The thing about all great things is there needs to be a beginning. No beginning means no outcome. Without a beginning, every great idea will remain simply that – an idea.
It was about Christmas last year when a text from my dear friend Narita popped up on my phone. Narita never sends general greetings messages, so I knew it was something important. I immediately picked up the phone.
We spoke about the upcoming Singapore Design Week and how to integrate the SmartVizX Virtual Reality product into the launch. It was an innovative idea, but it brought a serious challenge – we are not always in Singapore. We agreed on a time to speak and ideate. Ideate we did.
We agreed on the hardware and early access program soon enough, but the real challenge was who will test the product and demonstrate it to the users without us being there. This blog is not about Narita or myself. This is about the true champions of the Singapore Design Week – Apprentices at The Node.
We built this product with a different vision for the present and future users. We believe that students of design, who will be the future users of our product, are the future of the product as well. And that belief stands truly vindicated today.
The team of apprentices – Kester Lim, Siang Wee, Rachel Wong, Theresa Ng – took to the product better than anyone we have seen to date. The way they grasped a new technology like Virtual Reality and becoming adept at it so quickly speaks volumes about the comprehension abilities of these young minds.
The apprentices demonstrated spectacular learning and adoption skills and outperformed us senior pros, while all along we had believed we were the ones with the bragging rights.
Within days we saw their understanding of the product get better than ours. It validated our hypothesis that this was technology for the younger generation. It has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to have worked with this team.
As long as we have designers like them coming into the profession, we can all feel really confident of passing the baton. We all wish them the very best and look forward to making them a part of our product plans ahead. We would happily recommend them to other design firms as well.
This was a guest post by Gautam Tewari of SmartVizX, a Virtual Reality software company that is re-defining the norms in architectural design and real estate with its award-winning VR solutions.
