Settling in a new ‘fun’ place

Its my first month at Elephant and I’m still finding my way around. As a new face in the crowd, you tend to get swept away. In the midst of trying to find a rooting, I have been amusing myself with the little things at Elephant. The little things are quirky, fun and add an element of happiness to my dullness of solitude while I attempt to make new alliances. 

On my first day, within the first hour, I am showered with goodies. A well illustrated coffee mug, a t-shirt, and a diary (there are a set of cool stamps which can be used to personalise your diary!). I am also given a little pink diary (yes, pink) which gives me contacts and guidelines that I may need while settling in. It also allows me to set goals to be achieved in the first few months. All this using unique comic-book type illustrations.

As I wander around the premises, I notice these little signages which add to my amusement. The conference rooms have names such as ‘Idea Bar’, ‘Think Tank’, and ‘Chat Box’: (REALLY cute displays). While going down the stairs in one of the buildings, the ceiling is a bit low towards the landing and here comes a little sign saying ‘Oops!’. That truly does put a smile on my face. There are coffee and lunch breaks at the ‘Palm Beach Cafe’ and it rightly holds true to its name. It is an open wide space giving you plenty of opportunities to mingle with the rest of the crowd. Even the disposable cups have been personalised by Elephant and have cute illustrations.

It is still my first month and as time passes, I am sure to discover more little things at this institute that believes in the power of magic!

Reema Mehta

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1% inspiration 99% perspiration

By Partho Guha Co founder Elephant Design, elephantdesign.com

1% inspiration 99% perspiration

In any project where the outcome is something new, we think it is driven by inspiration. The ideas which leads to big shift in our life, which really takes us to the future are the domain of few gifted individuals who can think up these great ideas. 

In today's time, this is a mistaken presumption.

Inspiration

Most people can join some few dots and come up with next best idea. The ‘eureka’ moments are way too common than we believe. If we ask around, it will be really hard to find a person who has no great idea. Idea is always in abundance and overflows at our will. This is way too over rated.

Perspiration

Getting an idea from ‘thought to thing’, is completely a different capability. Very few people have the gift to commit for an idea and spend half a life to realise. This is the true magic of creation.

1% inspiration is actually enough to get an idea to start with, but one does need 99% perspiration to keep at the idea and make it come alive.

Most of our education system is focused around this 1%. We learn to become good in thinking and communicating ideas. Our hero is a person who can speak beautifully about a life changing big idea. We are not really bothered about those people who will actually work on the idea and implement it. They mostly stay in the fringe and are forgotten as ordinary.

To inculcate the culture of innovation and doing never before things, it is time to we start celebrating the perspiration. 

Perspiration demands meticulous planning, ingenuity to do with less of everything, patience to endure ridicule and maybe failure every-day for next ten years. That is the kind of time it takes, to make a new idea work for users successfully. 

Perspiration may seem ridiculously painful, but it is the true joy for many invisible, adventure loving, excellence seeking working folks around us. 

What is a journey if it is not really scary!

Scientist at NASA experienced 20 failures in its 28 attempts to send rockets to space. 

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Growing with the Problem

Problems, which keeps the world leaders awake at night, have already changed. Technology is becoming the dominant force and as human we are grappling with the speed & meaning it brings to our daily life. World today is looking at design to solve these complex & unprecedented problems. We as designers are eager to rise to the occasion and welcome the change. We need to relook at our methods, mindset and measurements to be effective with these problems.

At Elephant, we are constantly experimenting with our self to understand and gain capability to address these problems. Creating a next level of work culture is one such focus. 

Partho Guha, Co founder and director Elephant design.

EMPATHY. People matter to us. More than anything people defines what we do. People from all walks of life use our design. Clients represent a business but at the end they are people too. They come with their own needs and wishes, their personal expectations, dislikes and world views. Then comes our own team, the most important set of people we have at Elephant.

To work with people we need to understand them deeply & seriously. Considering we do not even understand our self-well, this is a daunting task. Empathy is possibly the most human way to understand another human. After going about the practiced way of logical profiling, demography, segmentation, motive & barriers and such logical methods, one needs to trust empathy. That is how we go beyond words & statistics and people become alive and connectable.

Thankfully we are born with empathy and use it extensively in our personal life. When at work we seem to switch off this important capability. At Elephant, we wish to switch on the empathy and use it as our primary tool to understand people.

EXPLORE. A design problem comes with certain obvious solutions. The practical, proven, easily acceptable solutions, little tweaked for the context, easily becomes the winning idea. Possibly in any design project this is the greatest challenge to solve. How not to give in to the obvious and push the boundary fitting to the opportunity. It demands a great effort and energy from the team (client, design & vendors) to take the project beyond the obvious.

Adapting to the mindset of an Explorer, possibly the best way to go beyond in a collaborative way. The explorer’s restlessness of finding the edge, the faith that there is always a better way drives this effort. At Elephant we greatly respect and encourage the explorer in us to grow and take charge of projects.

MAGICAL CHANGE. Subtle changes are everyday occurrence in our life but only sometime there are changes, which are momentous and defining. They demarcate the past from the future. At Elephant we work towards making such magical change happen to the business and people we work with. Most importantly, we try to create such changes for people in our team. We try to contribute and bring about magical changes in each other’s life.

At Elephant we believe magical changes only happen when we work with empathy and like an explorer. 

Surely many from the global design community have felt this urgency for change and already doing something in their context. We all need to learn from each othersexperiences.

We are all ears to learn from your comments and thoughts.Thank You.

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