Serendipity and Learning

Noticed these two ads recently - both on a similar theme. The theme of jugaad:  And the second:   The theme of these ads (and some recurrent ideas - makes you think if it is by the same agency) - is anti-jugaad. Represents a fairly different strain of thought than I have seen in the last many years. The sentiment over the past many years has been largely pro jugaad - where as these ads are anti-jugaad. And that is what the popular sentiment is these days - that while jugaad is good upto a certain extent, the jugaad mentality allows us from seeking long term solutions and instead we end up relying on band-aid solutions. I have seen this clash in organizations. As Indians work more and more with 'anti-jugaad' countries, it is perhaps Indias own evolution into a culture that seeks long term solutions as opposed to quick fixes.

The new Apple ad exemplifies this. Nowhere does it talk about the RAM or the OS or the Gorilla glass - it talks instead of the user. The person with the iPhone and what you as user can do with it. It is not about the greatness of the phone, but the power that the user has with the phone. It sounds obvious, but most often people talk about products and their greatness and not so much about about what a user can do with it. And linking this back to work - do you talk about your projects and programs or do you tell the user how it makes them powerful. Putting the user in the centre, as it were..

Take a look at this wonderful advertisement. It beautifully replicates a website into a physical design through the 90 odd seconds that it runs. First of all it is creative - almost burns the light bulb in your head - and makes you go - why did I not think of that. Second, truly, the internet, like life is what you make of it. Third, it is quite inspiring when you come to think of it. But as a creative concept, this has appealed to me for a longish time. We had attempted to do something similar for a website as part of a project at work. We worked on getting the entire website down a book. The whole idea was to make the website "physical". So, literally you would have dropdowns that would need to be folded back and then little windows would pop up as part of the book and so forth. Pages would cut like tabs on the website and would take you back and forth and so on. The project did go through, though to a time crunch in the end, we had to cut down many of the "feat...