When Hollywood imagines the future, interesting things can happen. Although tech/sci-fi movies often go a bit over the top, they often leave me pondering about things we are starting to see in the present.

I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these movies:

• Transcendence, where a Dr. named Will Caster uploads his consciousness into AI technology so he can continue to live without his body. Great movie. Jony Depp is in it, but it’s great anyway. This story is set to happen in a relatively distant future.
• Ex Machina, where we see the problems, the fears, and implications of our relationship with humanoid robots. This movie is set to happen in a near future.
• And then we have Robocop, where we see a police officer extend his life through a total-body prosthesis. This movie… is strange. Although Robocop seems more feasible now than it did back in 1987.

The reason why these examples are of interest here is that — the concept of human augmentation is not such a flight of fancy. It is one of the key themes in science fiction writing and a common subject in comic books, anime, and video games, but entertainment aside, it’s also one of the key areas of investigation for robotics, prosthetics, and nanotechnology. It’s exciting to see people taking human augmentation very seriously and making it real.

I believe that human augmentation will help us navigate a future world of extremes, where our brains, our language, and our bodies won’t be enough. I believe it’s good for us to imagine that world of extremes, and what role we as designers can play in it.

My name is Momo and I am an augmented human. That’s right.

I’m thankful for these! *holds glasses like Steve Jobs*

Isn’t it wonderful that I can work as a designer, thanks to these little things? My eyeglasses are probably the most important augmentation I have! These things help me see the world. I wear these every day. I was wearing them the day I met my wife. I’m sure she noticed.

This is my friend Keren. This augmentation allows him to hear frequencies and catch nuances in words that he would otherwise he miss. His hearing aid helps him understand people. Keren also wears glasses. That makes him double-augmented.

This is my grandfather. He is 89 years old. His dental implants help him enjoy his favorite food. He also has glasses. And hearing aids. He’s triple-augmented!

This is my son — His nebulizer helps him breathe better. I wish he didn’t need it, but I’m happy that the device exists.

So you see, the future is nooooow. We’ve all heard this phrase before. In this case, it’s accurate. The future has already arrived. Many of us are augmented by artifacts and machines. And depending on our needs, these things can blend, seamlessly, with our daily routine. These augmentations are so integral to how we live that they are pretty much invisible to us. However, they are very visible to others. So visible, that often, others stare at them with curiosity. Sometimes with surprise. Sometimes with irreverence. Like my wife who stared at my glasses, I think she liked them.

The difference between my glasses and what you see in sci-fi films or read in books is that most human augmentation portrayed is invisible. No glasses, no hearing aids, no exoskeletons, no implants, no prosthesis. This is where I tend to agree with Hollywood. Machines will be so seamlessly integrated into humans that they are no longer perceivable.

Have a hard time imagining what that is like? Let me introduce you to Almo.

Almo is born sometime between 2030 and 2040.

At 10 years old, he loves running and playing basketball. He enjoys eating sweet things. He likes visiting his friends. He likes the sound of rain in the evenings. He hates the smell of old milk. He cries when he feels lonely. He struggles to understand his parents. Almo is just like you, and me.

Almo, however, has a few advantages. He can run faster and jump higher thanks to an artificial leg that is custom produced based on his body height, weight, shape, and the exacting sports performance advantage he desires. He can visit his friends just by thinking about them. He can enjoy sweets because they fuel neural prosthetics that feed on glucose. He loves the sound of artificial rain in the evenings because humans seed clouds to maintain healthy soils.

Almo lives in a beautiful world of extremes. A world of extreme sustainability, where cities are required to convert entirely to renewable resources. Buildings and homes are powered by carbon-neutral sources such as solar, wind, or biofuel created by human waste. All means of transportation are electric. And the weather is perfectly controlled. Both businesses and individuals will need to pay a global warming tax.

A world of extreme connectivity, where augmented reality and virtual reality are making remote meetings as real as in person. People don’t even have to leave their homes — they go to work, get a diploma, consult a doctor, visit friends in the comfort of their living room.

A world of extreme personalization, where finally everyone is unique. With a breakthrough in DNA technology, we now have full access to the secrets of our bodies. Almo now lives in a home where the environment is fully customized to his personal physical and health profile, from food, water, air, light, to sleep systems.

Almo has a few special traits too, which somewhat hold him back. He doesn’t like to talk to other people. He never feels comfortable expressing his deep emotions. He has a hard time understanding how others feel because he focuses more on the world inside his head than on the world of others. He loves others but never hugs them. He dislikes others but never says it. Almo doesn’t know how to empathize or communicate.

So you see — Almo lives in a world of extremes, gifted with augmented abilities, and surrounded by people he deeply cares about, yet his biggest dream was to be able to tell them how he feels about everything that surrounds him.

In thinking about how to design for Almo, I think how despite our environment, our tools, or technology, and so on will continue to evolve and improve over time, it is the basic human traits that will always be the core of who we are. And designing for these traits is, will, and should always be our guiding principle.

*bring back the movies*

In Transcendence, the truth is, everything Dr. Will Caster did in his life was driven by his desire to stay with his wife Evelyn, the human trait behind this: Love.

In Ex Machina, Caleb the clear-minded engineer falls in love and becomes manipulated by a robot. The human trait behind this: Obsession.

In Robocop, Alex the police officer remembers who he is, and uses his augmented power to put all the fragments of life back in order. The human trait behind this: Revenge.

What will be the human driving force in Almo’s dream? Will it be the technology in his legs or the neurocells in his brain? Or will it be his love for his parents?

Almo is who I use to stretch my capacity to imagine. And I’d love to show you something that I think Almo needed desperately. It is a machine: The Empathy Writer. It would help Almo empathize and communicate.

It is something IDEO imagined as we explored and speculated the potential benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, our work, and our society.

Our thinking was — In the future, our globally connected lives mean we’ll be frequently brought into contact with people from different cultures and backgrounds. Despite the opportunities these networks will present, we will struggle to communicate, as we won’t be equally fluent in the other’s language and culture. What if you could find just the right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation? The Empathy Writer helps you convey what you mean in a way that will be easily understood.

So in my imagination, Almo would insert two tokens that describe his emotional state. Say, for example, he feels happy about the evening rain but anxious about being surrounded by crowds during the daytime. Then he would insert two tokens that describe his parent’s emotional state. The Empathy Writer would help him compose a letter that conveys his emotional state and expresses how Almo feels, in a way that builds empathy in his parents.

In The Empathy Writer, empathy is amplified.

What would your version of Almo be like?

How would he learn? How would he communicate? How would he get things done? What would be his driving force?

How would you go about designing for his needs?

If the exercise feels a bit difficult, you can always start by asking yourself the same questions. The possibilities are endless. The future is a wonderful place, waiting for all of you. The best part? You might just already be an augmented human, ready for what’s next.

You might just already be an augmented human, ready for what’s next.

You see, in the end, the future sits in designers’ capacity to imagine.

This piece is a written adaptation of a talk I gave at IxDC in 2018 during my time at IDEO. Special thanks to Alice Huang for her guidance through the narrative in it. A video version should be available on the archives of https://ixdc.org/

Earlier that day, my mom explained to me that we had no money, and couldn’t afford to put me in the private high school where my friend was going. A french institution known to cater to affluent families.

I didn’t know I was poor. Or rather, being poor had a different meaning before and after that afternoon. I felt sad. Confused. Angry. Sitting on the wet grass in silence.

“Uh… Maybe I’ll see you one day!” –said my friend.

I never saw him again.

Let me take you back in time a little more.

In a way, my parents designed a childhood environment that protected me from the judgment that often comes to those who are poor. For many years I thought that I was a rich kid, with parents that danced together in the mornings, went to work early and came back late, and hugged each other after dinner. I grew up surrounded by toys. I had piles of them. More than everybody else I knew. However, many of these were not mine. My mom sold fabric toys on the street. They were called ‘Goyitos’.

I always knew there was something different about me and my family. Some kids knew too. And they were harsh. They made fun of my mom, of my faded, oversized pants, the holes in my sweater sleeves, and my homemade haircut. But each time they bullied me, something larger than fear kept me afloat: Pride. I was proud to be who I was. There was nothing wrong with my family. There was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with being poor.

But, on that last day in Primary School. With my friend. Sitting on the wet grass. Silent.

Being poor hit me.

He and I both had the same personality, we liked the same things, we enjoyed the same jokes, we had the same ideas for the future. Suddenly, money made us different. It never impacted my life before. I couldn’t understand it. I really wanted to go to with him. Now — I didn’t have a plan for how to get there. All I knew was: I needed money.

At a supermarket, I saw a young boy packing all the grocery bags at the end of the cashier lines, and getting tips from people for helping out. I felt so curious about how to make money by myself. I remember a long talk with my mom about how much I wanted to make money. She didn’t like the idea. She felt very sad. I wanted that job so bad, at that time it didn’t matter what she felt.

She knew how much I hated being in that Public High School. That place was a daily reminder that not only I wasn’t with my friends, but also that I was less than others.

I begged my mom to help me find a job. Every time, she listened, looking distant and worried. I insisted every single day. Then once a week. Then once a month. Then I forgot about it. Until one Friday my mom showed up with a big smile and told me: “I think I got you a job”.

For two months, during the summer break, I worked from 6 am to 1 pm at an elegant 9-story building in one of the best areas of the city, paying all the utility bills and running errands for tenants and merchants there.

On my first day, I remember being terrified of knocking on the first door. My mom told me that morning — “People in that building are very different, be very nice to them no matter what”. Imagine a chubby boy knocking on your door at 6 am to pick up your bills. Almost every time, people were grumpy. Some others were nice. Like the gentle old couple on the 4th floor that would be very well dressed from early morning. They often would ask me to help them move big pots to get some sunshine. Or the kind foreign woman on the 3rd floor. A very tall woman. She would practice her broken Spanish with me. Or the nice big family on the top floor that had a piano, 3 good-looking kids, and a lot of cereal boxes on their dining table.

My job skills included trashing bags and boxes, moving pots, carrying random letters and small packs to the post office, leaving paid bills in envelopes, to teaching Spanish. I was enjoying it. I often wondered what these people did for a living, or how they got there. Or how important they were. During these two months, I got to know these people and families through small glimpses of their lives. Those glimpses were mesmerizing. I felt somewhat attached to some of the people in the Building. I knew their names, and how much they would spend on services. I knew how they look in the morning without make-up. I knew when they fought. Or when they didn’t come home. Or when I was bothering them.

I knew who liked me, and who didn’t. Like the guy that would look at me like I’m insignificant. Or the woman that would let their money go from the distance so our hands wouldn’t touch. I knew when I grow up I did not want to be like some of them. But I did want to be like some of the others. Like this man on the top floor. The dad with a piano, 3 kids, and boxes of cereal. There was something very peaceful about him. About his voice. The sound of wisdom. The sound of comfort. He was kind and always seemed in a good mood. He stood out from the grumpy ones.

On my last day, I was told to mention to everybody that I would not be there the following week. Summer break was about to end.

I knocked on people’s doors and ran the last errands for them. I said goodbye. Most of them didn’t care. Few of them gave me a tip that day.

I went up to the top floor, where the big family was. The dad opened the door. I did my thing, then I told him that it was my last day.

“Going back to school?”
-Yes

“Where?”
-The Montúfar High School

“That’s a great place. I went there too.”

I wasn’t sure why, but I got watery eyes instantly. For 8 weeks I had been doing these things triggered by my dismay with that High School. Now, there he was — the dad with the cereal boxes. Proving me wrong. -Yes, it is a very nice school — I said.

“When my kids grow up I will send them there”, he said.

I looked past behind him, to the pile of toys in the living room. It was very similar to my pile of toys. The pile of toys I grew up with. Our families were distinct, yet very similar. He shook my hand and wished me good luck.

I learned a lot during my two months at that building, but also on the randomness of that moment. I learned there are peculiar sources of happiness, comfort, and knowledge. I learned it doesn’t matter who you are, where you come from, where you study, or where you live. What matters is who you want to be, where do you wanna go, what do you wanna know more about, or how long you’ll be around.

The summer break ended. I went back to my Public High School and continued with my life. Being always proud of who I am. Proud of where I come from. Knowing that our similarities are far larger than our differences and that there are lessons we can only learn when we see others for who they are, not for what they have, or what they do. I loved my Public High School, and my friends.

About 5 years later I learned that the reason my mom found that job for me was because she convinced people in the building to let me do it. She gave them money so they could pay me. My first job, my first salary — came directly from my mom.

She’s the best. And, although she doesn’t tip me, I’m still paying her bills.

And I always will.

—

Bonus story: After writing this, about five years ago, I found my childhood friend on Facebook. We’ve connected again and are planning to meet at some point. Looking forward to sitting on the grass and in awkward silence again.

Note: Some events above have been altered for privacy’s sake.

I had woken up in middle of the night with the fading sound of a train in the distance. I realized I left the window opened by mistake. A blinking light at the other side of my bed was signaling that my breakfast is scheduled to be ready at 7am.

It was one of those moments when you think you can simply go back to sleep and move on, however this night was different. In a time where everything is predicted, automated, and programmed, I still messed up with something as basic as leaving the window opened before falling asleep. We’ve trusted technology to help us to not fail, so it’s understandable how my analog window frame proved I was an idiot.

The AQI in my room was now over 700. I heard the purifiers in the room trying to vacuum out the mess. Smoking with the window closed would have been less risky.

As I kept thinking about this time of automation, prediction, and augmentation, I couldn’t help but recall the writings in the good old days when people had choices and free will. I guess at some point humans agreed on letting the intelligence of our machines dictate. To tell us what we needed, when we needed them, and how we had to deal with them.

Why was I still smoking? It was universally banned, it was illegal in my zone, but it was arguably the last thing I truly had a choice on. Everything else was given, assigned, or ‘suggested’ as they called it. The penalty for banned activities was pretty severe, including changes in the food, indoor lighting, and social credit score. It was bullshit. It was all bullshit.

Hours later, I was eating breakfast. It was delicious as usual. Probably the only good thing in my life back then. As I ate the paste, I kept telling myself I should’ve known moving to this zone was a mistake the moment I arrived. The emptiness in the roads, the blizzards, and the constant humming coming from the sky made everything feel spooky.

For 30 years I kept observing the society in my zone degrading and becoming more and more stupid. Why nobody else seemed to bother about anything other than their jobs and being plugged all day? I didn’t understand it.

People no longer questioned things. People just accepted everything that happened around them. It seemed that the ONE thing that everybody truly enjoyed was food. That paste was grown in labs or in these weird roof things that some buildings had. It magically met our genetic needs. Blablabla. I got it — It was all good for us.

I remember wondering what a real fruit ever tasted like, or if it was true that we drank coconut water back in the day. I read stories about entire generations that developed a unique relationship with actual, real food. It was sad to think that we no longer had the ability to grow anything in our world. In the late 40s, most predictive flavors had been mastered in the labs where they grew our food paste, and taste became a thing of the past. Everything was delicious. Everything was exactly what people liked the most, every time they ate.

As I stared at my breakfast, I couldn’t wait for the next morning! I kept wondering what tomorrow’s flavors would be like, but little did I know my life was going to take a big turn, and give me a surprise that would forever remove my ability to enjoy food paste.

Here’s what happened.

My neighbor, Almo had relocated to my zone a few years before me. He also lived in a separate house, detached from the columnar hub. I guess he had some veteran privileges. I heard he worked on the launchpad that collapsed in the 50s. He was dismissed after the incident — like, forcibly retired. I remember he had both legs and one arm replaced but he kept saying he wanted to get them all removed. He had some depression problems but his food kept him happy.

He was very kind to me. For many years we met in the evenings to talk about the things he always wanted to make, and the things I should try and see before I get too old.

That one evening, Almo showed up with a big bag filled with vintage stuff. He pulled out a bunch of papers, smaller bags with some weird things in it, and a very old computer. It took him awhile to get the machine to turn on, and that’s when the best day of my life got marked in my memory.

He pulled out recipes from the bag. Like, actual recipes to prepare food.

They were basically bullet points of ingredients, and instructions on what to do with them. Ridiculously simple. No nutrients, no purifiers, no trackers, no nanodust, no antibiotic paste, nothing. Just raw things that you could chop, mix, and cook. No way this was a good idea — I thought. I knew Almo was a bit ‘out there’ but I did not expect him to attempt cooking. He knew my smoke detectors were hacked and about my smoking. He knew he can make a mess in my room.

When his computer turned on, he showed me some footage of people preparing things by hand, and eating food that looked amazing. It was… just… beautiful. It was mesmerizing to watch so many colors, so many shapes, so many layers of things on top of another, and how things looked ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ when you cut them in half.

Almo took a few items out of a bag and started cutting small white cloves of some sort of nut that I hadn’t seen before. As he cut it, I immediately smelled sulfur. I knew this wasn’t a good idea right away. He then pulled out a jar of oil-like cream. He said he had made it with something called diacetyl and other ingredients I can’t remember. He then took out a piece of lab-grown protein that he had been keeping dry for a couple of weeks, put all the items in a hot steel plate, and started to cook, right in middle of my room. Almo, cooked in my room! I told him I didn’t think that’s legal, to which he reminded me that I smoke. It was nearly 10pm, and I put the air purifiers on max.

The first wave of what-the-fuckness came right after he dropped the little pieces of the white nut in the disc. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever felt such sensation in my nose. It was like a magnet! I hovered my face in the smoke and couldn’t help but chuckle at such marvelous discovery! I couldn’t believe I was enjoying a sulfur-smelling thing, being cooked with a creamy mixture with diacetyl.

Almo told me he is just “browning garlic for the meat” and I told Almo he is crazy, for the fourth time.

By this point he had already been teaching me a bunch of new words that I had no idea existed. Frying pan, sizzle, caramelization, and a bunch of other mumbo. Almo then put the piece of lab-grown protein in the pan, sizzled it for a few minutes on each side, and then sprinkled with classic iodine sodium crystals.

The following 20 minutes were simply… intimate. Almo and I sat down and shared what I believe is the most beautiful form of human expression I’ve seen in my life. He had turned something into something else. He walked me through the flavors I was experiencing, and described beautifully the contrasts of the different layers food can expose when you treat it with respect and consideration. It was all about balancing different elements.

For a very long time I had struggled to see things in life with such simple lens –He literally took four things, the white colored nut, the cream, the lab protein, and the iodine sodium crystals. He kept calling them garlic, butter, meat, and salt. Madman.

I will never forget the flavour I experienced on that day. It was so profound that I couldn’t talk or describe what I was feeling. Almo told me the flavour was probably going to be much more enjoyable if I wouldn’t smoke so often. And so I stopped smoking after that evening.

A couple of weeks later, before he was summoned to his final relocation, he had a chance to drop by with many of his precious collections, many of them which I’m going to show you in the next pages of this book.

One of these precious items was a small printed book that he had inherited. Its cover was eroded, wrinkled, and had a lot of little stains. Almost like splatters of oils mixed with a fingerprint or two.

The book included a curious list of places to go to — but it didn’t have sightseeings or zones, or even air routes. It simply had photos of food and the buildings and rooms where people could enjoy it. Almo called this book a “restaurant guide”. A book dedicated to telling people where to go, and what to enjoy, and how to eat it.

Where, what and how. The same things I was fighting against every day. The same things that made me look out of the window with anxiety, made me question the choices I couldn’t take, and the things I didn’t want to do.

However, here it is, printed on old paper, a collection of beautifully human instructions, sharing the pure joy and celebrating something that I wish we would have kept for ourselves. The privilege and joy of not only growing, preparing, and cooking food, but also sharing it with others.

So, this is, what I hope, will become your guide on where to go to find ingredients, what to do to grow them, and how to prepare them by yourself. I call it Almo’s Guide for Better Eating. Most of the following pages are a collection of his writings, but also some of the adventures I experienced when I ventured onto finding new ways of growing food by myself.

Now, please keep this book hidden. By local regulation, it is illegal to deny the nutritional paste that we’re fed every day. Penalty might include forceful retirement. So, read the following pages at your own risk.

And in the wise words of my good friend Almo — “Bon apetee!”

Or something like that.

–Anonymous, Zone 4368696E61

This piece was a contribution to The FOOD+ Journal: Stories about food, restaurants, chefs, and all that stirs the palate, the mind and the imagination.

Almo’s Guide for Better Eating, is the first in a series of writings that contemplate the future and humans’ relationship with food.

The FOOD+ Journal

A short story on changing mindsets.

About 20 years ago I was dragging a bulky hand scanner on some photographs of a mountain bike trip. I think I scanned a bicycle’s photo about 16 times before I managed to get the wheel to register like a perfect circle, and not a jagged oval.

“One day I’ll be good at this” — I thought.

About 5 years later, I got my first ‘creative’ job at a small animation studio. I was standing in front of a big scanner, looking at how it sucked hundreds of hand-drawn frames through its feeder rolls, and turning these into a .tiff sequence on a desktop computer. I believe I spent about a full month sitting down and renaming files in batches to fix the scanned files’ order, or name correctly ‘body part’ that the .tiff sequence represented.

“One day I’ll be good at this” — I thought.

About 5 years later, I hired my first employee at my design studio. Once again, I was scanning a bunch of contracts and invoices, and preparing all this documentation to officially pay him for his hard work. His last name was Talepp, and in middle of my excitement, I realized I misspelled it on a few pages. I had to to print/sign/scan again.

“One day I’ll be good at this” — I thought.

About 5 years later, I was sitting down at my brand new overseas job, sitting in a corporate office in Asia, sipping coffee from a branded mug, and reading my on-boarding documents. There was a whole section explaining how the printer and scanner works, and how to use my badge for it. Of course I can do this, duh? I went to scan my passport to open a bank account. I could not get it to scan in color. I asked for help.

“One day I’ll be good at this” — I thought.

About 5 years later, I’m walking across the studio towards the printing area. I curiously stare at the brand new printer that IT installed earlier that morning, hoping that I get it right. I put my documents in, press two buttons, and two copies magically appear from the side of this machine.

A colleague walked past behind me and said “you’re good with this new loud machine!”. I immediately showed her how my passport photo scan is now printed on a A4 piece of paper.

“Oh” she said.

I stared at my own giant face for a moment, and put it in the recycling tray.

In retrospective — on this journey from scanning assistant, to producer, to studio owner, to designer, to design lead, I’ve worked hard to develop skills and mindsets to kept me relevant. However, I regularly perceive there are many small things in front of me that I completely miss somehow. Surely, there are bits we mature and develop consistently, and others that we don’t. It’s a normal process.

The interesting bit is —at the right time I learned that:

• The bicycle wheels didn’t scan correctly because of a faulty ISA-slot RS232 port card with high latency.
• The filenames didn’t register properly because of a bug in the beta build of the Scanning software.
• My employee’s last name was misspelled because it was being corrected by an automatic language detection setting in Microsoft Word.
• My passport didn’t scan in color because my badge didn’t register user privileges to use color functions on the company’s printer.
• My passport photo was scaled into an A4 size because of a weird UX decision of having ‘detect borders’ and ‘scale photocopy area to paper size’ by default, in a cryptic settings tab.

Over the years, I learned as I studied the reasons behind my moments of frustration and deception. I slowly went from “one day I’ll be good at this”, to a more proactive mindset of “one day I’ll fix this”.

• I replaced the serial port card on my dad’s computer with a new one.
• I coded my own script to rename files to very specific production needs.
• I added all my overseas employees and contractors’ names to Microsoft Office’s dictionary.
• I gave feedback to IT that 100% of expat staff will need a color scan of their passport during the on-boarding period.
• I asked IT to fix that printer.

So this is, precisely, the only advice I’d give to everybody who wants to make a difference. Get out of the well you fell into, and fix it. And while you figure out why you fell in it, leave sign posts for others.

If you’re someone driven, purposeful, and curious, as you walk in life you’re most likely going to feel you move faster than others. It is your duty to not only look ahead with more intention, but to also signpost the path behind you for those who need it.

So that the next time someone scans a passport photo, it doesn’t print in A4. So that the next time someone needs a guide, an advisor, or a mentor, they come to you.

And it’s ok if you mess up from time to time. You’ll figure out what went wrong soon after.

Originally shared in a private coaching session and now formatted for the web. Views are my own.

I’m a designer that can be described as “the guy staring at patterns and charts”. I take pride in the work I do. Nowadays I’m mostly figuring out how to enable people to have a better relationship with the technology that empowers and helps them achieve something positive. Nevertheless, arriving at that description hasn’t been easy.

The following piece is a written version of an old talk I gave a while ago. It has been formatted in a reader-friendly way. Views are my own.

Long time ago, I used to struggle with making good first impressions, with knowing if I’m being successful, and with being understood. There were several reasons behind these, but primarily: I wasn’t good at introducing myself, I wasn’t good at understanding my success when talking to people, and my stories were boring.

Here’s what I learned on my way:

Lesson 1: You can impress without a suit.

There are basically three things that define how a strong impression is made:

Personality is a combination of a lot of things: The way you talk. The way you laugh. How you project yourself to people. Your quirks and gimmicks. Your tone of voice. Your manners. That hat you always wear. That flowery pattern on the elbows of your shirt. What people will remember you for.

Passion is what gets you excited. Hopefully it will be something not related to work. Truth be told, the most interesting people I’ve met are passionate about things entirely unrelated to their field. What people will want to ask you more about.

Potential is what you can do for others. This is arguably the most important thing to let others know about you. How can you help others? What makes you be the answer to someone else’s question? This is what people will recommend you for.

Lesson 2: You can be the winner in the room.

Here’s a trick I used to use in the past, and it worked quite well. It might sound a bit mechanical, but it can definitely help you navigate conversations, pitches, group decisions, and so on.

Think of each big business meeting, pitch proposal, or any other situation that has an audience to your message. Now imagine they’re all in a village.

The Gatekeepers are often the ones in charge of not letting you in. Understandably, they’re often tasked with the hardest part: Figuring out if you’re adding value before opening the gates.

Committee is the group of people in charge of being inquisitive — Oftentimes the very senior ones, the connoisseurs of the inner workings of the village. They’re tasked with checking the feasibility and viability of what the newcomers bring.

Chiefs are the decision makers. Simple as that.

Here’s how you navigate that situation:

While this might be too generalist — It has proven to be an effective way to navigate/defuse/conquer situations where one or more of these groups play a role. Note that this isn’t meant to give you a method to interact with people, but merely to understand a bit better how you can group participants or attendees with traits that are common amongst them. This is entirely based on the expected positive outcome of said interactions.

Lesson 3: You can tell a simpler story.

Stories are fun. Unless you’re terrible at telling one. A simple framework to put together an effective story follows this structure:

Context — What happened? Where and when did it happen? Where were you? What’s the landscape like? Who’s doing what?

Conflict — What went wrong? How did it blow up? Who disrupted it? When did it hit you without notice?

Resolution — How did you resolve it? How did they patch it up? How did we put a plan for it? How did you end it?

If you frame your stories in this way, a simple paragraph can have a long lasting impact in your audience. If you’re looking for an example, this piece is one. I started with the context of Who I am, then went to the conflict of my struggles, and lastly, closed this piece with the resolution (or my learnings/lessons).

Here concludes a written version of something that took me a few years to understand by myself. I don’t believe I have all the answers, but I do spend a fair amount of time questioning things, starting with myself.

I hope this piece feels helpful to you. Let me know if it didn’t! :)

This talk was originally presented at the 2nd edition of “The art of Self Branding” at Naked Hub in Shanghai, China. It’s meant to inspire people in diverse industries, but primarily focused on those going through self development journeys or on a period of career discovery.

A short piece that has been on my drafts for way too long.

This happened a couple of years ago but I remember as if it was just yesterday. It was damp, cold, rainy, and pretty gray — Standard winter in Shanghai. Around 5pm on a weekday I had a phone call with a recruiter who convinced me to prepare my résumé for a big role at a big place.

This was the very first time in my life that I’d have to put together my CV & Portfolio for a company I admired, but that probably never heard of me, or had the slightest clue of who I was nor what I’ve been doing for the last 12 years. Until that moment I had built a pretty successful career with zero job interviews on record (AMA). Nevertheless, I was daunted by the sheer size of the company I was gonna be interviewing for. I expected to learn new things along the process, but I didn’t know these lessons were gonna be so valuable. Here are some of them:

1. Study the company

This is an obvious one. Don’t go unprepared. Learn about the company’s history, recent news, their leadership team, their regional influence, their competitors, their potential threats or risks for the foreseable future.

2. Talk to the right person with the right words.

Most people interviewing you want to hear chronologically about your successes and failures as a professional. Your ability to lead or grow. Your recognition from others. Your progression from role to role, the reasons for your promotions, etc. Managers want to hear your past stories with victories and struggles. Project leaders want to hear about your compatibility with others and stamina. Peers want to hear about your teamwork, or how you grew to be who you are.

3. Always keep your past successes in the pocket. You never know when you need to show them off.

Keep track of your successes. Have a number or percentage for every measurable positive thing you’ve achieved at both personal and organizational level.

4. Be honest and truthful when showcasing both your knowledge and your illiteracy.

Be real. Show what you’ve done. Expose what you couldn’t do. Your past is only a glimpse of who you’ll be tomorrow. Good companies hire people for a combination of potential, personality, and passion. No good company hires only because of your past.

5. Ask for clarity. Dig deep for the answer you need.

Ask though questions. If you’re sitting in a room interviewing, it’s your obligation to make sure this is the right place for you. Ask every question you have in mind, but keep in mind lesson #2 above. Choose the right words and pick the right time to ask your questions. e.g.: Ask HR about company culture, staff turn over, candidates vs. successful hires ratio. Ask project leaders about methods, processes, delegation, accountability, tracking. Ask creative about decision making, balance between creative vs execution. Ask managers about threats in the region, growth strategy, what’s keeping them up at night, what can you do to help them succeed if you’re hired. Ask peers how late do they work and why, what’s the best part about their job, etc.

6. When asked something, stick to your answers. Don’t back off.

You’re gonna have to answer a ton of questions that will help a company understand if you’re the right person or not. Be prepared to answer difficult ones and give very specific examples. Some of the tough questions I encountered are: What’s something you don’t want me to ask you about? Have you got someone else in trouble at work? Have you made a mistake that escalated beyond control? If you’re given XXX money to do either A or B, which one would you do? Would you hire the 3-years-ago version of yourself? why?

7. Be honest with your concerns and foreseen issues.

If you do the first ones well, you’re most likely going to encounter some stuff you’ll definitely want to address. You have to express your concerns and try to figure out how the company is going to address those, or how are they going to help you navigate these foreseen challenges. Here are some hypothetical scenarios: The company has downsized considerably in the region. Why is that? The company has hired way too many people recently — Are they selling out? The company has services that have been challenged by a regulator — How are they moving forward after that? The company is just too good to be true — What’s something they don’t tell publicly?

8. Be truthful when asking for what you want.

If everything keeps going smoothly, at this point you’re gonna be asked for what you want. Compensation talks are always (never?) fun. There are endless pieces written about this, so I’m not gonna dig too deep. What I’ll share though, is that the same integrity and consistency you maintain in your life, career, and portfolio, are the same basic values for sticking to your desired salary. Be transparent, be consistent, and be truthful. State what you want and disclose the reasons behind your baseline. Don’t overshoot. Don’t be greedy. Just mention what’s the number you gotta hit, and stick to it. If you wanna negotiate, it’s up to you to learn how. Everybody plays the game differently.

9. Always assume everything will be ok, but keep an emergency plan at hand.

I received verbal confirmation. After many interview rounds with several people across the region, they were preparing my offer and it was gonna be sent the following morning. I still didn’t celebrate. I did not tell anyone. I kept it all for myself. Until now.

The verbal offer never materialized into a written one. Incredibly bad timing. Certain headlines were in the news all over the internet the previous week, and I immediately knew the role had very little future at the company. I was right. They did not need me (or anybody in that specific team) to move forward.

The big lesson here is to always have an emergency plan. I did have one, but I’ll probably write about it in the future.

10. Go and do your best. Be who you needed when you were younger.

No need to explain this one. If you get the job, go and be amazing at it. If you don’t get the job, go and try your best again.

This is an old post that should have been originally published a long time ago. It does not intend to encourage anyone to switch their jobs, or take any action based on it. This is simply a reflective piece with advise that I personally needed at a certain point. I hope it helps you.

The first thing I ask when I first meet someone is: Tell me about what you do.

After years of learnings and conversations with lots of talented people, I’ve come to a general conclusion: More knowledgeable (and often very successful) people give simpler answers when asked about what they do. Answers filled with wonderful, straightforward and accurate stories of what they do, and how they do it. Some of them even go further and tell me why they do it.

It’s an incredible distillation of what they’ve become best at. It also gives me a glimpse onto some factors and motivations that drive their success, which is a tremendous source of wisdom.

So, after many years of conversations, introductions, handshakes, and some beer-infused talks, here is a collection of learnings that I’ve rephrased myself, hoping to allow their simplicity to tell a bigger story than long-paragraphs of definitions.

Re: Disciplines/Industries

• Experience Design is how to create value.
• Product Design is the tangible version of Experience Design.
• Marketing is how to sell it.
• Business Intelligence is how to measure it.
• Advertising is how to create awareness in the market.
• Strategy is how to win a market. Where to fight your battle.

Re: Product Innovation/Success

• Creativity is how something comes to exist.
• Invention happens when you make an idea become tangible before someone else.
• Innovation happens when something historically exclusive becomes available to everyone.
• Good UX exists when you clearly communicate “This just happened, and this is what you should do next” on every important touch point of a user journey.
• Product features are functional answers to user needs. People can pay for these.
• Product values are emotional answers to user needs. People expect these to be free.
• Subscriptions happen when people believe in a product’s cyclic relevance+value. One-time value, or future-promises aren’t enough. Cyclic, iterative value is where subscription money is at.

Re: Roles and Departments

• Managing is how to keep a company believing.
• Architecting is how to grow infrastructure.
• Project Management is how to keep teams focused.
• Exec Leadership is how to keep groups of people building things they believe in.
• Org Development is how to keep Content/Services/Ops teams from killing each other.
• Biz Development is how to have one less thing to worry about tomorrow.
• Finance is how to make sure the company makes more money than it loses.
• HR is how to keep employee experience stable even during chaotic times.

Re: Seniority, Career, self-awareness

• The higher you get, the more ground you see, but the less accurate your turn-by-turn directions are.
• Leadership is not about people believing in you. It’s about them following you.
• Successful career paths are never a straight line. Allow yourself to zig-zag and move horizontally if that leads you to a more fulfilling role.
• Money doesn’t really matter at high seniority levels. Money isn’t what keeps a good leader motivated (unless the company sucks).
• Good senior leaders are willing to help other people. Don’t be intimidated by them. Email them. Handshake them. Talk to them. There’s a reason why they’re up there, and you should try to get to know how.
• Instigating change won’t change a big company. Sadly, it only changes people.
• People who don’t know you, or don’t care about you, are often the ones that give you the most valuable feedback on your thinking. Expose your thinking to them (like me, writing this piece to the public).

With my simplicity, I intend to make some of the points above easier to digest and visualize. I mean no disrespect or inconsideration for industries, disciplines, roles, and so on. If you find yourself disagreeing with what I write, feel free to leave me a comment and we can discuss rationally.

Please note that I haven’t wrote about motivations/discipline/habits below — as I believe these things works differently for everyone.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to stay in touch, feel free to add me here on LinkedIn or find me on twitter.

Musicians, Painters, Sculptors, Designers, Dancers, Actors, Filmmakers. Creative minds worry about the outcome of their craft.

Depending on your line of work you might be dealing with different ways to define success, and that’s where your anxiety points to. Whether these success metrics are driven by client’s expectations, user data, growth, media exposure, money, or recognition, the simple truth is that we can’t predict the real impact of our work. Strategy+Research can do a big part of the job, but there will always be external factors to tilt your trophy.

If you’re an anxious creative, it means your work wants to be in the future. And that’s a good thing! Nobody creates for the present, or the past.

If you feel that your creative anxiety is affecting you and impacting the outer boundaries of your work life, perhaps you need to deal with it differently. You can mitigate this anxiety by diverting focus to something other than your work. Get out of the zone. Workout. Take deep breaths. Spend some time doing other activities and desensitize your mind. Come back with better focus, and a more objective approach. If you still fail to see a way out, seek out for external feedback. Get unstuck. Keep in mind that most of the time your goals are further away in a timeline of successive events, and you’re currently standing in the progress bar. What your tangible progress shows might be giving you a sense of stalling, making you feel stuck. That’s completely normal. Just don’t stop moving forward.

In the future, you can stop feeling anxious if you help to set better goals or success metrics for the work you do. While you can’t change these success metrics overnight, you might be able to identify better ways to measure and slowly drive the change as needed. Unfortunately, if you’re not in a position that gives you control over these metrics, or if you don’t have a voice in the place where you currently perform, you might have other challenges ahead.

Anxiety is a combination of things. There is no simple definition to it. Creativity is also a very complex word. It’s only normal that when both things combine, the difficulties of both become more evident. We all experience it at some point in our career, and that’s perfectly normal. You’re not alone.

Reach out if you need advise. There are plenty of others willing to give you some tips, or offer a helping hand.

– Find me on twitter as @manicho

This piece is one of many short and generic writings on topics that I find useful for creatives. They have come from notes, conversations, past experience, and daily observations of an industry that changes faster than our ability to create. New pieces every week.

Thanks to Brandon Owens for helping me start writing again.

Let’s assume you’ve just decided to wander onto the magical world of Design and Experience. Perhaps without knowing, you’ve been already exploring this territory, unaware of certain key points that can finesse you onto the true potential of what this practice can do for you, or your business.

To figure out where you are and what design can do for you, I’ll try to break down this complex topic into an unreasonably short piece. With my apologies to fellow designers for the brutal (and perhaps dangerous) simplicity of my writing, here we go!

The term ‘experience design’ (XD) would seem to be somewhat self-explanatory, i.e. designing ‘anything’, be it a product, process, event or environment based on the quality and highly specific appropriateness of the user-experience.

While this is broad, it is founded upon particular and specific ideas and rules of thumb. Let’s take a look at a set of these, before going on to explain how that might actually adhere to your new application of XD, in whatever form is relevant to your business.

Storytelling

Conveying events through motion, words, or visuals; how something captivates.

What’s the story your business can tell me? Why is there a black curtain here? Why are there quotes on the ceiling? Who lived here before? Who ate in this table? How many candles have burned in this chandelier? What do others do with your product? What do they say about it? Your business, product or service, should be able to tell a story of ‘why’ things are the way they are. Your digital products should tell a story through content. Your physical business should tell a story through interior design and a thorough branding system. Your persona should tell a story through the way you speak, the way you dress, the way you move. Help people to understand your business vision through all of these components.

Simplicity

The lack of complexity; how something is perceived.

Simple things are straightforward and easily understood. Simplicity with recurrent and frequent ‘feedback loops’ can help your audience to build trust much faster. Life is already complex . While tempting to overload on pure information, always keep in mind how much better a simple idea performs.

Cleanliness

A design aesthetic; how something looks.

Clean designs are often sparse with ample whitespace. A well balanced cleanliness in your product or service results in people feeling more relaxed and comfortable. This is clearly not for everyone, and sometimes excessive cleanliness can lead to the opposite result.

Honesty

A strategy for your content; how something communicates.

Nothing hurts your business more than when a lie is uncovered in your product or service. Being honest with what you offer from the beginning of your customers’ journey will help you connect with them in more meaningful ways. You can choose to tell an incomplete truth, sure, but don’t lie to your customers. They deserve your respect, before you deserve their money.

Clarity

Simplicity in the language; how something reads.

Perhaps one of the most important principles of good Experience Design. Don’t bathe people with complex analogies or overly-dreamy phrases. Content strategy is slowly shifting in the market, but the ones that are spearheading this change are brave brands that speak in clear lingo, without embellishments.

Reliability

A precise, problem-solving offer; how something helps people.

A good business succeeds because it solves a problem for people. Surely, perhaps your first step is to make people aware of the problem itself (hello advertising!), but your ultimate mission is to expose a promise of what people can do upon understanding/acquiring/using your product or service.

Community

A sense of belonging; how something nurtures.

Particularly in China, feeling as part of something bigger than yourself, tends to be a very effective strategy for establishing products. People want to belong, to be ranked against, and ultimately, to be given the opportunity to show-off what they can achieve (through your product).

The list can go on for many pages (touching topics like Adaptability, Flexibility, Coordinating, Scaling, Managing, etc.). You would be surprised of how much these items “makes sense” as you read through it. After all, Experience Design is also about making sense of the complexity of our world, and helping to better define it. If you’re interested in learning more about that, please get in touch and I’ll be happy to write about these pillars.

If you’re in need of help, a well-seasoned Experience Designer will be able to understand your business and create interactive maps of your service, how it connects to people, how its emotional touch points can lead to improved growth on early stages, and revenue generation opportunities. That would be a good start for guiding your next steps. Perhaps a more specialized kind of talents you need to know are known as Service Designers, and they can help to organize people, infrastructure, communications and materials of a service, and help you to improve the quality of the interaction your business has with your audience. This is a much deeper and specialized task, and although costly, it’s a great investment of your time and resources.

We can next surmise the steps of Experience Design, while realizing that however this is explained, some specialized designers may feel that toes are being stepped upon or boundaries being blurred. So let’s just think of this as a rough template which needs fine-tuning for specific needs.

1. Frame your product

Figure out what you want to do for people. What problem is it resolving? Why is it worth solving? Who is your audience? How can you explain your product to them in the shortest form possible? Here is where you need Strategists. Business advisors. User Experience Researchers.

2. Execute like a pro

Get measurable results as early as you can. Branch out and explore all the possibilities before you think you ‘nailed it’. Never chase the obvious. Here is where you need Designers. UX, Visual, Interior and more can all play a key role.

3. Use evidence and data to grow

Every number tells a story. Find out a way to understand what your customers do, and how they do it. Figure out a way to measure your success and keep track of how your decisions on the service are affecting how people use it. Use the data at hand to establish new goals and objectives. Chase the sky but use solid ladders to get there. Rockets can wait until you grow a bit stronger and confident. Here is where you need Business Developers, Business Analysts, Data Scientists.

4. Always be inquisitive with new features

Don’t bloat your business. If you’re selling radios, don’t sell air purifiers. However, if you’re selling fans, then maybe you can bring in a purifier or two to the inventory to give it a try. Contextual growth of features can help you to stay focused and make your business more stable. Being adventurous isn’t a bad thing, but unless you can handle the risk of it, don’t do it. Here is where you need User Experience Researchers, Strategists, and people with solid ideas.

5. Build a kickass company culture

Don’t only design your business, product or service, but also design your company culture. Think of it as an ecosystem of attitudes, values, social expressions, and cultural views, that you can establish, define, and manage. Companies are simply groups of people that come together to build something the believe in. Give people the freedom to be who they are, but finesse them onto the area of stable workforce. Help your teams to fall in love with the problems you’re trying to resolve, rather than with the solution to it. Unresolved things and unanswered questions are more motivating than set-on-stone features and rulebooks. Here is where you need an excellent HR professional. Business Developers. Manager-minded people who also happens to be extrovert and fun.

6. Have fun

Work hard, but also live a life. Go home. Spend quality time with your loved ones. Any business research, books and data prove that time out is a valuable must.

Final recommendations

Assembling the right team, or the right creative practice can be difficult, and it always differs from case to case. Some projects require one UX designer (how is this product relevant, how does it work?), or one Interaction Designer (how do I interact with it?), or one Visual Designer (how does it look?). However, the complexities of some of these projects might require several talents at different stages of the product/service cycle. Some processes might take a few days, or a few weeks, and some others could take months. Truth is –and this is a word we (designers) try to avoid– It depends of what you want to do. There will always be a way, but it rarely is as simple as you may think.

With the basic rule of Experience Design in mind: to meet the exact needs for the usage or consumption of a product or service with zero fuzz, you will be able to apply the same clarity to your own life. Design goes beyond the graphic canvas, beyond how something looks, or how something feels. Design is a method of problem solving, and if your company, or yourself as a human, are currently facing troubles, perhaps the best way forward is to sit down with a designer and talk to them about what you’re up to, and what comes next.

Originally written for the printed version of Status Magazine, Summer 2016. This is an unedited version.

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Parachuting into Experience Design. was originally published in theuxblog.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You’re at your desk and your boss walks in with a huge smile on his face. He wears a scent labeled epiphané, and a wristband with a usb stick that holds 12 photos in TIFF format. He is clearly on top of what’s #trending and regularly shares links to Gizmodo.

“Nick, we have to go Digital.”

Cuts to a close up shot of his grin. Cuts to black.

The year: Doesn’t matter.

Just kidding. The year is 2016.

Note: This piece was written for Shanghai SMEs, based on specifics the Chinese market.

If you got the 4 jokes in the first paragraph, you’re probably going to nod your head in agreement a couple dozen times through this piece. My sole intention is not to point at the obvious or poke fun at it, but rather than that, my purpose is to bring some clarity and guidance to the rapidly changing landscape of small and medium businesses in Shanghai, particularly the ones that are eager to go digital.

I’ll try to don’t use terms like SEO, CRM, QR, KOL, Tmall, although I’ll be basically talking about it. One big concept I won’t talk about (so we save it for the next issue) is localization. And I don’t mean language-localization, I mean culturally-relevant content localization. This is a big, wide topic, and it deserves its own study. Most of the following piece, however, can be applied to both English and Chinese content.

There’s simply no easy way to describe what digital means, because it’s connotation depends entirely on what kind of context you put it on. As a creative, I constantly fight the urge to answer every question with “Well, it depends” — but in this case, there’s no escape from it. To structure this piece, I’m gonna explore the diverse meanings of the phrase “Going Digital” according to different industries. I’ve had my dose of experience for a decade or so, and the friendly advise ahead comes from quite a bit of struggle to survive the digital change that showered the world in recent years.

So, if you are part of a business that really wants to go digital, below is an excerpt of some of the steps you could take to help you on that transformation. Some of the advise in other categories will fit yours too, so read thoroughly.

Case 1:
If you run a small workshop on the lifestyle area, going digital means you need Wechat marketing.

Foundation: Register a Wechat Subscription Account. It allows you to send daily messages to your followers, although it buries them in a ‘folder’ called Subscriptions on Wechat’s active chat list. Alternatives further below.

Content: Write to your followers and talk to them as if they were an audience, physically present in front of you. Don’t blog. Just talk to them, by writing in a more natural language. Prompt questions, encourage tip sharing, share interesting images or pieces you find online. Be careful with the frequency of posting because it quickly dilutes the interest. Don’t just inform. Involve your audience.

Operations: You can do it all by yourself. No need to get an extra help or a social media manager for this purpose. If you need tools for sorting content before publishing, you can use tools like Pinterest for collections, and the Notes app on your phone or your computer for the text. Use web wechat to send to yourself the text from the computer to your phone, to make it faster to write/edit/publish content.

Case 2:
If you run a small F&B place. Coffee shop, Juice Bar, or similar. Going digital means you need all of the above, plus web presence and digital content.

Foundation: Open a Wechat service account (only ‘businesses’ can open these, not individuals). With this type of account you can post one time per week, but the potential to reach your audience is much higher because your messages go directly onto their active chats list. A clever way that I’ve seen my friends at Heyday do, is when they post “This week at Heyday” and give you a glance at all the performers during the ongoing week. It’s pleasant to read, it’s not too intrusive, and it informs quite nicely. For a small Coffee Shop or a Juice Bar, this solution is ideal, since your offering is often static. There are not frequent changes in your products or variation in your shop, but instead, there’s an opportunity to create a weekly ‘window’ of engagement to your customers.

Content: With a Wechat service account, you can send push notifications, gather user data (quite valuable) and get geo-location information from your followers (as long as they grant it). This helps you to get a better picture of where your audience is, geographically, and perhaps setup a plan to expand your business, or create incentives for those valuable costumers that are a bit further away from your main shop.

Also, definitely register a URL and put together a website. I can’t stress enough how valuable your online presence is. You don’t need a ICP to have a static online storefront, but if you’re planning to regularly link your Wechat followers to your website, you might need to look into getting a ICP (this is a license that lets you register/host websites in local servers). There is a lot of documentation and recommendations for this part, so your own research is needed here as well. Check out www.strikingly.com if you want a website builder tool that even the Managing Editor of this magazine can use.

Operations: For your store, you might wanna consider having a tablet with a running slideshow of your menu. This can be easily done with free apps, although your content might require software that isn’t necessarily free (think Image retouching, custom fonts, etc). Another advantage of this, is that a QR on a digital display is 60% more likely to be scanned than a printed QR on a piece of paper, plus, if you are wise designing your content, you can reuse the same elements across wechat/web/store displays.

This quickly becomes costly, if you don’t manage it well. For your digital presence, you need regular updates on your digital marketing. Flyers that are branded and well designed can cost you quite a bit, so invest some time into buying a few good design templates that you can handle yourself. I’ve seen people learn the basics and be able to work their way out of a design problem, but I would definitely advise to partner up with local talents for that.

Say, for instance, bring a group of good Instagram aficionados, with considerable follower base. Invite them for a tour of your place, and get them to experience what you consider is worth sharing on social media. You would be surprised how involved, and amazingly talented the Instagram community is in Shanghai, and how humble and professional these guys and girls can be. A few coffee shops have done great deals with some talented photographers and managed to get nice social media posts that boost their digital marketing.

Consider also how compatible your branding is for digital presence. For instance, you need branded cups, napkins, flyers, art on the walls, etc. Anything that is captured on your place, should somehow reflect your brand. This amplifies massively the reach your establishment’s name has on social media.

The estimated investment for a Domain and a decent Website made by yourself with an online tool, goes for at least 1500 CNY a year. Digital Displays or Tablets go for 1800+ CNY. A dedicated freelancer for design needs (recommended) goes for 1500–2000 CNY per day, but you probably need this person only once every three months.

Case 3:
If you are a certified Health & Wellness service professional, going digital means you need all of the above, plus a booking system.

Foundation: Setup a dedicated device (phone or tablet) and setup multiple ‘calendars’ on it. Set one calendar for business reminders (create events for accounting, tax filling, paying bills, salaries, starting dates), another one for customers (set events with Name + Phone), etc. Digital scheduling can happen through paid services, but the foundation of just being able to have full control of your schedule and workload in a transparent and fully digital way, allows you to be very efficient with your week. Efficiency is the number one item that 70% of businesses in Shanghai lack on.

Operations: You can use your customers’ booking calendar to track how often your customers book you. Say, you run a hairdressing salon, or a skincare center, by knowing the frequency of their visits, you can reach out in a timely manner and the service will feel more personal. You can receive calls or messages with booking requests and you can have a pretty flexible way of handling it with a simple app switch.

Now you can do a lot of this manually, which still saves you a lot of time in organizing schedules and so on, or you can pay for an online service that makes digital bookings as easy as tapping on a webpage through your mobile browser or Wechat. Several options out there for you, so additional research is needed. Some of these services run for 70–100 CNY a month, but the benefit and clarity they bring to your scheduling is worth it.

Case 4:
If you’re a medium size business looking to grow your digital presence, going digital means you need a strong website and digital communications, and a social media campaign.

Foundation: People often feel daunted by not knowing anything about design or code or marketing, but truth is, many of your customers just want an honest window onto your business. What do you do? What are you good at? What can you do for others so they have one less thing to worry about? If you can answer these three questions, you already have a Company Mission (old school term), a confident sales statement, and a service descriptor that says everything your customers need to know to assess whether they’d like to call you or not.

As for digital communications, stop using QQ/Gmail/Hotmail emails, and go for custom domains. hello@businessname.com or nick@sensibleshop.com will make a better impression than 123456789@qq.com – Plus your email handle becomes more memorable.

Content: Build a beautiful website. Either hire someone great, or do it with the right tools. Avoid Wordpress. Avoid downloading HTML templates. Aim to use services like Strikingly or Squarespace, and get your business out there. Depending on your line, perhaps ‘H5 builders’, Tmall or JD are also good ways to go online.It’s really much easier than you think. Trust me. My first site sucked. It didn’t matter. I had one. Nobody else in my circle did. Guess who is ahead now?

Operations: Ongoing maintenance is a pain in the butt if you use open source tools or Wordpress. Simply put, great platforms for business are built by people who understand business, and people who understand business rarely do things for free. You gotta spend money on a reliable platform for ongoing operations. Customer Support, Emailing, Shipping & Tracking, Invoicing, etc. Everything can be good or it can be great, depending on how you invest your passion and kuais in it.

Case 5:
If you just want to build an ‘app’ to go Digital, you need a lot of things you probably don’t have at hand right now. Also, a ton of money.

The ultimate way to go digital, is definitely through a custom app. I don’t mean to demotivate you, but if you want to be realistic, there are many elements you have to understand if you’re looking to build one.

A simple app developed by a team of 3 people can cost you, at least, 300.000 CNY. That cost covers design and development. Ongoing costs for maintenance and updates might apply. A more robust app, with integration with social networks, or that interconnects with other apps or services, can go for 600k-900k CNY.

Ultimately, a robust app that captures the core of what your company does, and provides all the needed functionality, can easily cost you 3M-5M CNY. That’s a company, basically.

Now, there are alternatives in the market that you might be able to use. For instance, there are Wechat stores you can use for your shop, right out of the box. There are more robust solutions for digital engagement and marketing, where if you have a lot of followers and you’re looking to distill the top percentage of engaged brand advocates, there are alternatives as well — A good one is PullPath. These might not be a full replacement of a custom app, but perhaps they’re a great start to help you add value to your business and bloom in the digital space.

Closing thoughts

Going digital doesn’t mean having a website, or having a Wechat account that sends fliers. Going digital means that you understand the hardware that hosts the software that performs your needed task. Going digital means you know what percentage of your sales come from referrals on Wechat. Or how many unique visits your store has. Or how many email addresses you’ve collected through a newsletter form. Or where is your audience based.

Going digital means you understand that your digital flyers (a JPG basically) should be 960px wide and more than 1500px tall, so it can be scrolled when people share them, so you can showcase more information in an elegant way. Going digital means you know that Wechat crops the center block of the image, so you design a flyer that uses it as an advantage to be more attractive from the thumbnail on a moments feed.

Going digital means that you prefer one image reposted by your followers or referrals, rather than multiple images that require more operations (save this, save that, search and find it, tag it, select this, select that, post –Nobody has time for that). Going digital means that you fully understand how your audience uses technology to access what they need, at the right time. It means showing the right thing just in time, rather than just in case.

Going digital means you do exactly what you’re doing now, but finding ways to use existing tools to amplify your reach, to save you time, to improve your productivity, to boost your sales, to help you sleep longer hours, to give you more time for your family at home.

For example – I wrote the first half of this piece on my tablet, then switched to my phone as I was on the subway, then finished the first draft on my laptop. I sent a PDF via Wechat to Nick, who looked at it on his Wechat app for Mac, who then used annotations to bounce it back to me via Email, so I can finish it and have it ready to be printed in this beautiful glossy paper.

That makes me a digital writer, I guess.

So perhaps, you, dear Shanghai reader, are also a digital person. You have gone digital already, and it’s now time to organize those apps and services into neat folders, labeled emails, and recurrently-paid subscriptions to platforms that will multiply your growth, and give you heaps of time to continue growing as a non-digital human, doing things like talking to people, and not looking at your phone.

A rain of little tips to finish

Your wi-fi password shouldn’t be something like “iloveburger” or “ilovebeer”. It’s outdated. It’s not fun. Use things like “ofcourseimhungry” or “whatsyournextbeer” so when people share the password among themselves, they’re also triggering potential purchases.

Create wallpapers for your business and share them through Wechat. You’d be surprised how much reach you can have with something apparently meaningless as a mobile wallpaper. I’ve reached hundreds of thousands of devices in the last years by doing this.

Create consistent branding on social media. Use the same identifier on Wechat, Weibo, Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc. Make your brand easy to find. People call it SEO, but I call it ‘make it findable by its name’. No tricks here, just basic naming conventions and descriptors.

Partner with good talents on Instagram. You don’t need a KOL, you need someone with a good reputation and a sizable follower base (1000–1500). They can bring a massive audience to your business. Reward brand advocates in your own ways.

Good luck! Welcome to the digital world!

Brb, I gotta go see Nick’s boss now. We’re going digital.

Originally written for the printed version of Status Magazine, Summer 2016. This is an unedited version.

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Everybody wants to go Digital. Nobody knows what it means. was originally published in The Agency on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.