Perhaps Bruce’s landmark trip was to the Taj Mahal.
“I took off my shoes and gazed at the majesty around me. I’d seen the
pictures and on TV so many times. But being there was completely
different. It’s immersive learning.”
There were things you couldn’t absorb from a photo, like the smell, Ted
Shin realized. It stinks, he thought. “I learned something I couldn’t really
describe,” Ted said, abandoning the South Korean practice of rote
memorization he had grown up with. “It’s not memorizing it.”
Bruce explained to the students that the drape of sunlight reflected
differently off the Taj Mahal’s bulbous dome and marble minarets, shifting
with the time of day; and this shower of sun was a symbol of god’s
presence. The imitation of nature was one of the goals of the Mughals who
built the Taj Mahal. Marble was in short supply, so cutting waste and
carving with precision were key. It was a story that was similar to the
experience of those from South Korea, with its lack of resources.
The Taj Mahal became the inspiration for new product ideas that could
be developed only through experiencing new environments. One student
told me he had been videotaping the inside of the Taj Mahal and realized
that he couldn’t capture everything around him with his flat, two-
dimensional camera. So he went back to Samsung and designed a five-
lensed camcorder that could capture angles not just in front of the
cameraman but all around him. He won all sorts of in-house design awards.
“Hey, why don’t we design something for ourselves?” someone in the
classroom suggested when they returned to Seoul. “What kind of
workstation do we want?”
It would be the capstone to their class. The students had been designing
products for other people their entire careers. Now they’d have to pass the
ultimate test: designing something good enough for themselves.
After days of toiling away at sketches of lamps and tables and chair
placements, Ted approached the front of the class and nervously handed
Gordon Bruce his blueprints. He was afraid Bruce was going to respond
like his Samsung bosses, who picked their favorite ideas without consulting
others.
Bruce thumbed through the papers and looked up at Ted.
“So what do you like?” Bruce asked him.
Ted froze. What do I like?