An Affordance Problem

For all interaction designers and also my dear geeky engineering friends from college, I found the bar for you: People 7.



Game Clue #1: Where is the front door and how do you get in it?

Game Clue #2: After one too many beers, how do you find an open bathroom in back and how do you open the door?

Your efforts will be well rewarded with Tube Wine and People’s Fingers.

Stuff that falls off the back of the truck

It’s cold here and I am embarrassed to say that I am a sucker for merino wool cable knit sweaters. In the United States, I treat myself to one or two sweaters a year, along with a few pairs of khakis, usually ordered from a catalog to accommodate my being vertically challenged. I’ve been avoiding the clothing stores on Fuxing and Nanchang Roads mainly because I fear that the salespeople will pounce on me and guilt me into buying by following me around and constantly barking out increasingly ridiculous discounts.

Well, I discovered where all my beloved sized 4P dark fatigue JCrew pants disappear to when they fall off the back of the truck. My standard issue crew neck sweater is 68RMB instead of $68USD. All these favorites are one-offs however, but complete with the expected JCrew, Ann Taylor, Esprit, Guess or Levi Strauss nametag. I had to sift through a large trash bag for sweaters in one store.

So it turns out that all these seemingly boutique stores on the main thoroughfares in the French Concession are selling a motley collection of western clothes. They all look the same. There is nothing to draw me more to one than another. They are all lacking identity, perhaps of their slightly illegitimate nature. Have the Chinese not discovered the power of consolidation and brand identity?

On my second day here, I wrote about going to the ‘Modern Electronics Store’ with Lisa where every vendor was selling the same array of cell phones and electronic gadgets. Buying the same cell phone from Stall #137 rather than #250 made almost no difference. It turns out that this phenomenon is the same everywhere for everything. Down the street from home is the flower market – fifty stalls all selling approximately the same flowers and flower arrangements – each flower individual wrapped in tissue paper?! Then there’s FuZhou Lu two subway stations away near People’s Square. Everybody on this street sells the same stationery and office supplies. Even the store fronts look exactly the same.

This makes me wonder about two things:

What happened to the small multi-faceted pedestrian communities that were self sufficient with their own bookstore, clothing store, grocery store and general store? Did these exist once upon a time only to be bulldozed to make way for giant apartment complexes, forcing retailers to relocate to these mega-markets of specialized goods that are all far away from each other? Or have specialized markets always been a way of life here?

Do the Chinese rather have their own business with a mishmash smorgasbord of goods rather than work for someone else as part of a larger retail business? Is the individual entrepreneurial spirit and sense of pride here so strong that prevents them from building bigger, more efficient businesses with consistent marketing and brand equity? I mean, seriously now, the tobacco and liquor store down the street also sells cashmere sweaters, just in case, on the spur of the moment, I wanted to buy a cashmere sweater to go with my bottle of scotch.

On that note, this is a big year for foreign retailers entering China. ToysRUs just opened up a store in Pudong and Best Buy has landed as well. I wonder how the locals will respond to the lack of opportunity to bargain in these big box retail stores.

'Will work for food' works

Last weekend Jesse, Christy (Jesse’s wife), Ela and I climbed HuangShan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui province. Escaping the gritty Shanghai air, we found ourselves at the foot of a UNESCO Heritage Site on Saturday morning after a 12 hour train ride followed by an hour long bus ride through the Chinese country side. I think we were all a little skeptical of this place, given that all the ‘trails’ are paved with stairs and that the Chinese sometimes wildly exaggerate things, like ‘Once you see HuangShan, you won’t want to see any of the other mountains in China’.

Well, the locals weren’t kidding. It was beauty overload. HuangShan isn’t just one mountain, but a mountain range, like the Rocky Mountains. And it is all accessible by foot. After getting to the top, we found a breathtaking scenic stop every few hundred feet or so along the trail. As Jesse pointed out, it didn’t feel like we were working hard enough to be rewarded with these magnificent scenes at every turn.

But we met a bunch of people who were working hard for their food along the trails. In order to feed and house hungry visitors at the top of the mountain, companies will hire porters to carry everything up and down the mountain. Mind you, there is a perfectly functional cable car system up this mountain – but it is STILL cheaper to just hire people to climb up and down the mountain with up to 85kg of stuff on their backs. So all weekend, we saw ‘li hai’ (very strong and fierce) porters carrying everything including eggs, vegetables, tired hikers, old mattresses, and dirty laundry up and down the mountain. At one point, we even saw six porters chanting and working together to carry a very heavy marble pillar up the mountain. I think it was also shocking and amusing to some of the Chinese visitors that we decided to hike up the mountain instead of taking the cable car, which we could obviously afford. The time of hard physical labor and suffering is still near and dear in the memories of the Chinese, so perhaps avoiding it as much as possible is a good thing. More photos of Huangshan.

In a country with many hands, everyone wants a job, no matter how small. This is a powerful workforce that can do great things. The fact that giving people jobs matters most also affects how things are designed, manufactured and serviced. Here are some associated observations:

1. Instead of laying down tile that is textured to prevent people from slipping on the trails at HuangShan, it is cheaper to pour concrete flat, and have people chisel in the texture afterwards.

2. Delivery of almost everything is free – from train tickets to my stir-fry tomato and egg lunch (which was already really amazingly decent at 50 cents). This harks back to my experience at IKEA as well. There are people outside clambering to help you take your furniture home and assemble it.

3. My favorite example out of Ted Fishman’s China, Inc: It is entirely possible to turn low quality leather into high quality leather for cheaper than buying high quality leather to start with, because you can hire people to cut out little patches of leather to fill in the holes exactly.

4. Why bother to sort out your trash into recyclables and ‘unredeemables’? Every other night, the dumpster gets overturned onto the road and bit by bit, different people come and sort out their specialty of recyclables. The cardboard guy will pull out the cardboard, the plastic bottle guy will pull out all the bottles – and both will make about the same amount of money as a government sanitation worker, with the added hope of building a bigger business on recycling.


On that note, in a future blog, we’ll share some thoughts on what many eager and skilled hands can do for bringing craft into mass manufacturing.

I'm a little teapot, short and stout

What happens when the old meets the new? Lynnette and I went out to Gome a few days ago to take a look at white goods designed for the Chinese market. Gome consists of four floors of home appliances ranging from cell phones to refrigerators to washers and dryers, though not your typical Best Buy or Home Depot experience.

I struggle here because no company has really designed for a certain room in the house holistically. Why can’t someone apply a consistent language across all the appliances in my kitchen so that my fridge, my microwave, my water heater and my stove element all look like they all belong in the same family? Part of this may be because appliances are still a new luxury for this market and there aren’t defined spaces for them yet in the house. A good example of this is that my washer is in the bathroom but my dryer is in the kitchen. Huh?

Among the masses of very cutely designed appliances (like the water filter that looks like a giant fruit of some sort), we found a few gems, like the space heater that looked like a giant electric fan. The electric kettle was definitely the winner though. Whereas most electric kettles are slim and modern looking, this Midea electric kettle references the old ceramic tea pots that go back thousands of years in Chinese history. In a traditional Shanghainese home furnished with traditional furniture, this electric kettle would look a lot less out of place!

Purchasing the teapot was another adventure. Everyone has to pay on the first floor. The salesperson gives you a slip of paper to take to the cash register, and while you pay, they go to the storage room to get you a fresh unopened box. After you have paid, they open the box for you and show you that all the pieces are inside. What is worthwhile to note is that Midea has leveraged this expected part of the purchasing ritual to build a box that sits like a regular flat box for shipping, but when opened, re-closes to form a sturdy handle for the customer who must carry it home. What a nice gesture of customer service! Reminds me of Fry’s Electronics but better – I mean, we were buying a tea pot, not an entertainment system!

For more photos from our white goods exploration:
WhiteGoods And Home Appliances Album

Glamour Girl Shanghai

This weekend was entirely devoted to discovering local Shanghai Glam. To kick it off, Anand (our superbly fantastic IDEO Boston business development director) invited Ela and me to his second party on The Bund in 48 hours. It’s good to know that our BD guys know how to schmooze, and have willing friends all over the world. So Friday night, I was instructed to dress in floral, and told that I would be liberally plying myself with some sort of champagne.

The Bund is a beautiful stretch of waterfront on the west of the Huangpu River, which was the waterway that turned Shanghai into a major port for foreigners doing business in China. Known as ‘Wai Tan’ to the locals, The Bund is home to a dozen or so beautiful European buildings that were erected by the French, Germans, British and Americans in the 19th and 20th century. By contrast, to the east of the river is PuDong (literally, river east), an ultra modern city of glass skyscrapers. After the Cultural Revolution, businesses started to set up shop on The Bund again and restore to it the 1930s Shanghai glam culture.

We arrived at Number 5 on the Bund and took the elevator to the top floor where The Glamour Bar is housed. The party was to promote Perrier Jouet, ‘champagne of the Belle Epoque’. The scene was a blur of very classy people who could dress, dance, drink, and socialize. Each guest was given a fresh corsage and the woman on the stage sang pieces from Bizet’s Carmen. With Anand’s help, we were introduced to some curious and interesting people, including a French film maker, an American party-planner, an Australian furniture importer, and an Italian hotelier. Yes, the world has descended upon Shanghai, to party. By midnight, Anand was still getting his party on, but being fish out of water compounded with jetlag, Ela and I started to wan a little, and hence the conclusion to a lavish night of high fashion and social life.

Cheers to not being hung over the next morning when my father came to visit me from Canada (via Hong Kong)! Since Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s former residence is within a stone’s throw of IDEO Shanghai, I spent an afternoon there with history-buff dad and learnt that my grandfather was a big wig in the Kuomingtang (National People’s Party), which started with Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution to rebuild China after the Ching Dynasty. Continuing the European Architecture Tour, we had dinner at the Ruijin Guest House in the middle of the French Concession, where Mao and his cronies used to stay and talk about communist politics in Shanghai. While it saddens me to hear that the Wu family home will be torn down to make way for new high rises, it is a small consolation to know that the local government has cared enough about these cultural gems to turn them into historical buildings. Preserving and celebrating the colorful past will make a great future Shanghai.

Photo of the weekend definitely has to be the boat with the giant LCD screen on the HuangPu River. I thought the giant LCD screen at Yu Gardens was odd but this one takes the cake. Looks like Shanghai has a pretty colorful future too!

One week later

Ela arrived to today. IDEO Shanghai says hello in this Google Video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6645470665746074953&hl=en

Soymilk and chrysanthemum tea have become standard beverages. A plate full of dumplings has become the standard lunch. At 2.5 yuan ($0.30 USD) each, I can buy the enough delicious egg tarts for 50 people for the cost of a light dinner in the US.

I wish to give everyone on a two wheel vehicle in China a large can of WD-40. The roads are noisy and treacherous and seriously freaky for most of us foreigners. As well, the locals probably think that horns are made for honking. What good is it to have a horn if you can’t honk it liberally at every corner?

The fuses in China are mostly solder fuses in a ceramic housing. No fancy components are required to restore power to your home other than a roll of heavy gage solder. I had the washing machine and the heat lamp on at the same time in the bathroom last night, and was rewarded by a power outage that went beyond my circuit breaker. But with a little bit of help and a lot of gesturing, I was up and running the next morning and taught how to fish as well.



The city is a tough place, but everywhere, there are people who are willing to help us navigate the intricacies. It’s all about knowing the right people here, and in particular, the well connected mavens like our IDEO-experience superwomen Jane, Lisa, Vivian and Shirley.

ZhuJiaJiao

On Sunday, Jason insisted on traveling to the outskirts of Shanghai butt early in the morning to visit ZhuJiaJiao (‘The Zhu Family Township’), a small canal town that seems much like China’s version of Venice. Having barely seen Shanghai, I was more than a little bit overwhelmed! We arrived at 8:00 am and met up with three other friends, including Kelly, a young woman from Texas who is fluent in Mandarin and Japanese.

Kelly, being blond but ironically the much more well-spoken one, ended up ordering a breakfast of dou nai (hot sweet soymilk) and you tao (Chinese donut) for me. It was freezing cold outside so the five of us quickly lapped up the great variety of soymilks and soups we ordered at a little place near the parking lot around the corner from a KFC. Yes, KFC is everywhere, but Kentucky Fried Chicken is apparently better here than in the states. Someone expressed to me that KFC is so prevalent here that many Chinese think that it originated in China!

As ZhuJiaJiao was once a very important town when Nanjing was still the capital of China, the locals have made it a point to preserve the charming architecture and bridges that span the canals. They’ve obviously capitalized on the tourism business as well, but since it is smaller than Hanzhou or Suzhou, the town has maintained its authenticity. Still populated with locals, the town has a traditional style ‘mansion’, pharmacy, post office, and tea house that are maintained as living museums. As we made our way through the tight streets and past the always persistent street vendors, we also found locals washing their clothing on stone tablets and drying fruits and vegetables under the sunshine, as they did in the Ching dynasty.

ZhuJiaJiao reminded me of two themes:

The conflict of the new and the old: China has hundreds, if not thousands of years of design history. ZhuJiaJiao represented Chinese traditional design at its best. However, as it establishes its global presence, China is trying to shed its tradition in favor of the modern. How is China integrating tradition with technology? How is China integrating tradition with modernity, if not at all?

Brand differentiation in an informal network: Every fifth stall in ZhuJiaJiao was a silk blanket store. What was strange to me was that they were all selling the same brand of silk blankets. Same thing with the food vendors. Same thing with the balloon shooting game stalls. If one store or vendor proves to be successful, a dozen more will spring up beside it doing the exact same thing. So how does one choose which vendor to buy a silk blanket from? Maybe brand is represented by the seller rather than as an abstraction represented by a company logo. Maybe I choose to buy from one silk vendor vs. another because I was referred to her by a friend. Trust and word of mouth credibility is of utmost important here where companies have very little brand equity.

More photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/shanghai.journey/ZHUJIAJIAODEC2

Thrive after the cultural revolution

The cultural revolution and the misdeeds of the gang of four are deep wounds that the older generation of Chinese continue to nurse. I was told that many Shanghainese like to cook three male crabs and one female crab together to represent boiling Mao Zhedong, and his three cronies Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and Jiang Qing.

Nevertheless, as difficult as it was for the lost generation during the Cultural Revolution, they are alive and well, albeit slightly bewildered. Friday night, Michael, Christine and I went to the Peace Hotel (Wo Ping Fan Dian) to watch the Old Jazz Band play. All in their 70s and 80s, these musicians sport my grandfather’s quiet demeanor but play jazz music passionately. Can you imagine an old Chinese dude in a tux, all straight faced, shaking his hips and playing the maracas? Christine and I suspect that when these musicians were forced to do farm labor during the cultural revolution, they must have buried their instruments in a hole, only to dig them up in 1978 to regroup in the Peace Hotel, where they have been playing ever since.

On Saturday, my good friend, expert linguist and electrical engineer Jason Yang came from Tokyo to visit me. It’s his first time in Shanghai but along with the other ten languages that he knows, he picked up Shanghainese in the last week or so in order to reconnect with his grandmother’s brother’s family here. I was invited along for what turned out to be a six hour long feast in a very traditional home, where the Wu family has been living for the last fifty years. Behind a huge high rise on Jiangsu Lu, north of the French Concession, the Wu family lives in a two story home . . . with five other families. This is becoming more and more rare as the developers push into the last remaining traditional residential areas. In fact, the Wu family’s home is about to be bulldozed in the next six months, to make way for a newer building. They won’t be compensated to move back into the area and thus are paying people to line up for days in their name in order to obtain housing the suburbs.

Middle Brother Wu and his wife hosted us in their two bedroom portion of the apartment. They live there with their daughter, who is my age. The bedroom is connected to the kitchen and doubles as the family room and the dining room. Eight of us (Jason, myself, Big Brother Wu, Middle Brother Wu and his wife, and Little Brother Wu and his family) all crammed around a little 3’X3’ table to enjoy a big feast of traditional boiled shanghainese hairy crab, steamed fish, fried shrimp, meat balls and vegetables. It took me about one hour per crab, and after three crabs, Jason and I realized that eating crab wasn’t necessarily about enjoying the crab meat, but about spending as much time as possible with family. Especially for Jason, he had fifty years of family history to catch up with. Out came photo albums, marriage certificates and family treasures during and after the meal.

Although our hosts Middle Brother Wu and his wife are probably about my parent’s age, it was clear that they were much more weathered. Middle Brother Wu was sent off to a farm in rural china and then to South Africa during the Cultural Revolution. This entire conversation started when rice was being served and he shared with us that he could eat 2 kg of rice in one sitting. Apparently that was all he had to eat during the 1970s and he needed the energy to carry massive 400 kg loads on his shoulders. We got a similar story about eating bananas in South Africa. Okay, maybe he was exaggerating at little. That’s very Chinese.

I think what surprised me was that as difficult life was and still is for the Wu family, they are one of the happiest and most loving families I have ever met. I could understand less than half of what they were saying (even with Jason translating to Cantonese for me), but their hospitality and open invitation to return contradicts my impression of Chinese paranoia and exclusivity, as realized by the many gates and doors to every home to shut out strangers, robbers and ghosts. With three generations sitting at the table, they enjoy each other’s company late into the night, are very accepting of the cultural difference within and outside of China, and embrace memorable experiences, like going to Zimbabwe. Yes, Mr. Wu really enjoyed Zimbabwe!

Somewhere inside that Mao suit, and the weathered soul of the older generation, there is a loving heart and passion for living.

Graffiti as advertising

Eddie, Andy, Michael and I went out to Arrk Dison this afternoon in southwest Shanghai to check out the 24 cosmetic models for a cell phone project. Arrk Dison is one of our major prototyping houses out here in Shanghai and certainly the main prototyping house for our most important cosmetic models.

It took us 45 minutes to get to the outskirts of Shanghai (somewhere between SongJiang and MinHang). In the middle of a more industrial area – Arrk Dison is sandwiched between an electronics factory and a fashion clothing factory, go figure. I came upon graffiti phone numbers liberally scattered on the walls of buildings and thought to myself, is everyone in Shanghai looking for a date?? Eddie explained to me that these are actually ‘advertisements’ by local people and companies. One graffiti number was for a truck driver. Another was for Arrk Dison’s prototyping services no doubt.

Arrk Dison just moved to a newly minted building. For the cosmetic models, they have a team of ten people each with their own desk and their own tools doing the ‘hand work’. At first glance, both Michael and I didn’t think the set up looked entirely professional, but these guys are bright and very much on top of their work. With 18 CNC machines and a space marked out for another 36, Arrk Dison is expanding like mad. We were all glad to be there today since with 2 sets of 12 models on the build manifest, we were bound to do something silly, like accidentally get the scale wrong. Michael wasn’t too pleased with the ‘retro brick’ cell phone model, but Arrk Dison was extremely accommodating, adjusting their schedule to start that model from scratch and still hit the deadline. Eddie, Andy and Michael have been visiting this team every other day, including weekends, and working with them to build these beautiful models with functional hinge mechanisms and keypads.

Fascinating stuff. Efficiency with a chinese bent.