Japanese draw, Chinese speak, and Koreans write. This is my temporary conclusion about how people communicate in three countries. I *suspect* Japanese draw because they intend to help readers understand messages correctly (receiver-oriented), Chinese speak because they find typing Chinese characters difficult (sender-oriented), and Koreans write because these two reasons do not apply (message-oriented, maybe).
Since Japanese like drawing, cartoon is frequently spotted in Japan. At one train station in Fukuoka, for instance, cartoon boards say that people should not throw away cigarette butts, riders should not sit down with their legs spread, women should not put up cosmetics in the train, and riders should not open up their newspaper wide.
Although cartoon is easy to understand, I wonder whether cartoon works for Chinese listeners or Korean readers.
Taipei is hot in summer. After sweating an hour, I ordered an iced coffee at 羊毛與花 Youmoutoohana Coffee. To my surprise, it served me a glass of coffee with a metal straw. After sipping coffee through it, I became a huge fan of metal straw. This summer, I will buy and bring a few metal straws to office with me to enjoy coffee more and consume plastics less.
I keep these in my tote bag (if you are worried about them getting dirty, I suggest a pencil pouch), and whip them up out whenever I’m at a coffee shop. Once at Starbucks, a talkative barista commented on my straw. “Hey, I’m with you,” he told me. “You’d hate to work here. You see how wasteful people are from behind this counter.” I’ll be gifting them to all of my friends for World Oceans Day on June 8.
Thai designers make interesting experimentation. At a department store in Bangkok, I found several stationary items and kitchen utensils designed by Qualy, seems to be a local Thai design company. Although this company introduced a series of interesting products including owl-shaped salt and pepper shaker or bear-shaped one, the most interesting one is mushroom-shaped magnetic.
Shiitake is a mushroom native to East Asia and consumed in many Asian countries. It is considered a medicinal mushroom in some forms of traditional medicine. Qualy website says,
Shiitake magnet Make sure you don’t put these in your soup. They are actually mushroom shaped magnets. And not just any mushroom, they are shiitake mushrooms, to remind you to seize opportunity. Just place them on any metal surface to secure your notes. It’s like picking mushrooms from a field each time you remove a magnet.
Although I do not know why shiitake mushroom is related with seizing an opportunity, the form is certainly eye-catching and attractive enough to open wallet.
In Shenzhen, China, people ride bicycles almost for free because bicycle sharing companies such as Ofo (yellow) and Mobike (orange) compete each other aggressively.
Thanks to the competition, renting and returning bicycles is extremely convenient. When I subscribed Mobike, I could use app to search for available bicycles nearby. When I met a lonely bicycle on a street, I simply scanned its QR code to unlock and ride it. When I finished my trip, I parked it anywhere I wanted and then scanned its QR code one more time.
Certainly, aggressive competition raises numerous problems. For instance, some bicycles are broken, others are dirty, and the others are even dumped out in the woods! However, competition solves a challenging problem that other bicycle friendly cities failed to address, that is, bicycle theft. Since bicycles are for free in this city, no one is interested in owning or stealing them. A sharing economy, when it truly comes true, could change how we value a product or service.
Psychologists have long claimed that people do not know the value of a product or a service. Instead, people shape their preferences on the spot. For instance, when Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec asked 146 U.C. Berkeley undergraduate students whether they wanted to attend a free poetry recitation, the percentage of respondents willing to attend the free poetry recitation was 35% when they had first been asked if they would pay to attend the recital, but only 8% when they had first been asked whether they would attend the recital in exchange for pay. As written in the Mark Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer, Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”
This paper challenges the common assumption that economic agents know their tastes. After reviewing previous research showing that valuation of ordinary products and experiences can be manipulated by non-normative cues, we present three studies showing that in some cases people do not have a pre-existing sense of whether an experience is good or bad-even when they have experienced a sample of it.
