Another Friday, another guest!

This time the guest was an architect and a design professional with an extensive hands-on experience in spatial and retail designing. An alumnus of NID, she has worked under great Industrial designers like Michael Foley and Ajay Shah to name a few. But that’s not where she decided to limit herself. She went on to work and explore visual communication, logo designing and creative writing as well, this wonderful guest was Ms. Alpa Jain.

Alpa Jain has worked with some of the major Design Studios in India like ASDS Mumbai, Graubar Design Studio Indore, Rhizome Design Studio Ahmedabad and Foley Designs Pvt. Ltd in Bangalore. Right now, she is working as a Design Consultant in Ratlam.

The session kicked off with a creative video introduction of Alpa Jain made by Rohan Goje, one of the Design students at Avantika. There was a lot of hype after the students came to know about her education and the work she had done till date. Then, Alpa Jain came on the stage. After a crazy round of applause, she started her speech. For the next half-hour, she told us all about the exhibitions she attended and the work she had done till date. Giving example of ‘Alibaba’, she introduced us to the concept of ‘Retail Re-engineering’ where offline and online retail went hand in hand.

She went further to explain what Jack Ma, one of the founders of ‘Alibaba’ did. He and his team analysed the customers first. They analysed their problems, the issues they faced while shopping. So, they found out that customers didn’t like the hassle of buying the products and lugging it all the way home. Their primary objective was to solve this problem.

‘Alibaba’ designed a system wherein one could go to the retail store and buy the product “electronically” by scanning its QR code. Then the delivery boy delivers that particular product right at the person’s doorstep. This way the customer gets satisfied that he made the right choice and doesn’t have to worry about the hassle of transportation anymore. Simple, but genius. The video gave everyone the insight on how the world is changing with technology and how the life of the customers is getting easy day by day.

Then, she announced an activity which had to be done in 45 minutes and in groups of 8-10 students. It seemed like a very interesting one and created a buzz amongst the students. The theme of the activity was “Customer is God”.

Basically, there was a scenario where 3 people go to watch a late-night show. Now the idea was to identify what difficulties they would face during the time. What would be the problems, or the “gaps”, and how do we fill those gaps with solutions.

The objective was pretty simple

• Make a list of problems
• Make a flowchart
• Choose one problem
• Design a solution for it

It was a great activity and we were very excited, cracking our knuckles ready for this challenge and the activity began.

45 minutes was a relatively small time for us since we had to present every problem that we could discover and then design a solution for anyone of it. All of us had to find the perfect wavelength to work together. This activity truly brought everyone together to collaborate and have an insight into each other’s minds. In the blink of an eye, the time was up. Everyone had made sketches and mind maps of the solutions and were proud of their work and couldn’t wait to present it to everyone.

All of us presented our solutions one by one in groups and Alpa Jain reviewed and shared her thoughts and inputs on the same. Hearing her feedback on each group’s work was very helpful to everyone.

This really was quite an activity.

It was an absolute pleasure to meet Alpa Jain. The experience taught us a lot of specifics and details about starting the process of identifying the experience to search for a solution. The students all went back tired, but with a lot of knowledge in their brain and smile on their faces.