book advocated that to truly have a game-changing product, the emotions must be designed into the product right at the onset; emotions which resonate with customers and company, and designing these emotions into the touchpoints of product interaction. Too late for me, but I thought it an interesting exercise to do now that everything is kind of over…

 

How emotional is the Book Bag?

So just how can a paper bag be emotional to users?! I think this is something a plain ol’ paper bag had not done in some time? Ladies handbags, yes, can get emotional, but the ubiquitous paper bag used for grocery shopping? Maybe the only emotion is something that comes out from pure utility, a feeling of security (out of familiarity, that it reliably performs its functions)……?

Do I make you emotional?

So how about the Book Bag? What emotions does it evoke? How does it emote you?

I’d like to hear more from you, but I’ll start the ball rolling with mine (which may or may not be relevant to your unique point of view). I think the first thing it evokes in me when I see it is curiosity. I’d seen it in my friends when I showed it to them or left it on the table, and they asked/wanted to see/hold it…I see it in myself, whenever I see it, even though being responsible for its birth. There’s something about it looking so much like a book but not really (one can tell pretty quickly it’s not a real book through the handles and flaps). That sense of curious wonder, with a play-like tinge to it. Yet its antique-ish, ‘leather-bound’ exterior shows that the play is not a childish or stupid kind of play, but a more serious type, like serious fun for grown-ups. Play which we can learn from and enjoy in the process while not find it boring.

Of course all those feelings would be for nought if the bag didn’t live up to its utilitarian purposes of carrying stuff – which is why we always feel kinda cheated when we buy things we don’t need or things which look pretty/slick but performs poorly. Through the added CD and receipt pocket, and strategic locations for leaving the Book Bag and how it fits into the readers’ journey, I believe (I hope) it fulfills its intended uses.

So, to sum up those emotions:

Curious wonder. Serious fun.

And how does it resonate with readers? I see some alignment there, since after all those same feelings are what reading is all about, isn’t it? We read out of curiosity, out of wonder, and hopefully be entertained along the way (if it’s boring we won’t be reading it!). And certainly it’s somewhere along these values which NLB delivers its products and services.

 

Do you agree?

 

 

BBB = Book Bag bento

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” so said Leonardo da Vinci.  And there’s nothing quite like a Japanese bento to showcase the beauty of sophisticated simplicity…

 

Stop press update

It always sounds so cliché, but like they always tell you,”Always expect the unexpected…” I should have bore in mind those very wise words, ’cause I almost died when I saw the latest update on the NLB website – they extended the deadline to 31 Jan 2011 after I submitted my package! After all those late nights and long hours…… Now somebody kill me……

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

It’s all in the packaging

OK, I’m recovered from the shock now.

It was fun, fun, fun all the way in the final stages of this Book Bag project, from doing the fashion shoot to designing a slideshow video for ‘selling’ the Book Bag. On top of that, I had also decided to supplement my e-submission with a package containing the physical hard-copies of the final prototype, a few product photos to go with the prototype, and a CD saved with all the design templates, slideshows.

The final package looks very hand-made and rather rough on the edges, really. It reminded me of those school art projects I used to submit, with lots of hand-written/-drawn stuff on cardboard – would this be deemed too “unprofessional” or “kiddy”? I wondered if I was better off actually leaving my submission to just digital format… If only I had more time to do up a really slick package for submission…

Here’s the slideshow and video I did for Book Bag ‘marketing’:

 

In the end, I decided to submit everything, bento box and all. I’d already done it, and what’s there to lose? Maybe there’s a slight organic beauty about the hand-made quality… hahaha I’m self-rationalising (again).

What do you think? Rustic cardboard charm or modernist slick?

This blog is now on Tumblr.

Tumblr is a micro-blogging, social networking platform which is great for sharing random bits of photos, music, videos, quotes, links. It’s a bit like Twitter really, but less text-based. I feel it’s at least a great place to park all those ‘homeless’, random bits and pieces of quotes, pictures and video from the Internet which I had posted across the entire blog.

Check it out! 🙂

[Click on this picture to view my Tumblr site.]

 

The other fashion shoot

The uncut, unabridged, other version is here! The other shots which didn’t make the cut to the main fashion shoot set of pics…

 

 

The Book Bag goes live!

An object becomes alive through the warmth of our touch; the moist breath we breathe upon it; the soulful utilitarian/social/physical/emotional meanings we give to it; the day-to-day human-like interactions we have with it…

 

The fashion shoot for the Book Bag was great fun! First, let’s thank the photographer of the day, my sweetest girl:

Chief Photographer in rare pose

 

The location

The Food Republic food court at Suntec City, which is designed to the likes of a old 19th Century European library, was the perfect location for the shoot! I’d like to think that if the Book Bag is a spy, it’s secret hideout would be here. Why? Because one is in disguise as a library, another in disguise as a book – the square hole meets square peg situation!

Hahaha :D… ok ok cheesy humour aside (you might find that a lot here on ths blog…pardon the puns), see how the Book Bag comes alive through these ‘everyday’ shots (taken entirely on the iPhone 4 and various camera apps):

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

Obviously you won’t be doing what I did for some of the shots (like ‘reading’ the Book Bag… duh!). But fun was the operating word here. And just how often could you have fun with a darn paper bag?! I hope this presents another level of head/heart/gut engagement with you, who might use it one day… and I hope you had as much fun playing with it as I did!

 

What is the most book-like book?

It is about tapping on our collective visual memories, our cultural database of archetypes…

 

But a short digression first…

Well! I finally submitted the final designs and prototype to NLB for the “Brown Bag Design Contest‘! I manage to make the deadline, in email and hard-copy submissions. *phew. It’s a huge relief now that the stress of submission is over. A quick sneak preview of the final product – just for you…

Hard-copy submission of the Book Bag - CD and photos included!

I’ll get to blogging about this soon enough! First let me catch up on where I left off previously…about the making of the final design and prototype.

 

Pinning down the most book-like Book Bag

A close friend had commented (during my testing stage) that perhaps the generic “book” image used for the design could be changed to an actual book design which most people can relate to. Like say for children, the most easily-recognised book to them might be an Enid Blyton book cover, or Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book cover for children.

Which was a good point, because I would need the Book Bag to really resemble a book; to be the most ‘book-like’ in order for the ordinary man on the street to easily recognise the Book Bag for a book.  This reminds me of my philosophy classes in university, where we talked about Plato’s metaphysical theory of Forms, where abstract, non-material ideal types exist as the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Like the idea of a “book”. There’s many types of books – novels, dictionaries, encyclopedia, coffee table books – but what is the concept of “book” which holds all these family of books together as “books”? Physical traits like paper, words printed on pages? Those traits could fit a magazine, not a book… Almost there but not really. Well, I don’t think I do justice to Plato here, but it points towards how we know things as things belonging to a family of things. Famed Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa asked the similar question in his namesake book,

“I wanted to design a chair-like chair, a table-like table… But this ‘likeness’ was something confined to the imagination, and I understood that it differed from person to person. Still, I wanted to design the kind of chair that when people looked at it, they said,’That’s a really chair-like chair.” If you ask people,”What exactly is chair-like?”, they don’t know, but if they see it, they can say, “Oh, that’s really chair-like”; this sensation is one that, as first glance, appears inconsistent. The reason why I wanted to design a chair-like chair is that I felt that, within this ‘chair-like’ sense, there was an element of reassurance. Perhaps it’s a nostalgic sensation. Designers and architects all design at least one chair. Their chair design is thus indicative of their identity. These chairs are not referred to as being ‘chair-like’, but as ‘whoever designed them-like’. So I thought that an anonymous chair was more likely to be thought of as ‘chair-like’. The idea of designing a chair to look like chair-like stemmed from a desire to break away from the ‘this is the chair so-and-so designed’ kind of mind set.”

So to echo his sentiments, it’s exactly that “element of reassurance”, that “nostalgic sensation”, the anonymity set within the imagination, which drives me to find that “Form” of the ‘book’. Which brings me back to the question: What is a “book”? What is the most “book-like” book? Especially to local Singapore?

I pondered. Searched. Asked around for ideas. Looked around under the sheets of bookstores and stock image websites. And one image kept popping up everywhere – a hard-cover, rectangular, portrait-orientation, typically vintage-looking, and leather-bound book. So my initial hunch for going with a leather book cover design as most “book-like”, as the one most generic book image which most people would recognise it and say, “Yes, that’s a book which looks most like a book.” The answer had come full circle. But not a wasted exercise though, because only through asking this question can I be really sure of the spirit of the design is accurate.

 

The making of

So…with firmer conviction, I ploughed on to finish up the final prototype of the Book Bag for the submission to the library. And added on a few extra useful touches inspired from my very initial ethnographic observation of library users.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

As you can see from the slideshow, there’s now the:

• Outer clear-plastic pocket for keeping loan receipts – remember how my initial observations showed how library users fumbled with the receipts and found their own ways to keep them properly without losing them (in wallets, in between book pages, etc)? Now there’s a home for all those run-away slips of paper, and a highly prominent, visible and convenient place at that!
• An inner CD pocket to snugly hold the CD you borrowed above ground level – to minimise impact shock on the fragile disc of plastic when carrying and putting down the Book Bag.
• ‘Hidden’ instructions on the ‘page’ side of the Book Bag – in 3 simple steps (it’s really just 3, as the 4th step is to say there isn’t a step 4!), the users can read and understand how the Book Bag can be borrowed, used and returned.
• A mock RFID tag (taken from an old book I bought from a past library sale) to demonstrate a possible position where the tag can be located.

I should really be using Tyvek ® ‘paper’ (Tyvek® is actually all recyclable plastic, which looks and feels like paper) for the final prototype, but it’s not easily found as bookstores don’t really stock them. So I worked around it by using some good ol’ vanguard sheet, and pasting the A4-paper design prints onto the skeleton of vanguard sheet. The accidental quality of using printed paper is the creases and wrinkles that comes with uneven glue spread underneath, which makes the book look even more authentic!

 

Next up: ‘Fashion’ shoot of the Book Bag, to illustrate how the Book Bag would look like when used in our daily lives. No more studio shots against plain white backgrounds – stay tuned to see the Book Bag go ‘live’!

 

‘Fashion’ shoot in progress.

It’s the deadline tomorrow! High stress! I’m rushing out the various things for submission – editing pictures of the ‘fashion’ shoot, slideshow, physical package… I think I won’t be able to sleep again today.

While this blog does catch-up with reality (I’ll update posthumous as we go), here’s some quick peeks at what had been happened at Book Bag city…

The making of, @ Book Bag city

 

See the Book Bag in real-life action!

 

 

 

Life & lemons

When life gives you lemons, you don’t have to make lemonade! Sometimes we can’t choose what the cards we’re dealt, but we can ask if we even want to play (instead of the usual ‘wise’ latter part of that phrase where “we can choose how we want to play”). When things go wrong (they inadvertently always do), how differently would you want to play (or not)?

 

Beta test-cum-ethnographic experiment FAIL

OK, so I had planned to take the 2 prototypes of the Book Bag to the public library and do a little social experiment-cum beta testing.

It was meant to be ethnographic in nature – I place the Book Bag next to the book check-out counter with some instructions printed on a sheet of paper on how to use the Book Bag. I walk away but hover nearby to observe, camcorder in hand. Library user comes along, oblivious to the little experiment. Library user checks out books. Library user sees Book Bag, and reads the instructions. Library user curious, then takes Book Bag and fiddles with it. Lastly library user tries to borrow Book Bag, like other library books, by placing it on the sensor tray of the check-out computer. At this precise moment, I step in, inform the library user that you can’t really borrow that Book Bag as it’s not [RFID-] tagged yet, and go on to explain what I’m doing.

OK so it’s a little devious to trick harmless ordinary citizens into having false hope of actually being able to borrow the Book Bag to help ease the burden of carrying the books home. It even smells like something “Candid Camera” or “Just For Laughs Gags”. But believe me – no humans were harmed in the process! I came up with this experiment as there’s only so much you can get from interviewing people by showing and telling them about the Book Bag, like what I did with my friends. Useful nonetheless, but the totally unaware user would be the best way to show if the design is effective – it’s just simply a really effective way to test if people get it easily; getting the idea of the Book Bag being a bag that can be borrowed like the other library books. If they get it,  then the obstacles to ‘consumer market acceptance’ would be small.

Haha but before you hammer me for pulling such gags in the name of scientific research, let me say that I didn’t quite even manage to test it properly. True I got the set up done nicely and all. But as I was standing back waiting for the first ‘bait’, a librarian in charge of shelving/re-shelving books passed by, saw at a distance something of a left-behind book at the check-out counter, and promptly went to the counter in attempt to take the Book Bag to be re-shelved. Only to be intercepted by poor me, explaining my intentions. But alas! I would need official permission to do something like that! Red tape had be drawn, and now my little social experiment falls into tatters. Realising that there’s nothing much I can do now (I have to write in “somewhere” to get official permission it seems), I gently concede, and go off sulking in a corner. Hahah ok I wasn;t exactly sulking, but wondering how else I can proceed. There’s really no point in walking around the library and interviewing people about it – I could do that outside the library and that wasn’t the whole point of the experiment. Well…. I pondered and thought that instead of making do and getting by with interviews, I don’t really have to ‘play’, do I?

So I didn’t!

Not in defiance of authority, but in fact just not making it an issue of ego, but instead to “flow like water” through it. Well I figured it’s also good to not to put NLB in a difficult position, since they might not wish to be represented in any way through the experiment. The librarian had also been nice and she was simply doing her job, so I didn’t want to make her day difficult.

 

Finding a natural home in the library for the Book Bag

When stuck, do something else; something different altogether.

So rather than stubborning try to do the experiment head-on, I decided to just do something different and went to a quiet bookshelf in the library where I won’t obstruct reader traffic, and took some pictures of the Book Bag prototypes ‘being at home’. And true enough, they look very part of the book landscape! (If you’re reading this, NLB, please rest assured I did arrange the other books back neatly!)

This also got me thinking about the librarian who saw the Book Bag (first prototype that is, the folded one) and thought it was a book. When even a librarian can mistake the Book Bag for a book – now that’s pretty telling about how ‘naturally’ the Book Bag fits into the library environment, isn’t it? So this trip was not for nought, after all! One data point, but a good one at that! Hahahah… 😀

I also went to browse through the CD section to check out the range of sizes and shapes of the CD covers, as I’m also adding on a CD inner pocket in the Book Bag. Seems that all the CDs comes in standard covers, so I borrowed 2 which I liked (and would try reading!) to use as references for the inner CD pocket.

Just before I left, I managed to sneak in a quick picture (while I was borrowing my CDs) of how the Book Bag would look like if placed at the check-out counter to facilitate ease of loan. I believe being next to the check-out computer would be best ‘home’ for the Book Bag.  The pictures of the Book Bag being shelved together with other books also made me wonder if that is the other natural place where the library can ‘stock’ the bags, so that readers can easily and simply just take the Book Bags off the shelf where they are, use the Book Bag to carry the books around the library and out after check-out.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Well! So the final design is confirmed – the folded one! (by virtue of the librarian’s perception). Not utterly scientific again I know, but what to do when there are on-site constraints to user testing? Sometimes for certain products there may not be luxury of complete user testing (for reasons like confidentiality, high danger to test users, or red tape…), but move ahead we have to and we shall! 🙂

 

Next – finalised design for submission! The deadline (15 Jan 2011) is approaching! Stressed!

 

This blog is now on YouTube.

Another social media platform devoured! Yum yum yum munch munch munch…

 

[Tune in to our channel by clicking on the TV.]

 

 

Beta karma

The virtuous cycle of prototyping, beta-testing, feedback & reiteration is part of enlightened product design, liberating us forward to an ultimate salvation from the hell of useless objects…

 

The holistic harmony of participatory co-design, & relations with the social work field

Armed with the mini prototype, I went around as many friends as I could to gather comments about the Book Bag. Design thinking methodology tries as much as possible to include users as early on as possible to co-design and co-create the product. This is one good way of ensuring that whatever goes out as a final product had already been accepted by customers, and thus less risk of investing in technology and marketing when it won’t ‘sell’.

This is one of the best parts I like about design thinking – trying to achieve a holistic balance between desirability by customers, business feasibility and technological viability. IDEO proposed this method in their Human-Centered Design Toolkit, a free innovation guide which they produced together with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for social enterprises and NGOs worldwide [you can download the free toolkit intro here.]

Source: Adapted from IDEO HCD Toolkit Intro

 

I’m a firm believer that for-profit business have lots to learn from such a framework built for not-for-profits, especially now. Often in the past, we can hear of not-for-profit organisations expressing some form of ‘business-envy’, and they try to emulate business systems and quantitatively measure the ‘market numbers’, which can get pretty difficult and tricky in the very different and human-centered social work field. I respect that both sides can and should learn from each other, but I believe consumers are increasingly seeking qualities which these traditional helping professions are really good at – empathy, customised help and care, focus on benefiting clients not system efficiency, and sharing resources through inter-organisational collaboration.

Anyway, I digress again! Design thinking, combined with my passion and previous job in social work field, is juicing me a lot creatively!

 

Hear ALL about it!

I’m listing the comments gathered from my friends – I’d forgot who said what, so if you’re reading this and one of the comments belong to you, please stand up and comment on the comment!

• Have 2 variations of the prototype to compare and choose, in order to get the most honest opinions. It’s just like the proverbial situation where the wife asks the husband whether he likes the dress, and he’s damned if he does and damned if he don’t. Better to have 2 so that people can state their preferences of one over another, and not have to criticise just one option (and thus potentially making things defensive or socially awkward).
• Bag handles – opinions were mixed. Some preferred handles from years of shopping experience, some were okay with a slot-type handle.
• Most expressed a curious interest at first look even before I said anything about the Book Bag.
• Most liked the idea of integrating a book and a bag, and appreciated the aesthetics.
• Most were skeptical about whether getting people to borrow it like a book can work.
• Add-on ideas included instructions for use on the bag, incorporating some ‘reading’ on the opened pages itself.
• Someone pointed out that only right-handers can complete the picture – something I didn’t realised! Since most people are right-handed, I’ll go for it! Moreover, when it comes to carrying bags, don’t we frequently switch hands when one hand is tired?

 

Book Bag beta version 1.2 and 1.3

So I quickly made some improvements and made full-sized prototypes. It ended up being pretty nostalgic process; of youthful primary school days during the 80s when we worked on “science projects”, using vanguard sheet, UHU glue, colourful ‘magic pens’, cutting, pasting, colouring…… It was strangely comforting getting re-aquainted with those activities again – so fun! If you have a keen eye, you’d realise that I made a mistake when scaling up the ‘floating’ hand – it’s too small! Haha…. it can be rectified easily but to capitalise on the mistake, I got my lovely niece to model her hand for the prototype – see how the picture gets completed through the human user? I made 2 versions )open book/portrait vs closed book/landscape) to compare and choose.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

So what do you think? Which one would you choose? More beta testing needed, this time in real time and place – the library!

 

Hot models at my place today.

Hahaha… nope. Sorry to disappoint, but not that kind of hot models. But I’m sure the subject header got your attention! ;P

Cheap tricks aside, here’s a preview of things to come…

Lo - fi home studio shoot!

 

This blog is now Xtranormal.

Broccoli Man tells Coffee Girl about the Book Bag, a new superzeroz side-kick to the Library Man. But someone’s going green about the Book Bag……

[Created on Xtranormal]

 

Fail early, succeed faster = prototyping

Play with prototyping, as early as possible. Go low-fi. Test it out. Ask others to use it. Get feedback. Learn from mistakes quickly. Reiterate. Wash, rinse, repeat till success.

 

Prototyping is one of my favourite stages of the design process! There’s something very real about working with your hands, feeling textures and handling objects requiring high dexterity (no, typing on keyboard doesn’t count!). Sometimes I wonder if this ‘need’ to feel and work on something tangible with our hands originates from our cavemen days when being able to work with raw materials of stone and wood meant survival on a day-to-day basis. But anyway, I digress – my anthropological mind speaking again.

So it wasn’t too difficult getting out a first design prototype! A quick online search for the right images and templates (offered free, of course!), then collage, print, fold, paste and voila! My first prototype is up! Albeit a mini version, it looks so cute on its own! I’m quite proud of it actually! And convenient to carry around and show friends to seek feedback. Pictures here.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

*Notes on design:

Shape
A shopping/paper bag is similar to a book in terms of its box-like, cuboid shape. Thus, the Book Bag will follow the shape and look of a book, in 2 modes for comparison – ‘open-‘ and ‘closed book’ mode. For a start, the mini version will be made in only the open book mode.

Structure
Typical paper bag templates are offered freely and easily online. A simple template I referred to is here. But at the same time, I also wondered if there are more interesting ways to construct the structure of the paper bag, in order to lend more strength and manufacturing ease. This origami gift bag purse tutorial was pretty fun to make – folded entirely out of just 1 sheet of paper without any cuts or seams needed, it sounds like a pretty solid structure. But unfortunately the base of this origami bag was only a sheet thick, unlike the typical

paper bag which has several layers folded and glued together for strength and durability. This is important to the strength and durability of the bag since most of the books’ weight will gravitate downwards onto the base of the bag, and people will be putting the bag down mostly on its base – thus I think having those extra layers and with strong gluing, the typical paper bag’s base would be potentially stronger than the origami one.

I’m also liking the Instructables website a lot as people can get together to share DIY tutorials and tips on making EVERYTHING, except bombs and nuclear reactors of course. I learnt so many techniques and tips for making a paper bag here!

To handle or not to handle
The issue of having handles for the bag is a tricky one. On one hand, having those ‘hanger’ string type of handles makes carrying the bag easier. On the other hand, using a ‘letterbox-like slot/hole’ type of handle cut out from the bag itself is requisite for incorporating the interactive design element of the bag. The pressure points and textural feel of both types of handles are more or less the same; only the ways in which one can carry the bag differs between the 2 types of handles. The differences would probably be minimal, so I decided on the slot type of handle. But this debate points out the need to get feedback on the handle, later on during testing.

Aesthetics
Credits go to the artists at deviantart, dafont and stock xchng [1, 2, 3] for some of the key images. This makes prototyping much faster and easier! Can you see how the design mimics our natural behaviour in which books are typically held, carried, left on the table, while reading?  The ‘floating hand’ is a curious, attention-seeking piece of imagery which [visually/psychologically] ‘yearns’ to be completed by a human user. Once the bag is carried, the picture is complete – the ‘always-ready-for-reading’ open book is now held by the user. When we leave the bag lying down flat on the table, it’s as if we are taking a break from reading and the book is left open for us to return to it. When the bag had served it’s purpose of carrying and gets folded, it look even more like a book – check out the picture in the slideshow when I shelved the folded Book Bag together with other books – it looks exactly like one of the others! This is how the Book Bag ‘behaves’ like a book, that bags other books! This visceral-reflective depths of the Book Bag design is what really appeals to me personally!

 

What do you think? Which part of the design is calling to you? More to come – actual-sized prototyping and user testing.

 

Boxes for the mind

Without a map, a compass is useless. Thinking out of the box still requires a box to start with – without a box, where does thinking beyond go? All good ideas will float around in utilitarian nothingness without the good ol’ box. Sometimes, having boxes allow us to make better decisions…

 

Frameworks for those brain-works

Sometimes creative people are adverse to having frameworks. If thinking out of the box is needed, why do we bother with frameworks (aka boxes) in the creative process? This is where I feel the whole creativity thing is so over-sold and misunderstood.

I guess at the onset, divergent/creative thinking is needed to explore options and to go beyond the box, and to generate lots of ideas. Then with many ideas floating around, how then can we act? This is where we get caught in an “either/or” situation between thinking divergently/creatively and being rational/convergent. But this is a false division of the situation. We can think both divergently and convergently, but at different stages of the project. Particularly when it comes to the time for decision-making, we need to find convergence on all the ideas and cut out the superfluous.

Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design, proposes a useful way of assessing the different levels of appeal/engagement a product has on the consumer. He says there are three levels: 1) Visceral, 2) Behavioural, 3) Reflective. This is also similar to the three levels of head, heart and gut framework by Joel Desgrippes and Marc Gobé for brand engagement. In a nutshell, “head/reflective” level refers to the rational attributes, the “heart/behavioural” level points to the social/physical interactions (how things work) between the customer and the product/brand, and the “gut/visceral” level points to the intuitive impact and stimulation delivered.

Image source: http://www.taketake.com

These frameworks help me in deciding which one of the ideas to develop further. When I try to locate the bags in the Venn diagram, it becomes more telling – the Green Bag appeals to the head in particular, while the High Street Bag draws people mainly through gut appeal. The Book Bag seems to have more of a balance of the 3 levels. Granted, this is totally unscientific, but you get the rough idea (it’ll be awfully boring to read through numbers, wouldn’t it?!).

Conclusion? The Book Bag shall be the bag of choice!

 

The head, heart & gut of the Book Bag

Head – rational attributes, “liking the idea of it”
The Book Bag reminds one of a book and about reading, which ‘implicates’ NLB and its mission through such reminiscences in the library users’ and public’s mind. Book-lovers especially will like the idea of walking around with ‘open books’ in their hands, always looking like they are in the middle of reading, living and carrying out daily activities while in the midst of reading.

Heart – interaction-based, “how it works”
With readers already handling and borrowing books at the library, having to handle an extra ‘book’ would offer the least resistance in terms of having to learn and adopt new behaviour. Ultra low-cost RFID tags allow the Book Bag to be borrowed as a ‘book’ while being economically viable, and also fulfilling the criteria of encouraging return since the Book Bag will have to be borrowed as part pf the user’s loan quota! The functional convenience the Book Bag offers for library users who didn’t bring bags along would be appealing to the heart. Above all, the Book Bag ‘becomes’ a bag only when book-carrying is needed in between the home and library, and at other times becomes a book worthy of being keep together with the other borrowed books (i.e. not having to hunt for it at home for return), hence situating itself as a natural part of the reader’s journey and physical environment.

Gut – visual/emotional stimulation, “I love how slick it looks”
Learning from the interactive design shared on my previous post on creative shopping bags, incorporating some element of ‘clever’, interactive design would draw curious attention (visceral appeal) from the public eye, and hopefully create a kind of brand buzz.

 

Next…… quick design and prototyping, in order to fail quickly and learn even faster!

 

Meditations on first concept

Navigating the rivers of thought for a solution…

 

Of the 3 seed ideas from the previous post, through

looking and re-looking,

wondering and day-dreaming,

comparing and sieving,

I had come to a decision. It wasn’t one of those “Aha!” moments where instant illumination drops down from the sky, but more like a clear-water stream gently flowing and meandering through the expanse of random thoughts, cleaning out the landscape while at the same time refreshing it with clarity. So I thought I’ll share further meditations on the ideas.

The Green Bag

True. ‘Green’ consciousness had come a long way and now, more than ever, people are wanting more from businesses and governments in terms of ecological sustainable practices. So people might recycle and reuse the bags, fulfilling the 2 “R”s. But the third “R” would be more difficult – what incentive would they have to return these bags to the library? In more likelihood it would be tossed into a pile of other bags when they get home and another would take its place when they need to use one to carry books to the library. It would be truly lost. Moreover, if it’s going to be really well-designed and nice-looking to keep, users would have even lesser reason to return it. Encouraging readers to return the bag simply through advocacy would entail them to learn new behaviour which is a high barrier.

 

The High Street Bag

A great-looking fashionable bag would definitely get readers interested and start using, but it suffers from the same predicament as people wanting to keep them instead of returning. A rewards scheme for returns is certainly an attractive and familiar way of ‘pulling’ users towards a behaviour we wish to influence, though the budget implications may be huge. If budgets are low and the free rewards and gifts are perceived to be pretty ‘cheapo’, then there’s little ‘pull’ indeed for the again new behaviour they have to learn (‘push’ factors). Besides, what are the men going to do with these fashion bags?

 

The Book Bag

A book-like [book/bag]. Initially, this idea sounds ‘flat’, pretty normal or even average. On a visceral level, it seems to be nothing surprising, nothing too exciting either. But I feel it’s really more of something familiar, something easy-going. Readers are already handling and borrowing books at the library, so having to handle an extra ‘book’ [/bag] would be little obstacle as there’s almost no new behaviour to learn. If this [book/bag] can mimic the behaviour of other books, then there’s even less barrier of adoption. Technology (in the form of cheap radio frequency identification tags) used on the library books are already in place, and all this [book/bag] needs is a RFID tag like its book cousins to function as a ‘book’ to be borrowed. With ultra low-cost RFID tags in sight (based on recent research forwarded by local scientific institutions IME and A-Star), this will make economic sense as well. On a reflective level, the design can be crafted in such a way that would have visceral appeal to the public eye – imagine people walking around with ‘open books’ in their hands, always looking like they are in the middle of reading, living and carrying out daily activities while in the midst of reading. It would be a kind of buzz which would benefit the NLB brand.

 

What do you think, dear reader? My gut feel is for the Book Bag, but I’ll leave to the next post to highlight the decision-making frameworks which would help me decide with more [rational] certainty…

 

This blog is now on Flickr.

This blog wants to take over the world, one social media platform at a time!

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book bag designer’s Flickr Photostream, posted with vodpod

Brainstorms & Ideation

Unadulterated. Don’t censor. Have fun. More, more, more! Yes, it’s BRAINSTORMING (not what you might be thinking)…

 

OK! After so much musing, observing and trying to know everything there is to know about bags, libraries and reader behaviour, it’s time to brainstorm ideas for the design concept of the bag. I actually mapped out the scope of the design (or the “design brief”) and linked the ideas together in a really cool, zooming format using Prezi, but to much painful realisation, there isn’t a way to embed it on my post! 😦 But for those interested, you can also click on this link to view it (takes a while to load, and click on the “forward” arrow head to advance the animation). [31 Jan 2011 update: I found a way to host it on wordpress.com blogs! See the cool, zooming Prezi below!]

 

I’d always been inspired (in a geeky way) by Royksopp’s award-winning video “Remind Me”, in how they had made potentially boring info-graphics into a seriously cool MTV.

So to give you a cool way (I hope it’s cool) to view the design brief of the Book Bag, I created the Royksopp-inspired info-graphic above to tie together all the observational findings and the design criteria. I also didn’t want to forget about the various questions I asked through the past blog-posts, which would be helpful to guide the design concept, so here is it:

So how can I design a library bag which helps the reader and enhance his experience with the library? How can the bag find a natural place within the reader’s environment at the same time, so that it won’t be lost/forgotten?

Can the bag design incorporate some “reading” element or get people to read more?

What has play gotta do with the bag design?

[…] some of the designs are interactive and needing a human user to complete the picture, though by itself alone would also pique curiosity by ‘yearning’ to be completed.

So how can I design a bag for library users to borrow books with, but at the same time can be fun / entertaining to use / durable (since one of the criteria is for users to return the bag, and thus be subject to multiple uses) and lastly helps our public libraries spread their ‘brand‘?

 

Ideas, ideas ideas!

So after some rough sketching and doodling and incubating, I came up with three ideas for the library bag – here’s the marketing pitch for them (rough sketches included)!

1.  The Green Bag

A tote bag made of high-strength recycled/reused paper fabric. Green is the theme here – everything from the material to its purpose and cause is related to recycling and reuse! Tapping on the heightened awareness for ecological sustainability and the growing market for green products, this Green Bag calls all to action to the three “R”s – recycle, reuse and RETURN [the bag]!

2.  The High Street Bag

A fashionable shopping bag with a cool slick design, and an accompanying reward scheme for every return of the bag. This bag is coolness defined. Expect people giving you double-takes when you carry this bag on the streets. This bag brings book-carrying to a new statusphere of haute coutre. On top of that, this bag pays you for carrying it! With every return of the bag, you accumulate reward points to exchange for free gifts! Now, that’s rewarding!

3.  The Book Bag

A defining experience of a book, that also bags other books. This [book/bag] leads a double life shared only by its other superheroes – a normal book by day, a crime-busting bag by night! By tapping on our everyday visual and tactile memories of  book-like books and the way we hold, use and interact with them, this [book/bag] disguises itself by day and lives our everyday lives with us. But beneath its gentle mien is a character of super-human proportions. With a flip, it transforms into a bag to save us from heavy burdens! Fortified with its tear-proof, weather-proof Tyvek ‘armour’, this [book/bag] pledges to serve us ordinary citizens by easing us of the ‘crime’ of carrying heavy books in hand.

 

I think I’m having TOO MUCH FUN!!! Hahaha… okay okay, cheesy marketing puns aside, what do you think of the three? I’m inclined toward the Book Bag at this point…. and not just because its a “superhero”! 😀

 

The Deep Dive

This video is seriously inspiring, again from my favourite design firm IDEO! The creative process behind design and design thinking is made a lot clearer with this show-&-tell. I like it that the object in question was the ubiquitous shopping cart, which falls in that same category as the shopping bag in terms of how common and ‘everyday’ it is. Before I dive into brainstorming and ideation of design concepts for the library bag, this is one powerful adrenaline shot for the coming creative work…..

Library ethnography 101, part II

Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder (& more accurately)…

 

Observations from the Book Drop

To readers who may not know what the book drop is, it’s really something which you should get your library to start having! Don’t we all have slightly traumatic memories of anxiously rushing to the library on the due date to return books in order not to get fined? Only to get there 5 minutes before closing to see a very long queue snaking its way out of the library… on days like these, it feels like the whole world is determined to make things difficult for you, and every single library user had chosen the very same day to return their books as you did. And to add insult to injury, the indifferent librarian is taking her own sweet time scanning those books for return, and the bar-code scanner is acting up again… Well, those days are truly behind us now – it’s so easy now, even ducks know how to use the book drop!

I won’t bore you with the details of my observations at the book drop area, since most of what I saw were most or less similar to what I had previously mentioned at the check-out counters, except in reverse – man arrives with bag of book(s), man fiddles with bag, man takes out book(s), man drops them into slot, man walks away. Though I’m not sure why many seemed to take pride in very forcefully pushing the books through the book drop door…

 

Mapping the reader’s journey

Just for fun, I mapped out an illustrated journey of the library user. Visualising a customer’s journey through space and time is helpful for discovering touch-points where good design can come in to enhance the customer’s experience.

If you scrutinise the “man” in the slideshow, the only time he is burdened with books is after the check-out to getting home, and from home to book drop. These are the opportunities for the library bag to come in to help the reader. But what happens to the bag in between? Probably chucked away somewhere with a pile of other shopping bags, forgotten and lost. With high likelihood, a bag provided by the library to the reader will not be returned as the bag will be inconvenient to find (a needle among the haystack of shopping bags) or impossible to find (simply lost).

So how can I design a library bag which helps the reader and enhance his experience with the library? How can the bag find a natural place within the reader’s environment at the same time, so that it won’t be lost/forgotten?

Other interesting behaviour and mannerisms

It was also pretty interesting to cast the ethnographer’s eye on the everyday behaviour of readers in the library. There are really all manner of mannerisms, some not so pretty like propping legs up on the sofa, readers dozing off with their mouths wide open, picking their noses while reading (euuwwww!)…. hahaha. But what drawn my interest as inspiration for design were the mannerisms of people while in the middle of reading, and how some of these visual images of reading are situated in our everyday collective memories. Take for example the visual scene of a reader with an open book vs a closed book:

Everything in the picture is the same, and the only difference lies in the state of the book. When you look at the 2 pictures, which one depicts that the reader is reading, and which one depicts that he is not (or finished reading)? No prizes for guessing…. but you get the picture….

I mention this in particular because NLB’s objectives (or any public library for that matter) is to nurture reading. I remember this slogan from NLB about “Nurturing a Nation of Readers” some time back.

Can the bag design incorporate some “reading” element or get people to read more? If the design can do that, it would elevate the library bag above and beyond mere utility – of being “just another shopping bag” – to something which serves a greater cause!

Library ethnography 101, part I

Sometimes people are the best inspiration……

 

One of my design thinking heroes whom I had already introduced in an earlier post, Tim Brown from the renowned design firm IDEO, mentions this about design thinking,

“Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

After so much online musing and research, it’s time to get started on the “people’s needs” aspect of design thinking. Design thinking advocates an interesting method of ethnographic observation of the human user, through the open-mindedness of an anthropologist, in order to really see how people behave in their natural settings. As we know from the Hawthorne effect, people may say one thing but do another thing when caught in context, thus ethnographic observation helps to dig deeper into customer behaviour and minimises any armchair presumptions we may have about why people act they way they do.

While the tech and design worlds are still finding it difficult to agree on the power of ethnographic research as a serious discipline for innovation (see Don Norman’s controversial article, and further discussions [1, 2] on Business Week), I believe there’s still value in observing how library users go about their activities in the library – which translates to more personal experiences and visual material for musing and inspiration for conceptualising the new library bag.

I’m also pretty excited to get re-acquainted with those participant observational skills and methods I learnt in university through my anthropology modules. What an interesting way to bridge what we had studied in school with real-life problems! Not forgetting to mention that there’s also an ‘almost-wrong’ kind of voyeuristic excitement from hiding behind bookshelves to ‘spy’ on people, which I won’t explain too much here… hahah.

The ethnographic excursion starts!

So off I went to the Central Library. Thankfully the book check-out counters were located close to some bookshelves which made for good spying fortress. Next, find a book to ‘pretend-read’ while discretely observing library users check their books out. Then quickly jot down observations on notepad hidden on bookshelf. Resume ‘reading’ posture to observe. Wash, rinse, repeat till satisfied. But why the extra effort at pretense? Just so that people are unaware and can behave at their truest – remember the Hawthorne effect? But also because I’m having so much fun being almost 007-ish…haha.

I took a few minutes to get into the groove of observing and noting, and very soon, observational details were coming in fast and furious. It’s almost strange to self-witness that, since this scene (people checking books out) was something I see so often (I visit the library pretty often) and I’m pleasantly surprised to be able to pick out many facts to note which will help scope the design of the library bag. I split the observations into 3 categories: 1) People, 2) Books, 3) Bags.

People
I found that bringing along one’s own tote bag solely to carry the loaned books was already a common practice, especially with the ladies. Mothers with their kids are most definitely seen with their own tote bags, as they usually borrow stacks of children’s books. Otherwise, most other users stuffed the books into their own handbags/backpacks/slingbags. The ones who walked off with book in hand and no bag were mostly men. The users who brought their own bags even used them to carry books around the library while browsing.

Books
Really, books of ALL sizes were loaned, including magazines and CDs.  These days with these other forms of media available for loan, the new library bag would have to be designed for these items as well. Children’s books, which are a hit with mothers with kids (they borrow stacks of it), are usually thinner but in unusual sizes.

Bags
What materials made up the tote bags people brought along? Polyfabric tote bags seemed most popular, especially the ones used for groceries since they are built for holding heavy items. Otherwise people used shopping bags of hybrid paper/plastic quality. Many of the bags people brought along were also pretty fashionable and well-designed (not your average sloppy plastic bag) – a sign that people are more conscious of how bags looked with them.

Other observations
Receipts – many people fiddled with the receipts, finding all sorts of places to keep them (folded into wallets, slotted in between pages of the book, or simply tossed into the bag). Some even printed individual receipts for individual books, a practice which I confess to doing as well. Why? ‘Cause it’s much easier to check on the return due date if each book had its own receipt, than to hunt down the correct book and page. But the slotting the receipts into books also made many fall out of the books, even right after people had borrowed them.

Space – many users lingered on at the counter after the checking out the books, in order to bag the books properly, stuff them into backpack, re-arrange things in backpack and then stuff them in, fiddle with receipts and folded them and took out wallets/books to keep them. So having enough space for them to do all that was crucial – thankfully the check-out counters at the Central Library were widely spaced apart, allowing for this ‘transitional’ space.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

So that was pretty productive for a start! More to come next – spying “thoughtless acts” (no, not the ugly type) during book drop and other natural library user mannerisms.

 

More online muses!

 

Literature meets fashion.

Unleash the inner geek!

 

Thinking with your hands

Going analog for further inspiration…

 

In this day and age of the Internet, it’s so easy to get lost in the online world. I admit I spend too much time online, knowingly. Sometimes I feel like I can’t do anything else productive unless it’s in front of a computer! I wonder if this is some form of learned helplessness… haha.

So taking time off the computer and going analog is one of my little ways to get inspiration. There’s also something about being able to handle something in your hands; to touch and feel it, and to play with it with a curiously explorative mind not too unlike how a child would. It’s also an exercise in getting re-acquainted with the shopping bag since we handle it so often in our daily lives and would have probably overlooked its many details. So the easiest and fastest way was to potter around the house and see what play comes up.

I immediately went to my home stash of shopping bags, and took out the ones which were about A4-sized (as part of design criteria). Handled them to see in 360deg perspectives to see if the difference between ‘portrait’ and ‘landscape’ modes ; examined the foldings and ‘movable’ parts to see how it’s built; placed some books into them to get a feel of the weight; tried the different bag handles to feel the pressure of the handles against my hand in order to gauge ‘handle-bility’; touched the texture and bent the bag around to feel the physical properties of the bag through the thickness and malleability of the materials used.

All this exploratory play is really, actually quite serious. Yes, no kidding here. Play breaks down pre-conceptions and barriers to our mental stereotypes, and opens us up to possibilities which we might overlook as adults. Tim Brown, President and CEO of the multidisciplinary design firm IDEO, in his talk at Serious Play conference speaks about how:

Kids can inform our outlook on creativity by looking at exploration, building and role-playing, as he explained, “forgetting the adult behaviors that are getting in the way our ideas.”

I love what he mentioned about how kids on Christmas Day morning end up playing with the boxes which the presents came in rather than the presents themselves, and when encountering something new, kids will invariably ask “What can I do with it?”. However, he did point out that play as part of a creative process doesn’t necessarily mean anarchy – one thing which I believe is on every senior executive’s top fear factors when told he/she needed to let his staff “play” more in order to be creative. Tim mentioned that kids play by rules, and kids together informally adopt a code of behaviour which helps them play better. So “productive play” is definitely one of the ways to get our creative juices going.

So coming back, what has all that play gotta do with the bag design? At this preliminary stage, I hesitate to label and to start categorising point-by-point what came out from it. I like to just let it sit in the back of my mind at the moment, and let those creative juices slowly simmer. So that when it’s dinner time, I know that the stew will taste darn good.

 

Quick & dirty research

Inspiration musing (aka research) the quick and dirty way…

 

To get my design journey underway,  I did what most travellers would do for planning – Google! Images search was truly helpful to start off, and with each image linking me to more sources of inspiration, it became a viral way of getting quick information. Not only did the images offer design concepts, but also materials used, functions/purposes for bags. It was pretty fun learning about the myriad of uses and forms the ubiquitous shopping bag had become!

It was particularly entertaining to see how clever some of the designs brought out the brand feel and create buzz just by being carried around. Many ‘compilation’ type of blogs/websites frequently feature posts which show such like “30 Brilliantly Innovative Shopping Bag Designs“, or “Unusual and Creative Shopping Bags” . I especially like how some of the designs are interactive and needing a human user to complete the picture, though by itself alone would also pique curiosity by ‘yearning’ to be completed. I see this as one of the good examples where designers are tapping on how we are all hard-wired in our brains to organise visual elements into “unified wholes” (see Gestalt principles of visual perception) – especially in this case of Blush’s X-ray bag, giving a cheeky preview of Blush customers’ innerwear, or Panadol Extra’s bag showing how headaches sometimes feel like someone pounding on the top of your head. It’s great fun carrying these bags around, isn’t it? After seeing all these interesting, attention-seeking shopping bags, I’m surprised I don’t see much of such types making their way around town. Why Singapore, why?

Online sources also gave some good ideas on materials for shopping bags, especially since I’ll be designing a bag for books, which tend to be heavy and having hard corners (which might pierce your usual ‘soft’ plastic grocery bags). There’s so many choices, it’s baffling! Looking at materials like jute, polyfabric, and Tyvek had been pretty educational though – for some reason I love learning about random everyday stuff! It’s also fascinating how shopping bags are evolving in form, especially how since most are carried by women, the design for shopping bags are going more fashionable, like these fabulous Tyvek-made CheekyGreen bags- they look so good I think they qualify as normal fashion bags to carry around!

The main learning point from these online musings seem to be simply “FUN” – just because it’s a commonplace object doesn’t mean that the shopping bag has to look boring (think “brown”), or made of the usual suspects (think “paper”). Haha…

So how can I design a bag for library users to borrow books with, but at the same time can be fun / entertaining to use / durable (since one of the criteria is for users to return the bag, and thus be subject to multiple uses) and lastly helps our public libraries spread their ‘brand‘?

 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or bag)

So it is.

 

I came across this poster while at the library one day and was curious. How ubiquitous an object for a design project! What an interesting challenge it would be to design for something so commonplace and ‘normal’ that sometimes it’s almost ‘invisible’ in our everyday lives.

Though having said that, the “brown bag” is an almost blank slate which has a lot of room for a designer’s input in terms of form and function. There’s some striking similarity I can draw between the design of a brown bag, and the design philosophy in an inspiring design book I read recently called Super Normal. It’s frankly quite refreshing to read about how the designers Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison are aiming to bring design back to the roots of “improving” the “man-made environment” and deepening the simple and beautiful (“normal”) relationships certain commonplace objects have with us in our everyday lives:

“As designers we can aim at achieving the Super Normal by being less concerned with visual aspects of an objects character, by attempting to anticipate the objects likely impact on the atmosphere and how it will be to live with… perhaps the continuation of a good relationship that has been around for a long time is better than anticipating something new. I think maybe the moment this hits us is what Super Normal means. “

So already there’s a lot of food for thought for this design challenge. I’m also excited at the prospect of applying some of the techniques and methods I had learnt about design thinking – the ethnographic study and deep empathy for the user, rapid prototyping, cross-fertilisation of ideas with seemingly non-related industries, synergistic collaboration between engineers, designers, users, manufacturers, etc etc… Though without the benefit of a “hot team”, I can already envision roping in friends as a dynamically-knitted team collaborating through Facebook and over dinners. What fun! I’m truly excited now!

Other design criteria outlined by NLB included physical specifications of 20cm x 30cm (which is about A4-sized), and most interestingly, that the bag has to encourage users to return the bag after use. That would add on a extra tasty texture to the design challenge!

Can’t wait to get started!