Since fashion stores offer a wide range of clothing, they are often full of dust. I find many visitors leave stores because their eyes turn red. I recently found a fashion store with low dust level. Differently from other stores, it hung the whole clothing over the ground and maintained the floor clean. It was very comfortable for me to stay inside, I ended up buying a few jackets and, more importantly, I want to revisit this store. When the store is dust free, more visitors stay longer and they may spend more.
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Rooftop presentation of Seoul history
I attended an interesting event at the Art center Nabi in Seoul. At this event, Robert Fouser, Associate Professor of Korean Language Education at Seoul National University, introduced the history of Seoul with a series of his own black and white photos of Seoul. His Korean-speaking presentation impressed me deeply; his photos remind me of my own student life (e.g., highways and Soju bottles).
More importantly, I noticed from his presentation that he love Seoul and spend much time on discovering my home town, while I pay attention to my second home town, Toronto. Thanks to his presentation, I came to open my third eye and, academically speaking, be mindful to enjoy the present moments in this city. Making familiar things unfamiliar will be the biggest role that artistic events could do to us.
I also learned that the Art center Nabi is worth visiting; it is located at the center of Seoul and had a 15 year history for supporting artists. The website says,
“Art Center Nabi aims to act as an intermediary that transforms the cultural desires into vital activities. Our goal is formed around the idea of humanizing technology that technology is fully integrated with human’s cultural life to open a new space for creative practices. This can be achieved only after the fruitful collaboration and understanding among science technology, humanities and arts. Thus, Art Center Nabi maintains the following three ideas; being a ‘critique’ of contemporary culture independent from technological benefits; possessing ‘creativity’ which opens people’s mind to regard a new perspective and enables a new form of expression; creating ‘community’ where these ideas are shared and the new world is dreamed of. Art Center Nabi is at the center of this new culture, where artistic sensibility is combined with the technological possibility to bring out the power of change and creativity.”
Value of Writing Design Briefs
Our intuition is that we should create design briefs collaboratively. Our study showed that the very act of writing a brief, improves concept performance by twenty percent on average, while, already top performing designers achieve a twenty five percent performance enhancement from brief writing. Studies at Stanford Center for Design Research show that investing time in writing a superior brief can increase performance up to an additional thirty percent over average performing briefs…
Apple logo-shaped fried rice
I ordered a fried rice after having BBQ at a local restaurant in Korea. Interestingly, She first shaped the fried rice like an apple and then placed a small fried cake on top to make it look like the Apple logo. (What if I am a fan of MicroSoft? :)) Strong brands such as Harley-Davidson and Nike seem to induce people to express their brand loyalty aggressively (e.g., tattoo). Soft brands such as Apple, however, seem to nudge their fans to express their brand loyalty more creatively or softly.
Traffic light labels help us drink less wine
People often do things while drunk that they regret when they sober up. Opening expensive wines is one of them. In order to solve this problem and, more academically speaking, to overcome the hot-cold empathy gap (proposed by George Loewenstein), I adopted traffic light system.
I place red sticky notes on the definitely expensive wines that I should NOT open while drunk. Yellow sticky notes go for the relatively expensive wines that I stop and, hopefully, think once more while drunk. Daily wines have no sticky notes. Thanks to this simple traffic light system, I regret less in the morning. 🙂