Portrait a affection through creative leadership.

Reflections on Leadership Sessions with Miguel

So we are having class with Miguel these two weeks and also got introduce to a PhD student at Kingston, Alia Weston.

I am very impressed with the session with Alia, her class is very interesting and I very enjoyed it. She can be my mentor because we share a few common background. Like how she went from an art  degree (jewelery design) to a MA business management course. We felt the importance of management in the business of creative industries, it is hugely affecting the success of a project and the future development of a bright idea.

Here I want to share this post I found online when it has an interview with Alia – ‘Postgraduate study relevant to your industry can make you stand out from the crowd’. I want to point out on the post it says business masters are more preferable than MBAs because masters graduates are more able to ‘hit the ground running.’ This is the impression I get from Alia. Despite she is a teacher, it is very important to have a character that is very down to earth, a cool team player and also knowledgeable. I also believe that this is what creative industries need and what companies are looking for nowadays, which bring to the tropic of this post.

Portrait an affection through creative leadership

A more creative approach to leadership is all about how to transform the team players and create emulation. To have a very high moral value as well as a very down to earth character is the key of being attractive character in a team. Some people are born with lovely characters but many of us in the world believed that it can be trained. I guess this is why we are all studying creative leadership right?

Here are a few important characters I think we should try to developed and maintain before we finished our education and became a leader.

1. Be honest and organise. – There is nothing wrong to send an email or ring somebody to say sorry I could not finished the job on time rather than disappear at the last minutes. I personally hate people doing this but I was once like that, and sometimes I still have that lazy thoughts.

2. ‘Use’ each other – Don’t be afraid to ask someone to help, joint power is always the best! However, while doing this we have to be independent enough and don’t drag other people to worse.

To be continue.

Filed under: Leadership

How nature does sleeping?

More follow up from the last post, how nature does sleeping? Meaning the animals and the wildlife.

I’ve got a cat at home and I know he likes to find his favourite spots at home. So I start investigating the object that he chooses.

1. basket
2. bed
3. sofa

He chooses the basket most often, I am guessing because it feels more private to him and he feels like he own the whole thing. Whereas sofa and bed he could not stay as long as he likes and normally get disturbed as me or my flatmates get in.

other animals:

Pet normally got very nice place to rest however the wild animals sleep outside in the nature. Referring to what I’ve written earlier, baby birds sleep in their nest, leopard rest on tree branch, elephant sleep on the side and piggy sometimes sleep on the muggy grass. So to say, if we consider the nature as materials that we can produce, it will be something soft or fit their shape.

Filed under: Uncategorized

So how does nature do it?

There are a few questions we have been asked to think about during class, I think this is so important it worth to go through again especially we now realised our first product failed!

Potential product : Chair (s)

Q1. Reduce it to a basic function. What is your product?
——-A place to rest for a limited time.

Q2. List other things that does the same function.  (Shoe box example will be a container or a envelope)
——cushion
——bed
——bath tub
——toilet seat
——sofa
——bench
——bowl
——cup

At this stage, I realise a chair is basically a piece of surface that change the gravity from your body to an object. Therefore your body is resting, something else has support most of your body weight instead of your own force. Or something that help you to get up easily when you are not standing up straight.

After that, I categorise the objects in 3 groups.
Group 1 – object with soft surface:
bed
cushion
sponge
grass
textile
someone’s lap
mud
feathers
cloud

Group 2 – object with hard surface:
wood
bed
toilet seat
glass
acrylic
plastic
rock
metal

Group 3- object with a circular shape:
bowl
toilet seat
bath tub
plate
cup
drum
frying pan
egg shells
spoon

Compare all these group, I found out the most comfortable materials to use will be foam or feather, and it is very important that the chair has a round surface to sit on cause that’s what make you feel nice and protected.

SO what make you think nice and protected?
someone’s lap
someone’s arm
bed + duvet
tent

How does nature do it?
Bird nest
A piece of field
Layers of dry grass
A quiet cave
A damp muddy surface
A very fine sand beach

And how are these nature objects build?
Birds made their nest by spitting and sticking the grass, branches together.

Similar product already existed, research pictures from the internet.

At last, how animal does that?

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Week 7 Class Reflection – Presentation from all the groups

Today is the day for presentations from all the different groups. We have a extra long afternoon after coming back from Royal Festival Hall.

For the video of the day we looked at a video from a book publisher based in Germany, the company chose to use the method of guerilla advertising. It is a type of advertising that there’s no  big budget required necessary but the campaign can delivered the spread the effect by spread a news in a very short time and in a very unconventional way.

It somehow related to the one of the questions we set to ask ourselves from the last class – How does the nature do it?
Nature organisms make the world works as how it is now, it seems like there are no extra effort. If we break down what we are trying to promote and convert it with the nature(going back to the basic), the whole idea could turns to be very easy to promote and also spread across very quickly effortlessly.

In terms of my team, creativcontrol. We have agreed on building a chair, possible related to the nature or the USP would be it can be portable for travelers. I ask myself this same question, How does nature make a chair for us, or for all other organisms in the world? I have these answers:

A piece of grass
bird nest
spider web

This is a very important area I will further develop in the next post.

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Week 6 Class Reflection on Prototyping- 30 Oct

Corrine recommend some videos to watch in the class and using what we learn from the videos, we should be able think about how can they apply to our own business.

The first video we learned about is to share the ideas. Sharing is always a good thing. I have learned the benefits from sharing years ago since I was doing Graphic Design for my undergraduate. and its all about sharing ideas, talking to others and get feedback and inspiration. I think my team -creativcontrol will need more of that. Oleg and I has send out some questionnaires and got some feedback but I think more importantly is to really start a conversation and talk to more people.

The second video is about the student project from Standford. The video demonstrates the whole design thinking process, how they discuss an idea, then prototypes and more prototypes. And most importantly they managed to ask other students from the school to test it out for them and follow up by some useful reflections. So for our team, it is very important in the later stage we should all go to an airport with our prototypes and able to take pictures and survey the audiences.

There are more videos shown in the class but I think the most important thing that we ought to learn is there are many different ways to do Prototyping. By trying all of them, we will soon realise our problems behind and fail early! Role play, very quick dirty prototyping are all useful in a way. The reason is that some people think these are all wasting time but ‘Failing early’ is the fastest route to going to success!

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking

Reflection on your Team Role for last week of October

I always act as a secretary for my team, I drop down summary of  all the meetings also with assigned job. The first aim was to make our own team members or anyone would love to know what’s going on with each of the meetings and in this way its easy to remember in the future. Secondly, we also hope that in case anyone who missed the meeting or people with English as their second language would find it easier to catch up after the meeting and language would be a barrier.

In term of achievements, as a graphic design I created the logo of our company ‘creativ control’ and also responsible for the interface of the team blog. My role is also to give visual ideas to the design of the potential products as chair and green bag.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Week 5 Class Reflection on Storytelling

On week 5, we focused on discussing about methods and the good uses of story telling.

We looked at a couples web sources in class and that had shown different approaches of story telling.
1. Text
2. Data visuialisation
3. Map-telling
4. Documentary
5. Film
6. Animation

I think that putting personal opinion on story telling might also be a very helpful sources to the audience, such as the rating for movies and videos in youtube. Rate certain stories or give it a marking standard above the content, so that people know how good/bad this story is and what does the majority of people think about that particular story.

We also introduce the concepts of ‘Persona’ in class. In term of business research, persona are given as a term and easily describe as fake people based on real founding. It is a generalisation of the specification of our research.  We had ‘Sharon or ‘Roxanne’ as an examples in class. Persona means mask or character derived from Latin.

Wile we are in different stages of producing a products, whether from designing or manufacturing we might lost track form the objective of the business and asked ourselves ‘Why do we want it?’ or ‘ Why do we do this?’. Then it is time for us to go back and think about our Persona.  It is almost like an innovation compare with logical design thinking.

After that we have further our discussion on the scale of design, has it gone from BIG to small? Decades ago people used to design a rail system connecting different cities, compare to nowadays most people are plainly designing a plastic shape of a fax machine. To reflect on this discussion, I have certain amount of agreement but not wholeheartedly. It is true that different industries are mostly mature now in our 21st century however there are always improvements of product/ service from better design, along with less traditional thinking and a moving forward attitude. In some ways the scale of a design project can be determine and discovered by the individuals with new technology possible.

Next, we came up with a test to demonstrate the fact survey’s result can used as a tool and support but do not trust it all. It can be pointless when the method of the survey are wrong or simple enough to miss out important details. This statement are proved by the Camera SLR value test that we did in class.  We have half the class with their eye closed and not knowing what the rest of the class are doing. Student with eye opened as the first group were asked to announce how much will they sell of this particular digital slr which held as an example, figures came up from £500 to £1000. Following by the students who have their eye open now and expressed the value they think they will paid for this camera. Lowest price were shout as £150 because it is a second had or depreciation of the value as a high tech product etc. But as the fact that sellers always over estimate their true value of the product and buyers will tried their best lower the price and always willing to pay less than expectation.

Filed under: Class Reflection

Week 4 Class Reflections -Own systems triangle numbers

In order to have a success business, what do I need to know or have? (10 mins task)
This is what I have written down:
Luck, Ideas, Experience, Expertise, Time, Cost, Personal Management, A business plan, networking,
…
…
… and the list goes on.

We discussed about Activity Theory and looked at a systems analysis model. Here’s my individual results:

Provider: Wendy Ng.

User: (A specific description of your customer)

Constraints: 7

Community: 2

Roles: 11

Objects: 5

User needs: 0

Total: 25

Looking at my results, I quickly realised how I have neglect the ‘users’ in my business and they are almost the most important position of a business. Same as what I concluded from listening to other teams business idea. Me and my team are currently lacking concern on the users.

Very important note from MACE’s blog “By understanding all of the elements of the activity and how they fit together, it can be easier to visualise and understand where areas for improvement can be found, and track your thinking. It can also act as a way to find new innovations by trying it with extreme users, or changing a category in a new way.” I quickly understand how I have neglect the user in my business.

Couple other things to remind myself after discussion during the class:
1. When we look at potential market, we need to think about the constraints but not just from the market research! For example research shows that there are 2000 people in UK who love hot dogs and willing to have one per day. Howver, the stalls that you owe can only provide 200 hot dogs a day. Therefore we need to take that to consideration when we looking at market research and the real situation.

2. Toilet papers in UK vs China
If you are a company producing tissue pack in China and thinking about investing the market in UK. You should realise a shift of role from the community network to users themselves – the fact that no one carry pack of tissues in UK whereas in China it’s almost a personal responsibility to provide yourself tissues paper when using toilets.

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking

Week 4 Class Reflection on Systems Analysis

Our class started off by watching an video advertisement from company Volkswagen. During the video we have not seen any image of a car produced by the brand, instead we got introduced to the idea called  ‘fun theory’. When a company is so well developed and got a long history of itself, advertisements sometimes need not to show the products but more likely to state a lifestyle that the brand is subjecting with the little support of the logo.

Another company that I can think of has recently use the same way to advertise themselves and have successful result is Blackberry.

Follow by the video, different business teams were asked to present to the class their initial business idea and different roles of their members. Oleg is our team leader, he introduced our company  ‘creativcontrol’ by presenting our business statement and business objectives. You can read about our company and our roles on our blog.

Other companies in the class also have some fantastic ideas, I am very interested at Team 2 and looking forward to their products. One point that I picked out by listening to other companies was we are lacking of public opinion. I think our team should set out some questionnaires about our products.

Filed under: Class Reflection, Design thinking, Week 4

5 Possible Competitors

1. Smarter Products, UK.

2. Design Museum, London.

3. Jasper Morrison LTD, Europe.

4. Uniqlo, global.

5. G.O.D, Hong Kong

Filed under: Young Enterprise