In this dark time of the pandemic outbreak, everyone has got a learning opportunity. I’m not implying the likes of Linkedin posts and Instagram stories asking people to come out of the outbreak with a new skill but rather the idea of getting a new perspective of life and people around us. Many of us have a new-found appreciation for healthcare & essential workers and simple comforts we took for granted. I’m sharing my experience of how I overcame a situation using the age-old method called “jugaad” in India (read as frugal innovation).
I was invited to be a part of a white-board session as a fill-in for another student who was scheduled to take part in it. I was informed about 30 mins prior to the session that a slot was available if I was interested but I had to use a white-board for the activity, as the name of the session goes. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of a white-board session, it is where you externalize your thought process of approaching and solving a problem using a marker & white-board. So this was the situation I was in, being informed 30mins before a white-board session through an email while I was attending a class and not having a white-board.
I live in an off-campus student housing with no means to acquire a white-board within the time-frame given. As an ex-Amazon employee, I was quite familiar with the concept of “frugality” which is one of its leadership principles. It is valued with such importance that there is an award and story behind it called “the door desk”. The story goes like this, during the early days of Amazon there was a need for desks but due to the cost-ineffectiveness of the desks available, Bezos decided to buy doors that were way cheaper and decide to put legs to it, thus the name “door desk”. The idea behind it was to come up with cheap functioning alternatives that does the job.
I think it (door-desk) represents ingenuity, creativity and peculiarity, and the willingness to go your own path.
As said by Nico Lovejoy, an early Amazon employee about the door desk.
Coming back to my story, first I thought of an elaborate camera setup which would allow me to use A4 sheet on my desk instead of white-board, not a very effective idea provided the time constraint. Next, I came up with something I thought was brilliant. I thought of sticking A4 sheets to my wall but it would have too much tape running between them which might make it impossible to write on. This is when I remembered the brown-paper bags from my Amazon deliveries (see the connection?) which were stacked in my balcony. I quickly cut it up and stuck it to my wall. I joined the session a couple of minutes late but I didn’t have to make any additional camera set up to use the paper-bag board. The session went well but unfortunately, the people in the video call were not able to see the black sharpie on the brown bag. Since I was thinking out loud while I scribbling on the makeshift board people were able to follow the idea I presented.
At the end of my session, I took a snap of it and instantly shared using Google photos (thanks to instant cloud backup). One might argue that I could have used one of the multiple product/service offerings that tackles this problem, but finding an apt service, signing-up, and learning it within the short span of time might have been difficult. Maybe a lesson for the future, use online collaborative tools more often. Also, I might have missed the opportunity to tell a decent story had I done that.
Many people today including me, often throw away stuff that can be upcycled before sending it to recycling or trash. I think this also taught me to think about sustainable practices we can adopt, now that we have a ton of free time.
Thanks for reading my first medium article/story.
