#techyizu

Design - Designing for the passenger experience Richard Mullane, Senior Associate at Hassell

Richard, an urban designer was involved in landscape design for the Binhai transportation hub Tianjin in China. As people are moving from one city to another, it is important that different cities are accessible to get to. Occasionally, a passenger will transfer from high-speed rail to the subway to get to their final destination. Tianjin Binhai station are one of the stations that allows this transport interchange. The growth of both modes of transport are expanding rapidly.

Last Saturday was Shanghai Barcamp 2013, organized by Techyizu

Barcamp is an unconference - it's free to attend and anyone can sign up to give a talk or host a discussion.  I chose to speak about education reform, particularly about the need to reconsider how we think of the role of the student in education.  I hear a lot of talk about goals, standards, curriculum, teachers, but I don't hear so much about the students themselves.

I hosted two talks, 30 minutes each.  In the first, I shared a story and some opinions, then opened it up for questions.  In the second, I realized that my first talk, in its emphasis on transferring my ideas to the people present, was somewhat hypocritical to my message of reconsidering the role that students are expected to play in their own education.

( https://soundcloud.com/meiflower/education-reform-shbarcampmar2013 )

So, following the model of one of my favorite classes, I signed up for a second session where I opened with the question, "What makes a good student?"  I hoped that by starting fresh and building from our ideas of what components are important towards that end, we could gain some insight in how to promote those kinds of things.  We did not end up with any list of comprehensive categories, but we did come upon different ways to challenge the question itself and gained some insight in the process.

Feel free to add to the discussion :)

************************************

( I'm hoping to make a collection of this and future Barcamp talks: https://soundcloud.com/meiflower/sets/shanghaibarcamp )

Here are some resources that have been significant to the way I view education:

"Learning to Be a Sage"

Chu Hsi/ Zhu Xi

"Teach a Kid to Argue"

Jay Heinrichs

( http://inpraiseofargument.squarespace.com/teach-a-kid-to-argue )

"A Mathematician's Lament"

Paul Lockhart

( http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf )

"Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics"

Liping Ma

"Science is Play"

Beau Lotto, Amy O'Toole

( http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/26/science-is-play-beau-lotto-and-amy-otoole-at-tedglobal-2012/ )

"Blackawton Bees"

( http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/168#aff-1 )

Designing Shanghai 2012

If my week-days were busy, my weekends usually packed, literally. This last Saturday was no exception either. 

And since I have to dutifully record a journal for the school assignment, I might as well share this particular Saturday. If UX or creating human centered design is your thing, then the Designing Shanghai event might be in your alley of interest. 

Back by popular demand, this year UX Day Shanghai was held by Techyizu at the Haworth on 南京路1788号. This is one of those grass-root initiated event where designers, thinkers, hackers, students, and basically anyone who's interested in creatingbetter shanghai, get together and try to push for more design thinking for social impact.

The one-day workshop basically structured in two parts, morning talks by renowned innovative and design firms like frog,  IDEO, CBI China Bridge and Continuum sharing their insights, approach and methodology. Then followed by afternoon workshop where participants/teams are dispatched to do a city-wide research & rapid prototyping exercise, exploring solutions across digital, physical and service design. And upon returning to the venue, teams will synthesize their research, brainstorm solutions and create rapid prototypes to share with the rest of the group.

After successful initial prototype last year, we decided to focus this year challenge toward 'Social Inclusion' by ways of making Shanghai a better city for people with disabilities. 

I was mentoring on Design for Mobility, which basically focus on tackling the challenge around how the city infrastructure are generally not as friendly as it should be to those with physical disabilities. Navigating sidewalks, overpasses, public transportation access could be very difficult (if not damn near impossible) if one is on wheelchair, visually impaired or older than 50 years of age. 

Another design challenge that we were keen to tackle were: 

Elderly Care in an Aging Society (Shanghai population is getting older and there aren't enough attention being paid to its senior citizens) 

Designing for Special Needs in Education (think school and better education system for Autistic children, for example)

Employment for the Disabled (How to overcome the rampant discriminations over people with disabilities in China and give them an opportunity to have better lives)

The research locations were spread across the city; from newly erected space designed for disable persons, elderly house development, to school for autistic children, to metro stations (for mobility), to equal employment opportunities around pocket of districts in Shanghai (job centers), etc. 

The goal of the UX Day Shanghai is not to push any agenda to the decision makers, even though that would be ideal, but is more about creating awareness.  Believe you me, some teams actually came up with pretty decent (innovative), if not daring, recommendations that are worth exploring.

The key takeaway from this exercise, is not only to 'connect the dots'  but also for us to be more aware of the environment and the place in which we live in related to others and society in general.

Photos of Designing Shanghai Workshop

Organized by TechYizu, Designing Shanghai was the first prototype of User eXperience design challenge event in Shanghai, held on November 5th, 2011. 

The UX-DAY was a full day event in which participants are encouraged to tackle various design challenge around the city, from navigating the unique cultural phenomenon at Shanghai marriage market to road safety issues, from shopping experience to services at Chinese hospital, etc. 

There was a good mix of turnouts from both local and foreign talents, including the 11 year old boy wonder, Gilbert Chan a.k.a. the robot maker, as the youngest participant.

I was involved as part of the organizing committee with TechYizu,  as well as team facilitator/mentor on the d-day. My team, 上海民工 (Shanghai Worker), choose to tackle a design challenge that cover the UX in Chinese Hospital. Here's the presentation deck that the team put online and was chosen as Slide of The Day on Slideshare.