The occasional light expression

Last Saturday I attended the Mindtree hosted ‘icamp’ or innovation-focused Barcamp.

I must say I was rather disappointed by several aspects of the event. While the organizers got the ’structure’ somewhat right (the registration was smooth, the food was OK, the presentations were on time), they screwed up on the ‘content’. Most presentations were fairly dull and some were simply rip-offs.

A certain gentleman started valiantly on how innovation can be taught in MBA schools and was heckled immediatly by the audience with inane questions along the lines of: Why MBA schools? What is innovation? Why not the other schools? It made me realize that the word ‘MBA’ elicits a strange response from non-MBA’s - its sort of like using the words ‘Lawyer’, ‘Financial Planner’ or ‘Software Programmer’ - people either love them or just can’t stand them. Anyways, after much hand waving about Black Swans and Prototyping and Scenarios and such he managed to finish in time. My personal opinion is that the speaker had his heart in the right place but needs to get more fundamental inspirations from design thinking that he can share with students.
The second presentation was by the eclectic and sharp Murli, who, much to his discomfort found himself using a Powerpoint presentation. The minimal graphics content heavy Powerpoint was no match for the energy and vigor of the speaker and the whole experience got a bit disorienting with the rather lame Powerpoint and the rather convincing speaker. I loved Murli using paper with large text to convey that he sought disagreement and more questions and positive argument. I hope Murli tells organizers he doesn’t need Powerpoints.
A third presentation was by a senior gentleman who spoke about ‘Unusual Sources of Innovation’. While his hands on and interactive style went some way in making the presentation bearable, his content was simply too dull and commonplace in the end. Using Apple, Google, TV and the Tata Nano as starting points he launched into a discussion on what made these companies and their products successful and tried to relate how any learning from these case studies can be related to one’s job. Now the problem with Apple or Google case studies is post-hoc rationalization. It is rather easy to fit any explanation to explain their success - design, marketing, stickyness, rabid users, technology, user experience etc. I found the spirit in the presentation but the speaker would have been so much more convincing if they had used genuinely ‘unusual’ sources - how about ideas generated from sleep deprivation? from watching corny Hindi movies? from opening random pages of random (not only science fiction) books?
I bailed out in the early afternoon - couldn’t stay around long enough to be inspired to share my thoughts in that setting. It is events like these that make me question Bangalore’s claim to being the cutting-edge, futuristic metropolis. It ends up projecting itself as a city which is mirroring San Francisco or New York or London with a time lapse.

These past two Friday afternoons, I’ve been visiting the National Institute of Design (NID)’s Bangalore campus for providing industry inputs and teaching a class on ‘Prototyping and Usability’ to students of the Masters in Design program.

Over the next few weeks in January/February, I will be covering (with Adesh, a brilliant and enthusiastic Senior Interaction Designer from my team) the following topics through a mix of presentations, case studies, examples and hands on activities.
- How prototyping drives design and innovation
- Overview of prototyping, fidelity and tool selection
- Fundamentals of low, mid and high fidelity prototyping
- Group and individual exercises on different prototyping techniques
- Usability evaluations: Methods, metrics and protocols

All the students are in their second semester and are taking other classes in User Experience Design including on web design, usability studies, Interaction design and user research.
I’m quite excited about how the next few sessions turn out. Its always energizing to be in the presence of students - keeps me on my toes too.

I’m also looking forward to my visit to IIT Kanpur’s design program in mid February for a design workshop we’ll be conducting over the weekend of Feb 15.

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Yesterday while shopping for clothes and such at the Garuda mall in Bangalore, I found myself noticing that they have a propensity for 80’s pop - there was Madonna all over Shopper’s Stop and while i can normally tolerate Madonna’s brand of music, I find it too strong for the shopping experience - sort of like a bubblegum chewed too long.

The overall experience was alright - at Shoppers’s Stop i did notice some overstaffing, unresponsive sales persons and strange rules (you can only take 1 shirt of each brand to the trail room - their rationale - once you’ve tried one size in Arrow or Mario Zegnoti or Indian Terrain apparently you’ve tried them all!) - but overall the selection and ambiance was reasonably good.
I also noted some interesting ‘local content’ in Garuda mall - including a neat display for Ganpati/Dusshera and creative ads for Sprite all over the place - i hope to see more culture specific content so the Bangalore malls feel different from the ones in Minnesota or Singapore.

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.

On Friday, I attended a Siliconindia summit on Leadership. Since the 199os Siliconindia has been an inspirational magazine profiling Indian American and more recently, Indian success stories in the technology marketplace. I fondly remember reading the magazine back in grad school.

In this post, I cover highlights of a few talks at the event and my takeaways.

Sharad Sharma, who heads Yahoo R&D in India gave an excellent keynote on the journey from offshoring to in market incubation. He described some mega trends that characterize the new problem for multinational corporations – product clutter, aggressive and nimble international and local competitors coming out of nowhere, the emergence of overnight new technology innovations and unpredictable network/viral effects (He cited Facebook’s book application having 7000 Harry Potter reviews, the largest anywhere).

His viewpoint was that captive product development (such as the India Development Centers or IDCs of Microsoft, Symantec, or Oracle) and Outsourced Product Development (OPD) firms (such as GlobalLogic and Symphony Services) is already a fading story. Rising wage costs, talent crunch, and the tapering of Operating Margin gains means only one thing – it is harder to extract more business benefits from passive captive outfits.

The solution to this new MNC problem? In market incubation. Meaning the development of innovative products and platforms for local consumers, for small medium businesses, and the reorganization of captive units and OPD working arrangements to wards a multi-hub, autonomous, and risk sharing model (Sharad cited the Airbus/Boeing component responsibility model where landing gears are made in France and wings are made in Japan as self contained units!).

Sharad ended his talk suggesting that this new incubation model would mean the emergence of 3 key positions within the Indian product ecosystem:

1. Leader of a Global Center of Excellence with ownership for global or local products

2. Intrapreneurs – who seed inhouse innovation with access to go to market channels

3. Product entrepreneurs who develop new products or support the ecosystem

The subsequent panel discussion on Leadership traits included Dr. Anil Gupta from Sun’s India Engineering Center, and Vijay Anand from Oracle.

Vijay used famous CEO/Leader quotes to bullet his views on what makes leaders tick - including CEO views on newness, on opportunity, and on value systems.

Anil chose to go back to the basics of what makes a good leader tick – having a clear conscience, a human bond with employees, a healthy body, and a strong sense of values.

He ended with a lovely poem from the ex Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Touche!

“..Mere prabhu Itni Oonchai mat dena..

Gairon ko gale na laga sakoon..

Itni Rukhai mat dena”

The leadership panel was peppered with references to some very interesting books on the subject of leaderhip including Straight & Crooked Thinking, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness, and The Whole New Mind.

All the panelists agreed about the need to have more ‘Integrative thinking’ leaders than reductionist/conventional thinking ones – and made references to a recent July HBR article on ‘How do Leaders think’.

..Other interesting talks at the event are archived here. I enjoyed most of the afternoon talks particularly the ones by Sanjay Singh from Akamai, Ramesh Srinivasan from Bally Systems, Santanu Paul from Virtusa, Alexius Collette from Phillips, and C Mahalingam from Symphony Services.

In the next few weeks, a couple of us are organizing a design focused un-conference - Dcamp Bangalore. Dcamp is similar in spirit to Barcamp, but with a focus on Design, User Experience, Usability and generally, design driven innovation.

The general notion is to create a casual, peer to peer, hands on space where designers and design enthusiasts can connect, share ideas, and learn - No ribbon cutting, no lamp lighting, no invited celebrities, no corporate ideological axes to grind - Instead ideas, interaction, creativity, and henceforth - interesting and unpredictable outcomes. Isn’t that what perhapsness and possibility is all about! Ok Ok, no preaching either at Dcamp…
The event is slated for early September. If you are a product manager, entrepreneur, technologist or generally, a design enthusiast, you can register at the Dcamp wiki site or we’d love to hear from you on design topics that might be of interest to you!

Alexander Kjerulf ’s blog has several interesting posts on innovative workplaces, work related happiness, and such. This post on ‘Top 5 reasons why the Customer is Always Right is Wrong’ should be read by those IT-entrepreneurs and large multinational companies laying out miles and miles of cube farms across Bangalore and other places in India. Could there be a corelation between the IT industry’s 15% attrition rate and the BPO industry’s over 50% attrition rate to the manner in which most Indian organizations care for their employees? Very seriously, very few Indian workplaces (with exceptions i’m sure - design houses, movie studies, MTV offices) would be considered as cool, hip, and happening. Or at the very least, inspiring.
If you are in Indian IT professional or manager, take a look at some of the cool workplaces in this post. The images suggest (doh!) that there is a lot more that goes into employee satisfaction, motivation and capacity for innovation than simply paying people 15% more money every year…If most of the drab, soulless, and cold Indian workplaces reflect the state of the innovation quotient of their people, then most workplaces are doing a great job of hiding their innovations or simply had none in the first place :)

Where have all the great workplace designers gone from India? Did they never exist?

Manu Sharma has a great blog post on how Apple’s employee badges were designed to be as distinct as the products the company designs. The post is a good reminder that all great design outcomes are a result of multiple forces at play: Executive management sensitivity, a respect for individuality, an aesthetic grounding across the company, and a VERY user centered design process (not a reactive usability engineering process).

Here are some of my observations from the field in India’s technology sector. While an employee badge is the least of ‘motivators’, in the true Chinese tradition of starting every journey with a small step, it is a great starting point. A new employee is uncertain about many many things when they join a company. A well designed ob-boarding process, and certainly a well designed badge essentially says to the employee ‘There’s some thought behind things here’.

And here’s where most Indian companies get it wrong.

Several companies in the Indian IT industry follow the lowest common denominator to employee badges. Most badges are printed on cheap plastic, with even cheaper plastic covers, use employee-submitted dull ‘passport’ photographs, and include as Manu points out, all sorts of extraneous information. The result is depressing looking employee badges that give no sense of pride, no sense of inspiration, and certainly no sense of differentiation in an extremely commoditized marketplace. And then companies complain about employee loyalty! I suspect the reason for this is not only costs, but also that it gets outsourced to a Security setup which has no stake in employee satisfaction, only in workplace safety. It gets worse. Since almost everybody in Bangalore wears some kind of collar tag, all the way from BPO executives, office boys, Citibank sales drones standing outside ATMs and airports, to just about anybody and everybody, an employee of a company with a black, or red, or blue collar tag has a thousand other people in the city wearing the same tag.
Here is my wishlist for a GOOD employee badge:

1. Some customization on shape
2. Change your own pictures
3. Bright and cheerful

4. Some metal, not all plastic

Last Monday I visited the Infosys campus on Hosur Road, Bangalore (Image courtesy Diomidis Spinellis from http://www.spinellis.gr - Thanks Diomidis!).

In the two hours I spent on campus after my meeting, I met an old industry friend, Shan who heads the User Experience part of Infosys’s Communications & Design Group (housed in the much talked about pyramid), walked around observing the architecture, and doing a snapshot ethnography of campus.

In walking around, I was trying to notice the subtleties of the company that have made it a valued employer of choice in India, a super brand internationally, and the bellwether of India’s IT services industry. Here are some of my random observations on what makes Infosys tick:

1. Infosys has modeled its campus strongly along the lines of any top tier American university campus (Stanford comes to mind), and some of the American tech pioneers (Microsoft comes to mind). While most of the structures are indistinguishable, some, like the CDG Pyramid, the Terminal Food Court, Building 9, the lake and fountain areas, and overall, the wonderfully landscaping stand out as examples of good work. I was stuck that ironically, the Infosys campus seemed to have more ‘soul’ than most multinational campuses in India - while considering the scorching growth of the technology sector in India, most companies have reconciled to having drab, grayish white buildings with cheap glass facades. Infosys certainly gets the importance of having an inspiring physical campus.

2. Looking around at the Infosys staff walking around on campus, especially in looking at the old-timers, I got a sense of confidence, well being, and a sense of purpose and even more so - of people having been around for a while. Because of Infosys’ presence in industry for over 25 years, there is an interesting demographic distribution – I saw many people in their 30s and 40s on campus, lots of women employees, and lots of Euro-American or Asian expats. Incidentally the Infosys internship program has been one of the most sought after program for international students in overseas universities looking at good experience and the ‘India flavor’ on their resumes. Infosys seems to get the urgent, burning need for cultural and conceptual diversity to drive innovation and that one has to create a global workplace IN India to foster that global diversity.
3. The Infosys focus on ‘care & nurturing’ areas, including the standardization of processes, the consistency of processes, the fairness of the compensation and career pathing, and above all, the diversity and imaginativeness of the food courts is noticeable. Among others, I noticed a world class bakery run by a Frenchman (try the cinnamon rolls and croissants there), and a plethora of breakfast and lunch options, all dished out at very subsidized rates and with the quickness that the Indian IT industry is famous for. Certainly no one goes to office to have great cafeteria food, but the extra soft touches were visible.
My ‘external-observer’ observation of all the designers, usability professionals and other ‘creatives’ I met at the pyramid was that most of them are the kind of people you’d like to have a great conversation with over coffee, and in general work with. There is a great deal of diversity within the group – from a chap who designs world class Annual Reports to a chap who redesigned Infosys’ award winning corporate Intranet, to a dedicated HR lady whose job is to keep the design staff inspired and motivated. The glasswork in the pyramid is also quite intriguing (though I hear complaints about the greenhouse effect!), and the rooms – named after luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Spielberg house posters, books and more books – always a peek into the minds of the founders of the design group.

Great thoughts and some vision that went into all this! I think more technology companies should take a leaf out of Infosys’ book in terms of some of the elements of its campus, its architecture, and of course its spanking cleanliness :-)