Let the Workshop’s Begin

While most people were complaining about being sore from the hiking the previous day, I was out for my normal morning run. I figured out that RunKeeper would work as long as I was on cellular as opposed to the hotel wifi so that the Google Maps piece would load. That also verified that the runs I’ve been doing have been about 4.25 miles each day which was pretty close to my estimate based on the time it’s been taking.

The biggest surprise of the say was Matthias’s new look. He secretly shaved his head and just showed up at breakfast that way.

At work, we spent the morning talking through the final changes that we would need to make to get the material in order. I also went through quite a bit of pre-training with Katherine and Zoey so that they would understand the concepts behind the material, not just be machine translators. That idea turned out to be critical to the actual workshops being a success because Design Thinking has a lot of nuances that would be lost if only the words themselves were translated. Katherine in particular seems to be very excited about the concepts and was extremely eager to learn. We also got the room set up for the afternoon workshop so that we could hit the ground running. Another 13 RMB lunch today was again way too much food. I ordered a fried chicken, tofu, and cucumber dish which was really good. I don’t know the name of the small rubbery tofu strips, but they are worlds better than the big soggy ones.

For the workshops themselves, we were very fortunate to be able to use a conference room in the same building. Apparently, one of Jat’s friends has it and only uses it occasionally so they are letting us take it over for the next two weeks. Despite all the talking and debating, we finally settled on doing the Design Thinking components first, so that meant I was up. I covered the intro pieces of why designing for delightful user experiences is important, and also covered personas. There were definitely started to get into it by the end, but we started a bit late, and we had to finish a bit early so we left it at that. Overall, I thought it went really well though and we got some buy in to set the stage for the next topics.

For dinner, I got a chance to hang out with some of the people from the other groups a bit more. Six of us ended up walking around on the nearby food street, but ended up opting for something else as it was a little expensive (by Qingdao standards at least) and none of us were all that hungry. It was pretty cool to see all the seafood and other things all out on the street though. I might question a bit the food safety standards of a few of the things, but you could clearly see that most things were very fresh. In the end, we chose a restaurant in on of the nearby shopping centers which turned out to be quite good. The spicy pork and onions was probably one of the best dishes I’ve had since we’ve been here. We also had some really nice pork short ribs with garlic cloves. The only dish that was a bust was some pastry things filled with bean paste. Despite having some sugar to dip them in, there were still very very bland. All in all, not bad for $4 (including some Tsingtao of course)!