Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Appearance in My Paper (Chinese Singapore paper)


Today's My Paper has shown a report about the recent Keio - NUS initiative to set up a research center in Singapore. The research center will be called CUTE which stands for Connective Ubiquitous Technology for Embodiments, and is initiated by the PhD supervisor Prof Adrian Cheok.

Interestingly, a picture of me showing my previous research project, Poultry Internet was selected as one of the projects highlighted in the report! That was more than 2 years ago.

But still, what a moment that a student like me can be proud of :D

Thursday, July 03, 2008

about designers

has it been one month already since the last post? oh my, time passes by so quickly here in Singapore.

i hope i will get back the "mojo" to start blogging frequently again.

anyway, here is something interesting to be said about designers:

The designer is someone who is able to generate creative designs but not able to, or at least not interested in, explaining how they came about. - Daniel Fallman
I guess this rings a bell in me, especially since i am science and engineering-trained. my mind is trained to deduce and think in a rational and logical manner. Even my "wild ideas" seem perfectly grown out of a logical deduction of some established principles or widely observed behaviors.

Notice the way we read or write? it is from a sequential left-to-right or top-to-bottom pattern. Things appear in order. But somehow we know (or rather assume) that creativity stems from the disorderliness of how things normally appear. Pushing the boundary, to put it another way. Or to think out of the box.

So which is human better at? To "design" or to perform in an orderly manner?