Great holiday :-)

Click for more photos.

Illustration by Nerdski

Although a little too late for a Merry Christmas note, I do want to wish everyone Happy Holidays!

I’m taking a break and changing some stuff at the moment. Said goodbye to my apartment that was driven me nuts. Moved to a great new place, a little room in a lane house which I’m polishing up. Cancelled Chinese class which was eating up too much time. Stopped physical therapy which was getting too expensive. Picking those two up again next year though. But first, next two weeks will be off completely as I will be celebrating New Year’s eve in Cambodia! Followed by a couple of days of ‘lay-on-the-beach-and-do-nothing’: preparing for some serious relaxation!

In the meanwhile looking forward to 2010. Already thinking about some resolutions and stuff I want to do; a lot of exciting things! Perhaps a bit too much, but a little optimism doesn’t hurt anyone. For sure you will be seeing more happening online around me and Energize Shanghai in the next year. Got some cool ideas and projects coming up that I will publish here.

Happy new year and see you next year, when this blog will be more active! (ooh the promises.. ;-))

This post first appeared in Dutch on Marketing Tribune. Planning to translate my monthly column to English and post it on my blog. Mainly to have content for this blog which is becoming quiet lately (planning to change that, of course). Enjoy!

‘Mei banfa’, two magical words I stumble upon often recently. In English simply meaning ‘nothing to do about’, but in Chinese praised to an often used reaction that makes any problem disappear. Often pronounced while shrugging ones shoulders: ‘Phone broken? Mei Banfa.’, ‘Work overtime? Mei Banfa’. But since recently this expression is also used for something that mainly concerns foreigners in China.

From a million active members to a mere 14 thousand in just four months: Facebook China. The Chinese censors provide no explanation for blocking the biggest western social media sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook for months now. Previously websites where often blocked temporarily. The quiet hope that your favorite website would work tomorrow was on the mind of every foreigner in China.

That’s different now. The expectation that tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, your favorite sites work again is getting smaller. The complaints about the Chinese internet censors have changed. Everyone is used to not being able to tweet without some technical gadgets and a small amount of money. A disappointing ‘yes’ on the question of Facebook is still blocked, has changed to a shoulder shrugging ‘mei banfa’.

But now that the great firewall is reluctantly accepted, a much bigger barrier is seeing the light of day.

Last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced in its vision on Google in 2015 that ‘Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.’ In that same week the ICANN - the international organization behind domain names - announced that soon domain names can also contain Chinese characters. China has the most internet users, currently well over 100 million more than the U.S. According to Google most content will soon be in Chinese. And if its up to ICANN, this content will be accessible through Chinese domain names.

But not living in China you never stumble upon a Chinese website. The Chinese internet is an internet on itself. This will only increase by the introduction of - for western people - unreadable Chinese domain names. The growth of a Chinese language internet marks an end to the domination of an American ‘World Wide Web’. English focused internet users will have no clue what’s happening on the majority of the internet. A wall arises between the Chinese and the western internet that’s higher than the current great firewall.

China currently shrugs its shoulders for blocking a handful of American websites. But the real barrier are the characters that will soon arise on more websites than the Latin alphabet. ‘Mei banfa?’

Currently it’s the National Day Golden Week in China. Meaning that about 1 on 5 people in the world has holidays. Resulting in millions of people leaving the major cities to go back to their hometown. Instead of going back to my hometown, I’ve spend the past weekend in Anji. Together with some Chinese, French and Turkish people I left Shanghai to spend the weekend in a region known for its bamboo. While I read up about the region before leaving, how little did I know bamboo would be so omnipresent. We drank bamboo beer while eating bamboo dishes with bamboo chopsticks in a bamboo forest. Great fun :-) Some photos.


Science bamboo beer


Lighting a lantern with everyone’s wishes written on it for the Moon Festival


Relaxing


Walked all the way up here, and back


Eating nuts


Baijiu supplies ;-)


Housemates


Hotel view

All photos on Flickr

A week ago I paid a quick visit to Hong Kong. I had to change my tourist visa to a work visa, requiring me to leave China and re-enter with the newly acquired visa. I had never been to Hong Kong before and had high expectations picturing the iconic skyline. While the city wasn’t what I expected (more British, more tropical, less Chinese) it’s a cool place and the skyline is truly impressive. Some photos.



















All photos on Flickr.

Yesterday I wrote my first column for Dutch marketing magazine Marketing Tribune. I will continue doing so once every month. Writing a column is quite a challenge, as I experienced past few weeks. While it’s only a short piece, no more than 500 words, a mental struggle proceeds the first words on paper. It’s one of those things that is cool to do, but is also easy to procrastinate since the next deadline is always 4 weeks away. But the day before yesterday I decided to write about the China National Day, happening today. This gave me a deadline that was just 1 day away, instead of the original 4 weeks. I wrote the piece in a matter of hours and got it over with.

This reminded me of an article called ‘Timeboxing for Creative Professionals’ I read recently, saying “No matter how much time you have for ideation, you can always come up with a good idea.” While I didn’t set a timebox of 30 minutes - as the article points out - decreasing the time-span from 4 weeks to 1 day was enough to increase productivity. Last week I experienced something similar. I had one day to design a visual identity for an event that will take place very soon. I could have spend days or weeks going over sketches and draft designs, but as it turned out, I could also do it in one day.

Now that we deadline is 4 weeks away again, I could wait till the last day to create a short time-span or - preferably - set a short timebox a week in advance to work on it. I hope I will do the latter in 3 weeks or so.

As I promised earlier, I would keep you up-to-date about the progress of the new Energize office. It’s about a month ago I received the keys, in the meantime refurbishment and furnishing has finished. I think that having a good place to work is very important to being productive and enjoying your time in the office. After all, it’s where I and future employees will spend most of our day. Hence, I’m even typing this from my office while it’s already pretty dark outside. Some pictures.

Last weekend I did some street interviews for D4D, the initiative to design for the other 90%. Together with a Chinese friend we set out to interview street vendors, constructions workers and garbage collectors. Asking them about their daily life, what bothers them and - most importantly - how it can be improved.



Despite the fact that most of the people asked did not want to be interviewed (not to mention shoot a video of them), we where able to conduct some interesting ones. While we have the best intentions to help them, it seemed that the people interviewed didn’t really want to be helped, or did not want to express this as such. Whether it is a matter of ‘losing face’ to talk about their life to people who are not disadvantaged or whether it’s their natural shyness, I don’t know.

My friend reminded me of the saying “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”. Designing ‘something’ for the disadvantaged is great, but what do they really need? They mainly complained about the police (street vendors are not allowed) and the weather (past month has seen lots of rain). And in their opinion, there is nothing to do about it. The goal of this user centered research is to find out what really helps them, tailored to their needs. While I truly believe that design can change lives, after doing these interviews it became apparent to me that providing them with a newly designed tool might not be the holy grail.

Have a look at the video interview with a popcorn vendor (in Chinese though):