Elevator Communication

Here is in my opinion an excellent communication strategy in an elevator that has the company's logo on the button instead of the floor number. This helps guide the client in the elevator to the office as he or she does not have to remember what floor the office is on.

IKEA food branding

Here's a picture of IKEA's cups. The branding here is extremely simple, sweet and minimalistic and also very consistent with the rest of their branded food collateral. :)

IKEA low prices

IKEA is an extremely popular furniture store that amazes me primarily because of its low prices. The FOOD section's low prices is mind boggling to me. Naturally because the food actually tastes pretty good, sales are very good from the lines that are always long there. However I wonder how IKEA makes money off of selling hot dogs for 50 cents each if they do at all? What is their managerial accounting and business model like?

Tissue paper packets

Tissue paper packages in Asia tend to have cute characters on them, for example, the picture is one that my roommate from Taiwan gave to me. Sanrio sells tissue paper packets with character prints on the actual tissues within beautiful and adorable packaging. While in the U.S. it's more plain color or print patterns which are unfortunately to me are not as appealing personally. I was shopping at in store that holds independent designer products and found a tissue paper packet holder made of soft cloth (similar to soft tissue box holders that exist (I usually see them in Asian bookstores with characters like Totoro), so I bought one with a design print that I liked. :)

Here's an example of a soft tissue box holder in an Asian store!

International House Digital Newspaper

In the International House cafe there are three TV screens lined up next to each other on the wall where the condiments are. Each screen is turned vertically and displays that day's front page of a newspaper from different areas of the world. Like the last post's concept our professor taught us, the one shown has a Swatch advertisement, which compelled me to capture this picture and send it to my friend who was currently doing a group project on Swatch branding in case it might have been useful.

Innovation in the classroom curriculum

Last Fall I took a course called Corporate Social Responsibility Consulting. Haas emphasizes 'Leadership through Innovation', and our professor decided to be innovative and create a new exercise where we met outside the classroom and explored different parts and departments of the campus for ideas and contacts we might be able to use for our current consulting projects. We took note of contacts we found that might be useful for other group's projects as well as our own. The idea behind the exercise was to help us learn that we could find very useful resources outside of the business school in departments we never thought was related. I truly believe in this concept as different things can definitely be connected to each other and affect each other in ways people may not predict or imagine. He also related this concept to his friend designer who traveled throughout the world to observe what people are currently wearing and to get inspirations. (what fun!) This also reminds me of product management or design and market research and how important it is to be aware of the market and what is currently out there to stay competitive. I loved my professor for this because it was a very hands on, interactive fun and very different sort of typical business classroom exercise.

The pictures above are a couple samplings of contacts I found for either our group or other groups while exploring different building flyers and billboards.

UC Berkeley User Interface Workshop

Over the summer I took part in a workshop which was part of an initiative to improve the user interface for UC Berkeley websites where we went over the design process and collaborated in an effort to share ideas how to make the websites more efficient and more useful for the student body. The picture above show pin ups of each of our ideas, with post its to add and move around thoughts and comments. The pin ups also show scenarios and low fidelity prototypes addressing issues we talked about. Drawing scenarios and telling stories (storyboarding) is an effective way of communicating to others a user's need and situation to help designers understand and empathize with the user they are designing for. Post-its are so amazing for brainstorming and organizing ideas because using them helps keep collaborators more anonymous to encourage uninhibited idea sharing. IDEO uses post-its as a way to comment and silently vote on ideas (by placing post-its on the pin up ideas the designers like best).