Solar Powered Billboard

Posted on July 13th, 2007 in Design, Innovation by Puneet Sarda

Came across this post on Trendhunter about a solar powered billboard. Quoting from their site

South Africa’s NEDBank won a Cannes Lions 2007 Grand Prix Award in outdoor advertising for what is believed to be the world’s first solar-powered billboard. The topper? This revolutionary billboard uses the power it generates to power the kitchen of a local school - helping prepare food for 1100 kids.

Now that’s a bank that truly gives “power to the people” - and that’s a billboard that not just is the world’s first solar-powered billboard, but a solar empowerment tool!

Brilliant as the African sun!

Check out the video below



I found a true example of an innovative solutions. We have 1000’s and 1000’s of billboards all around us and all they do is stand on the ground day and night. Yet it has taken so many years to come up with this idea to put solar panels on them to generate electricity even though the solution (now that you think about it) was right in our face all the time. 2 Thumb’s up to NEDBank for doing such a humane act

Is Design just eye candy?

Posted on June 19th, 2007 in Design, Opinions by Puneet Sarda

Jess McMullin has an interesting post on his blog bplusd where he asks “Why is it that design focuses on surface elements?”. Read his post for all the details but in summary he puts forward 2 hypothesis as possible reasons for this :

First hypothesis: the design of surface elements acts as a prototypical category for design as a whole.

Second hypothesis: the volume of professional work across levels of design maturity means that there is relatively little framing and problem solving compared to style, form, and function.

For the first one he argues that as surface elements are easier to observe and experience, its likely to associate design with it. I thought of elaborating a little on this hypothesis. We see a lot of print/video ads and most of them are about glossy pictures and hot models showing off some product. There would be terms like “sleek design” thrown in and hopefully we will find some list of “features” etc. But that is the gist of how most products are introduced to customers. Few companies give sufficient weight to ,among other things, usability and simplicity in the initial ads. The immediate motive is to capture user attention with cool videos and pictures to make them look at the product and hopefully think about it.

Even when we browse websites , especially e-commerce websites, its the big product picture on the page that catches your attention and features are somewhere below or worse a link away. I think, we as designers, should pay attention as to how the customer gets educated about design? How do they build the perception of design as Jess describes it? Why is it that when they want to work on their products, revise them, modify them…they think more about “eye candy” and less about the other aspects of a mature design. Of course not all of us can be designers but its really important as a company to decide what kind of a perception of design are we building for our customers. Much has been said about the Ipod but the point I want to highlight is it was after Ipod that people started talking about “simple clean design”. Apple brought that vocabulary to a huge audience and over a period of time people were striving to have that ideology in their product design as well as tout it in their ads.

This kind of leads to the second hypothesis that yes there are lots of work for styling etc… as thats what the customer’s perception has been. Even if we as designers try to convince them otherwise and propose better ways to solve the same problem, without a good understanding of “What is good design” companies won’t be motivated to go beyond the styling.

I think as designers we need to educate our customers while we work with them as they come to us for the simple reason that they believe we know more about design than them. It’s this gentle touch of coaching your client that can make a great difference and help them better understand the idea of good design. Of course we should ourselves be sufficiently “design mature” in the first place but I think its such designers that companies would stick to once they see the benefits over time of well designed products instead of prettied up tools.

What do you think about these issues? Feel free to leave your comments

The Power of Abundance

Posted on February 22nd, 2007 in Design, Usability by Puneet Sarda
Remember 2001/2002 when we used to have 6 MB capacity for our email accounts from Yahoo or maybe 10 mb from Hotmail. We used to screen every email, every forward and every attachment to decide if it was worthy of being in the inbox or could be trashed right away. Many of us used to save all the attachments to our local drive and get rid of the emails. Even though it was slow to download them on a dial up it was worth it if the forwards were good. And it was necessary anyways or else your account would full up. The capacity progress bar would go from green to orange to red and you knew it was time to clean up.
Yahoo Mail in 2001
And then came Google with Gmail with 1 GB of email space!! Something no one had ever imagined. We were amazed wondering if they can really do that, do they have the capacity to store so much email. Gmail was by invitation only so soon people were selling invites on Ebay, friends were requesting each other to invite them etc… And if you were one of those who want to never delete an email…there was archiving for you. Within a year Yahoo announced that it will raise the capacity to 1 GB and paid accounts will have 2 GB. Hotmail, Inbox.com etc joined in later.

Gmail Capacity in use today for one of my accounts
Suddenly we all got used to so much of email capacity. We could now store thousands and thousands of emails without worrying about … well anything. They are going to be there as long as we want. Sheer abundance of space had changed our very perspective to email… we began to use it much more, realized that it appeared much more convenient that it did before and we could stick to one or two accounts instead of having to manage 5-7 accounts just because of capacity issues.

Abundance showed what its really capable of in a way it never has. Email capacity got transformed from a luxury, a sacred and scarce resource to something that we no longer concerned ourselves with. We now had the time and energy to concentrate on the actual details of the email, on our businesses and personal lives. Imagine the number of man hours saved each year by stopping people from having to worry about email capacity. With reference to my post on “The Feels Good Factor”, email had now turned into something that felt good to use, something that did its job and bothered you no more with unnecessary concerns.

Technology should be enabling and that is what email became. Enabling us to focus on the problem at hand rather than the mode of communication used to talk about that problem. The providers did end up installing huge servers to address the new capacity needs but to make the business going fine did a few things to stop the users from going crazy with the large capacity they had. One was to restrict the attachment size to 10 MB thus stopping us from emailing large movie or music files. If you wanted to share video or music you had YouTube and Google Video among the other numerous options. The other was the ability to archive emails. That saved quite some space on the servers and yet the users always had access to all their emails.

What other technologies you believe brought abundance to your life and helped you stop worrying about them? And in what domains do you feel abundance needs to step in and relieve you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

The “Feels Good” Factor

Posted on February 17th, 2007 in Design, Usability by Puneet Sarda

There are a number of things we do just because it “feels good” to do them. Recycling waste, smiling at your colleagues at work or catching up with friends on a weekend are just some of the examples. These and many other activities might have other reasons why you would do them but if you think about it for a minute… you do feel good after having completed them.Isn’t it a good experience to share a favourite movie scene or hum the lyrics of a mutually admired song? You can spend quite sometime recalling your college days and make jokes about your professors, discuss some of the cool ads you have seen lately or the tasty food you had last time you were at a restaurant.

The point I want to make is that People talk about what makes them feel good. And they don’t mind talking about it over and over again. Actually if it’s something that makes them feel really good…you will have a hard time stopping them from talking about it. Even people who crib all the time do talk about the few things that make them feel good.

But how many things out there really make us feel good. Everyday we interact with so many devices, gadgets, websites, applications and tools. But do you end up talking and I mean talking with full passion about even 25% of them. Probably not. With technology creeping into every nook and corner of our life, there should be many such experiences which make us feel good by making “life easier” but that does not seem to happen. We all have devices that do a lot but don’t most of them end up making you feel like you aren’t doing a lot just because you use the device for your basic needs. And the countless “frustrating” experiences you have as you use the different softwares on your computer.

I believe a product should be designed to make the audience feel good about using it. To make the experience enjoyable, something they recollect with pleasure and share with their friends and family. Google and Ipod have been talked to death about this so I thought let me pick some other examples.

Kayak.com is a simple example. It finds airlines from about 15-20 sites and brings them on a single page with options to restrict based on cost, arrival/departure time, number of stops etc… So you no longer have to search on so many sites to find the best deal and you can make ur decision quickly. It saves you a lot of time and you feel great not good about it.

Windows Live Map Search is another example. If you instal their virtual Earth plugin, you can navigate cities in 3D using your arrow keys or your XBox controller. You can fly like a superman over streets. But more importantly, you can travel around in a city just as if you are driving around. So if you are going to a new place, this gives you the opportunity to familiarize with roads and landmarks so your real trip would be much more comfortable. Feels Good :)

Feels Good is the extra gesture you did for the user without he asking for it. He probably wasn’t even thinking about it but now that you offered he loves it. Its the perk of using the product and the perk goes a long way in making a loyal customer.

What was the last thing you used that made you feel good and what about it made u feel good? what made you feel worse? Post your experiences in comments.