Is it almost over?

Been asking that question for a while, now. Time has passed really quick for this second term, I barely remember what I did in March—it went so fast!

Okay, let’s start with the second trade fair. I still have my freedom of speech, right? No one is going to sue me for cursing? Y’all know how straightforward and true I am to any given situation, right? I ain’t going to jail for expressing my mind? Ok, good, here goes.

It. Was. Hell.

It was windy, and freezing, and ineffective, and inefficient, and terrible, but knowing the positive cheerful nature that I am, of course I’m going to talk about the sunny part! (sense the sarcasm)

It should have been inside a building the whole time. That’s all I’m saying. We shouldn’t be forced to stand outside for three freaking hours and then moved to a much warmer room where we could have been the whole freaking time. If the purpose was to get the uni passerby to come to our stand and interact with us, just have it in the canteen, or building halls, or a designated room where flyers/signs/any form of communication design is printed or showed digitally to direct passerby towards that particular room. BOOM. That’s it. That was freaking it.

But hey, we got a nice picture, so…

Congratulations for Fli and Touch for winning some awards during the second trade fair, btw! You guys did well :)

Moving on… Final dragon’s den awaited us a week after our trade fair. So… work, work, work!

Yeah, that’s right. We worked hard. The day before. Nahhh…

We were in the middle of designing our business report in the library that day and Michelle asked if she can join us, because in her own words, she’ll watch Japanese tv shows on her bed if she didn’t go to the library and start working on her tasks. (That’s right, M, I’m spilling out beans about my friends here in my blog! *evil smirk*)

She came and, yep, she managed to get things done. Afterwards, we went for late dinner, just the two of us, and I remember exactly what she said,

“I like working with you guys today.”
“Oh, that’s good. Why did you say so?”
“Because you guys like one another. You all joke around much… but you get things done too. The atmosphere was just… nice.”

That made my day.

***

So… The final Dragon’s Den has finally arrived! We practiced and surprise, surprise, I volunteered to be the preggo mum. Never been pregnant, never had close family/friends who were pregnant when I was around, only equipped with my High School theatrical acting experience, and boom! There I was, wearing my PJ with preggo belly. Oh. Well. One for the team.

But we were extremely lucky that night. We were supposed to pitch in room A (as you can tell, I already forget the actual room number, so let’s just replaced it with A and B), and from the previous groups who have done their presentation in room A, the judges were not in a good mood. It was the “scary room”, and we were the last group that night. All five of us were really calm before, but boom, all of a sudden, serious face, serious game on.

We went upstairs 10 mins before we were called, and when we arrived, Corrine looked at us and said, “Oh, I was about to call you guys. I’m going to allocate you to room B instead, because they’re still going in room A and there weren’t supposed to be any group in room B at this time.” (Because the total was 7 groups, divided by 2 rooms, you do the math).

I turned around and saw the biggest smile, mixed with genuine surprise, in Aleem’s and Kaitlin’s face. Jonas and Britt looked like they just got hit by confidence boost out of nowhere and just walked into the room without looking back. And we… did well. We did really well. So well that we were one of the top 6 groups that had the best pitch? I guess. It wasn’t clear. (Finally! We won… something!) Whatever. But that explained these photos. We had to pitch in front of everyone for three minutes (out of seven!), and then the judges picked two teams to continue to the next step/competition in Manchester.

But of course, Fli won and they’re going to Manchester! Again, congratulation, guys!

and last but not least, our baby Ella!

So… what now? Dissertation?

Couldn’t I just have my usual MACE Friday routine back?

Till then,
vania

Me? Leading?

Hey-o good people!

Before I start rambling, and while I still have the privilege of your full attention, let me thank each and everyone of you who voted me as one of MACE’s Top Bloggers 2014-2015! I am so grateful, I can’t believe I won, I really didn’t expect anything to happen… and I want to thank my family and friends, colleagues, followers, supporte… oh, hang on. This is my Grammys speech. Ok, never mind.

See how my imagination run oh-so-wild? I told ya’ I barely know what’s going on in my head. Anyways. Moving on. Okay. What am I writing today? Oh yeah. Leadership.

We have had a couple of leadership and management class lately and as always, I want to share those moments with all of you.

Yeah. MACE is a serious course. Like seriously. We got Donald Duck and stuff.

On Friday, Miguel asked us to imagine how the future leadership style would be like. I happened to sat down with 5 lovely classmates, Alisa, Jason, Asia, Michelle and Yi Xin. Most of us agreed that in an ideal leadership, there should still be some sort of hierarchy. In my mind, that would give clarity to most things—from task delegation to making decisions for the group’s future direction. The more we talked about it, the more it seems like a “role” that can be “played” by any of the group members rather than a traditional hierarchy.

Are you familiar with the “talking stick”? To quote wiki,

The talking stick, also called a speaker’s staff, is an instrument of aboriginal democracy used by many tribes, especially those of indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. The talking stick may be passed around a group or used only by leaders as a symbol of their authority and right to speak in public.

Well now, imagine a leadership stick! Literally—it will make things easier.

It would be an ideal situation for me if we can pass around the leadership stick while working in groups. Everyone has the same chance to lead, to follow, to contribute and to listen. It’s all about balance.

Miguel asked us to transform our discussion into drawings—Asia mentioned King Arthur’s table, thus the inspiration for our exceptional art pieces:

Yep, of course Jason wrote his name down. Of course he was the one holding the sword.
Of course he drew the random red-coloured-trap-door on the floor.

And of course Michelle drew that unicorn. She’s obsessed.

One thing I pity, though, is that we didn’t talk much about personality, character and culture. Cause those things do play a big part in turning someone into a leader. What if someone is naturally introvert? Will someone extrovert always make a good leader? Can one be an outgoing introvert—or a quiet extrovert? What happen if someone who is not comfortable leading, pushes one self to lead? Will they make a good leader?

This class left me asking more questions, though. Will co-leading work that well in the future? When I own a company later, should I share my leadership with everyone in my team? Won’t it be messy?

You have to trust someone big time in order to do this co-leading thing. One has to trust the others that they will play their role as a leader right, one has to try to listen, one has to try to follow, one has to compromise. That… could be very, very difficult for some people. Letting go all control, and giving it to someone else who—in your head—might not be as capable as oneself. That might lead to one’s ego and dignity—see how far this can go on?

Nevertheless, my brilliant classmates came up with tons of different ideas about visioning future leadership—that would be best described with pictures. Enjoy!

Till then,
vania

and the winner is…

We attended the Bright Ideas judging night final event yesterday, and a BIG congratulation is in order for… Fli!

So very happy and proud of Olga, Sam, Michelle, Irene and Felix!

Sorry for the blurry pictures, I was sitting on the top row!

The overall event was great. However, I talked to a couple of people, and if we could have one criticism—and we do—it would be the transparency of the event that night.

Let me start from the beginning.

On our way back from Wales (see my previous post), my group members all received an email saying that we were the finalist for Bright Ideas. Having mixed feelings between excited and a bit worried because we left our prototype in Wales with our manufacturer, we did our best to create another prototype, just for this event, in approximately 8 days. Money and time was invested, and expectations were build that we were going to attend this event to do the pitching workshop with the others, then pitch our product to the judges, and then wait for the judges to nominate the winners. Little did we know, it wasn’t what they (Bright Ideas) have planned for Wednesday to be.

 

So this was the pitching workshop—which was good—we did practice our pitch to strangers and exchanged feedbacks. But what we didn’t know was that, in my own words, the pitching workshop was some kind of a manoeuvre for groups who did not get the “special email”. I may sound very negative in this post, but honestly, I am sincerely happy for all the winners—I am just disappointed in the process. Bear with me.

So the real finalists get a special email saying that they were going to pitch in front of the judges, during the pitching workshop where all of the “other finalist” will be, but it would be best not to spread the words about it.
a. Why make it so secretive?
b. Then why did we even receive an email saying that we were a finalist, when we aren’t?

If only they had told us from the beginning, that our group was, lets say, made it to the big 20 but not as a finalist, and that we all should come to the judging night on Wednesday, where there is going to be a pitching workshop etc—hey, we would still have come anyway! We are not kids who needs to be manipulated by sweet talk in order to get something done. Just tell us the truth and we’ll get it—we’re grown ups.

But now, because our expectations were not met, I highly doubt and questioned Bright Ideas’ integrity for hosting this event. Does it not occur to them that some of us may have put extra efforts and may have sacrificed other important things just to come to this event on Wednesday night?

Being a firm believer of freedom of speech—and counting on serendipity—I approached Dennis Aguma, the president of Kingston Entrepreneurs, whom I met and befriend with from previous event. I told him what I had in mind, and surprise, surprise, he said I was not the first person who talked to him about this. Then he said he would definitely bring this up to their review meeting. So, finger crossed, Bright Ideas will have a better procedure/transparency for their next events.

Hopefully this tiny gesture may encourage and inspire others to speak up their mind when they are not happy about something.

Other than that, it was a good set of events, it surely did encourage and support future entrepreneurs, and again, big congratulations for all the winners!

Till then,
vania

Hello, Wales!

Our first “business trip”, ever!

Kaitlin was the one behind the camera, so yeah, of course she was there too!

So, Little Steps decided to pay a short site visit to our potential product manufacturer, AJM Sewing Factory, in Wales last weekend. Established in 2001, AJM is a British Manufacturer specialising in manufacturing lingerie and swimwear. However, they also do prototype and sample making.

Upon our arrival, we were greeted by the kind and helpful AJM Director, James Meller. We have sent them our prototype right after Dragon’s Den, and he was optimist that they could actually produce Ella! He was kind enough to gave us a quick tour around the factory though we know he is a very busy man.

They had a lot of stations, and by the look of it, they are handling lots of different projects at the time. Compare to the complex garments they are currently producing, I believe producing our product would be as easy as spreading butter to your toast on a hangover. Not really sure why I used that analogy, but, oh well.

Again, I love taking pictures and explaining things visually—since I am a visual graphic designer (nah, that’s just an ego boost). So here are some pics!

Till then,
vania

Trade Fair

Well, hello!

Wishing everyone a good start for their 2015! I know I have. I always like this holiday season—Christmas and New Year—particularly New Year, because somehow it implicitly mark a new start, a new beginning. I know, we can always start something new any time of the year, but leaving 2014 and welcoming 2015 kinda makes it official. Fresh start, new resolution (making it more realistic each year), and new energy to kickoff has always helped me to start a new year with the right attitude.

Anyway, we just had the Trade Fair last Thursday, and it was great! I got to see other groups’ amazing display and their work-in-progress. And for us.. Too bad the audience there wasn’t our target audience, but we did manage to get lots of feedback and practice how to sell our product. Here are some pictures:

Yeah, we’re actually a group of five girls and two boys

By doing this Trade Fair, it made me realise that in every group, each member has different talents which they can contribute and make the most out of. When we delegate the right job to the right person with the right skill, we are going to get great results. In order to do that, we have to know ourself, and we have to know our group members too. What is our (and other’s) strength and weakness, and how should we go about it. I can’t be more thankful to have such an amazing and supportive group, who work together really well.

Here are some more pictures because, well, a picture is worth a thousand words—which makes this post… a 159,000 word post.

I  hope everyone else also had fun (on top of making money!), and excited to grow their business even further in the future.

Till then,
vania

 

Dragon’s Den

 

Excuse me for these poorly taken pictures, but hopefully it gives you just enough visual of how Dragon’s Den looked like last Friday.

It was a good session, but to be perfectly honest, personally, I don’t think we got enough constructive feedbacks—we just got criticised. However, I don’t feel the need to linger on how our presentation went, but more into finding out how we should go about it now.  That means more brainstorming, reading, research, group meetings, and another set of brainstorming.

The single most important thing that keep on bursting into my mind from doing all this—having our own business and stuff—is that you have to devote your time 24/7 to your business. You’ve got to be extremely passionate in what you’re doing—or else, your business will still grow, but it will grow terribly slowly. So a quick tips for those who are thinking about being an entrepreneur, it definitely means you will wake up, eat, think, talk, listen, research, sleep and dream about your business. It will happen, trust me.

Alright, I’m gonna sound like a philosopher-wanna-be now. For everyone in #MACE14, don’t give up. Failure is part of the journey. Learn from our mistakes. We all have to go through this downfall in order to get back up and find our dynamic. Quoting one of my favorite underrated animated movie, Meet The Robinsons, keep moving forward!

Introducing Little Steps, and our very first product, Ella!

 

 

Ella’s first prototype 16/11/14

Ella’s second prototype 5/12/14

Any comments, feedback, ideas in any form are most welcome! Leave comments or, well, any social media will do.

Till then,
vania

Some tips and tricks

How to get money for your business:
– Investors
– Crowdfunding
– Business angels
– Grants

Some tips from the (finance guys) panel:
– Don’t wait till your product is perfect. Get market feedback.
– Common mistakes are: getting evaluation wrong and lack of competitor analysis.
– Patent your 3D Object: take a picture, design a logo, seal, make it official.
– Don’t underestimate the time to raise money

Elevator Pitch
– Make sure your audience understand what you’re talking about
– Introduce yourself
– Explain objective/purpose
– Define problems
– Convince
– Be clear
– Explain why YOU should be the one doing this
– Solution
– Advantages
– Be money specific

More information check out Mace Kingston ‘Designing a business’ blog.

Business Plan and Business Module
Business Plan = It’s a map. It’s like your car.
Business Module =It’s the engine for your car

User-Centred Business Canvas

Personas keep the customer as the center of your business. This is a great technique to be unbelievably specific of your target market, and narrow your product’s vision and mission down to the their exact need.

Tips and Tricks from Rob Grundel
– User experience is crucial
– How can we communicate our product message to our audience? Story. By creating a story, we create a bridge that communicate empathy, experience, feeling, knowledge and visual imagery.
– “How well do you know your own story?”—A question to ponder at the start of your entrepreneurial journey.

Story is personal. What’s driving you? Why is it driving you? What do you value? Know your: Why, How, What.

– Ad agency can make a very good “why” for companies, making “profit”—as the standard answer—almost invisible.
– When you commit both feet, it will lead you to an ally.

Brand and their stories
– How do they get consumer? What attracts the consumer? Brands want you to tell their stories. Earned media.
1. Origin
Where does this business come from?

2. Product
What is the product/service they offer?

3. Consumer
Who is the target market?

In order to walk from “Me” to “We”, from “Why” to “What”, a business target audience need to see themselves in the product/brand/business itself.

happy monday,
vania

Three Fridays

Hello good people.

Sorry for being idle for a while, but on this post, I’m going to update everyone with what has been happening for the past three weeks.

We are currently in reading week now, I’m in the Knights Park LRC, and yet, it literally feels like reading week because… everyone is here! So… I guess everyone is diligent, everyone follows the rule, then? If it’s reading week, it’s really reading week? (Quick reality check: you are also in the library, writing this blog, while someone is in Paris, traveling to Germany and Amsterdam—yes I’m talking about you, Kaitlin, if you’re reading this—sigh, reading week it is, then).

Shall we.

Friday, 17 October 2014

We went to Frieze Art Fair, with one agenda in mind, to answer this question for our formative essay: Why—even at the age of virtual reality—these fairs are crucial for their respective industry?; and to see art, of course. *cough*

Before jumping to the answers, let me explain what Frieze is. Frieze Art Fair is a contemporary art event held annually, allowing more than 1,000 leading artists to showcase their work for visitors to see and buy. It also has Frieze Talks, which involves debates, panel discussions and keynote lectures. For some of us who enjoy art, it’s the place to be. The event was huge—it took me 10 minutes to find the restroom—I mean, it took me 1,5 hours to go through every room they had, which was filled with art by designers from all over the world. Which some I understand, some… I just don’t.

People has their own judgement towards everything, so I am not going to force everyone to think the way I do. It depends on how people determine what is good or bad according to their analysis and evaluation. For me, personally, I enjoyed 100% Design more than Frieze. For those who are wondering what 100% Design is, click here.

However, I’ve managed to answer the big question by looking at three perspectives. So if I can rephrase the question, it would be: why are events like Frieze crucial to The Promoters, The Designers and The Visitors? (Yes, those are the three perspectives). I’ll summarise my formative essay for the purpose of this blog.

For The Promoters, it is important for them to hold art and design exhibitions because: they help the country’s economy running, they help the designers to get talked about and they created a platform where brand and consumers can interact—or in this case the designers and the visitors.

For The Designers, these events help them to: send a message or two, channel their creativity, skill and talent, expand their networks, create chances for future multidisciplinary partnership and to be an inspiration for people—let it be a high school student deciding what to do next or a well established designer looking for new ideas.

For The Visitors, art and design exhibition is a good place to get inspirations, to understand others’ aspirations, and it also helps to enrich our society’s cultural value.

You are free to have your own judgement wether Frieze is for you, or not for you.

 

Friday, 24 October 2014
We had Skype call with the people from RoboFold. This may sound perfectly normal but I am just amazed by how effortless communication is nowadays! I think schools should be doing this ASAP. Imagine how fun it would be for elementary kids back in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Skype call with a British english teacher (and students, perhaps) to learn english with! Or for high school seniors to video call with a university course representative, receiving a bunch of information that could help them make their decision on what to study in university easier. I got a million ideas going on in my head, but sadly I know implementing it to a real school back home is not that easy.

However, it’s good to know that we got support for our business idea.

Friday, 31 October 2014
It’s halloween! Yes, Corrine and Mark told us to dress up, but honestly I didn’t think anyone would. I thought everyone was just going low key for their costumes—like me, I only had reindeer ears with me—but boy was I wrong. This picture explains all.

From Justin Bieber hardcore fan to black spiderman, we had fun—we surely did. I just love #MACE14 (I know, I know, no hashtag needed. But I like it, deal with it).

No, we did not just attend class with costume that day, we also had visitors from Cricut to explain how the machine works. From the second they did, I could only think about one thing:

Speaking as a designer—and I’ve double check with Irene, she agreed—I need that baby. I need to have a Cricut Explore machine on my desk, so I can make things I have been wanting to made since I was introduced to paper and scissors. Okay, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. But I’m serious on buying it. I already have several business ideas I can definitely start doing by having that machine. For more info about Cricut Explore, click here.

So that was my awesome three weeks and now I need to start thinking about my personal research project, on top of our business idea development and design manifesto exhibition we need to prepare for the communication design course. Anyone on holiday wants to switch place with me?

Guess I better start early! Have a good… reading week?

vania

STATS!

Hello, good people.

It’s time for me to analyse the statistics for my group’s #KnowYourLemons campaign (which I’m going to refer as KYL for the rest of this post. Or even blog). Sound’s a bit boring but hopefully we got through something interesting by the end of this quick analysis.

 

Let’s start with the number of clicks. 323 clicks so far, counting from Monday, 6 October, with the peak being in between the 6th and 7th. Why is that? First of all, we didn’t know that we weren’t supposed to post our campaign until Thursday, so once we got our materials (the photos and messages), we straight away jump to social media platforms and shared it with our circle of friends, and all that happened—obviously—on Monday, the 6th.

Our group of friends should have found our KYL posts as a brand new information. It would have been appeared new and interesting, so it would have triggered the clicks. I had a conversation with my colleague a couple of months ago. He questioned us with—probably a not very surprising question—“why do you think Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are successful?”. His theory was as simple as: those apps are full filling one of human’s basic needs which is wanting to know what others are up to, and wanting to be known what one’s up to. Does that make any sense? Of course it depends on how transparent one wanted to be seen on social media platforms. For me, personally, I wouldn’t care too much. I tend to share what I felt was important and useful for others, or simply to channel my inner photographer soul—if we’re talking about Instagram posts. But in general, people would expose their life on social media, and are curious about other’s. It explains why on the first days when our URL was introduced, it got most clicks.

While we’re at it, I have been observing how Facebook managed the posts that appears on my news feed. When an old post gets a Like, somehow, it will show up (again) on the top row of your newsfeed. So to manage a post to have longer “lifetime” on one’s news feed, us—as the sharer—just need to make sure that it gets “Likes” every once in a while; or being commented. That works too.

Moving on, it’s too bad that on the Referrers chart, it says: “Unknown” for the biggest percentage (74.9%). However, the other stats point towards our link being accessed via mobile/smartphone platforms. More than 120 people clicked our link from their mobile; iPhones to be specific. Then it goes to Chrome, as second most used browser, and Linux as second most used platforms for this case. I was expecting Mac or Windows for the second most used platform, but this fact has broaden my insight and point of view.

It’s very helpful to know that most of our clickers used their mobiles to access our link. If I were the website’s owner, after seeing this statistic, I would make sure my website is adaptable to mobile view (Responsive Design). I will also make sure that it doesn’t take too long to load (this has to do with the content), so the users will feel comfortable browsing through my website with no delay in any circumstances.

Next, we got list of countries where people clicked our links from. It’s self explanatory, actually—remembering that I’m from Indonesia and my group of friends are mostly in Indonesia and Australia—Joanna is from Thailand, Yoon is from Korea, and Eleven is from China. However, people in China can’t access Facebook. Therefore, in the future, if we need more clicks from China, we have to figure out another way for it to be visible to the people in the country. Such as researching other social media platform that is allowed to be accessed in China; Twitter for instance.

One thing that I found a little bit annoying is how Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links on our post. If they had allowed links, it would have been our top social media choice for our campaign. Because our campaign is photo based, and if only we could post it on instagram—and have a clickable link as the caption—I believe it would have increased the number of clicks.

The next step would be promoting our Pinterest account—that is where we upload all of our photos. However, when I tried to put our URL as the photo source, it says that the link is considered as spam, and Pinterest wouldn’t let me attach our URL unto the photo. I might try another URL shrinker (that could still be tracked) and put it on Pinterest. If it lets me do it with another URL, then we could track that (new) URL and hopefully we could find another interesting set of statistics.

For more information about breast cancer, click here.

To see pictures from our “photo booth” session, click here.

Till then, have a happy week!

vania

Know Your Lemons

Lemons. What are we doing with lemons, exactly?

Let me ask you (another) question before we start. Do you remember the ALS Ice Bucket challenge? If you do, well, that’s similar to what we want to achieve: creating a viral campaign to raise an awareness.

I have to back up for a couple of days for you to be able to understand what this thing with lemon is all about. On our last Friday class, we were divided into group of three—four in my case—and were asked to brainstorm ideas of how we could use lemons to create a viral campaign to raise breast cancer awareness. We were given the chance to get through our wildest imagination of how our group should conduct this campaign.

For me, personally, I let myself go. I used that exercise to challenge my imagination and I came up with the craziest ideas. Believe me, raining lemons from an airplane did come up at one point. But of course, since we are really going to do this, my group finally decided to go with the “Photo booth” idea.

The big idea is to dress up like lemons—that means in yellow—hoping it will attract people’s attention, approaching and asking them just one question: ‘what would you say  to your friend if they had breast cancer?’, taking a picture with them and their message, then uploading it to the internet. But wait, just like what I said in class last week, there’s more.

First of all, the four of us like the idea of our message coming from a friend. That’s why we want to use empathy towards the people we approached, so their messages can be delivered to all of the breast cancer fighters. It comes from a friend.

Second of all, regarding the technical stuff, once we are done taking pictures, the only way they can see  their pictures is to go to the short link which we hand out afterwards. We have prepared notes with the #knowyourlemons and our specific URL (http://goo.gl/Us7Zlr) on it, so people can access it later. After all, this is actually what we are trying to do—tracking the link. Bottom line, we were hoping that “writing down your message for breast cancer friends out there, and taking a picture with it and with lemons” could be the viral campaign uploads unto social media.

We went for the “hunt” on Monday noon, at Kingston Hill campus. We had around 30+ people who were willing to do it. The second we were finished, it clearly made me realise that the ALS Ice Bucket challenge was a successful campaign. I didn’t participate. I wasn’t their target audience, I wasn’t even challenged by any of my friends. They just knew I wouldn’t do it. However, I saw the impact of that particular campaign, where most of my friends did participate, and comparing to what we did on Monday, it was nothing. I learned that if we want to create a campaign to raise an awareness, we definitely need to put a lot of effort, time, thoughts and cook it through—so it would be as successful as the ALS Ice Bucket challenge.

It is so hard to make people do something they are not interested in. That’s one. So how did the ALS Ice Bucket challenge made people, a lot of people, to do so? How should we design a campaign that people want to participate in? I guess empathy is not enough. This is what I’m hoping to explore in our next classes, though. So, sorry to disappoint you, but I have not have the answer yet.

So here’s my standing ovation for the ALS Ice Bucket challenge design thinking team. Though I didn’t participate, I do admire your success (and curious about the process and chemistry behind it).

For more information about breast cancer, click here.

To see pictures from our “photo booth” session, click here.

Till then.

vania