The beauty of practicing Just Enough Design in our daily lives

Try envisioning design as water. Water is indispensable to human life, connecting us to our environments in visible and invisible ways. It can cause disasters like tsunamis (and so can design when it is uncalled for or when it tries to add nonexistent value), but it can also materialize as a rainbow, radiant in the light of the sun. Just as water makes every phenomenon possible, design is an essential component of every human endeavor....

September 2, 2023 · 8 min · 1512 words · Tiffena Kou

3 things a new hotel brand teaches us about product planning

The hospitality industry is making a strong rebound after the pandemic, and many hotel chains are now creating new sub-brands targeting a very diverse band of travelers. Recently I came across a new hotel brand B4T owned by the East Japan Railway Company (JR East). In addition to the highly efficient train system they operate, JR East also runs shopping malls and hotels at train stations. Utilizing contactless self-checkin and checkout machine becomes a norm in Japanese business hotels these days, but what strikes me the most is how much farther the B4T chain goes by introducing cloud reception....

August 31, 2023 · 4 min · 821 words · Tiffena Kou

3 time-tested leadership lessons passed down by Japanese temple carpenters 1000 years ago

Who are temple carpenters and what do they do? If you have travelled to Japan, you must have visited a traditonal temple or two that was built several hundred years ago. And if you ventured into ancient capitals such as Nara or Kyoto, chances are that you’ve shared ground with a wooden structure that have stood over a millenium. The book Ki no ichi Ki no kokoro ( 木の...

January 26, 2023 · 3 min · 1251 words · Tiffena Kou

2022 in recap - my most favorite books

2022 has passed and it’s time to do some cleaning up and recap. Since I’ve implemented my book tracker system, I’ve been taking a more structural approach to manage my learnings (notes, to-do-next, rating, time spent on each book, time-to-revisit, etc). Here’s a quick glance at what I enjoyed most last year. Time is medicine Time is medicine is written by Hiruma Eiko, a Guiness-certified oldest pharmacist to prescribe advice...

January 10, 2023 · 3 min · 1465 words · Tiffena Kou

What can Viktor Frankl's search for meaning in inevitable sufferings teach us today?

Why am I here? What should I do now? These questions come to our minds from time to time, regardless of what stage of life we are in. We play many roles every day. We may be students, looking forward to improving our studies and securing a good job after graduation. We may be children, trying to live in harmony with our parents. We may also be team members, working jointly to finish a project on time to satisfy our boss or client....

November 25, 2022 · 3 min · 446 words · Tiffena Kou

'The Drowned and the Saved' - an introspection of humanity's grey zone

“The Drowned and the Saved” is the last book from Holocaust survior and writer Primo Levi, published shortly before his suicide in 1987. In this book, he attempted to address the questions “why atrocities happened” and “how to prevent them from happening again”. In different chapters, he distilled his experiences in the camp to explore the fluidity (he termed it “the grey zone”) in human characters, the fragility of perceived memory as well as the state of mind of those in the camps....

October 6, 2022 · 5 min · 941 words · Tiffena Kou

How to upgrade your Kindle while keeping your existing notes, bookmarks and reading progress

For many years I’ve been using a Kindle Touch as my primary device to read books and long-form web content. I also employ a strict regimen to capture my learnings via my BookTracker app. Recently, I upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite for its better screen resolution and warm backlight. I thought that the upgrade would be as seamless as that of a phone’s, and I could easily migrate all my notes and reading progress over....

September 5, 2022 · 8 min · 1671 words · Tiffena Kou

How to produce an interactive visualization using Matplotlib in Python

Problem with 3D charts I’ve been using Jupyter notebooks inside Visual Studio Code as my Python coding environment, and really enjoy its capability to mix markdown, code, text output and charting in the same place. Recently, I want to visualize the distribution pattern of my dataset for trimming. As I plot a 3D graph using the Matplotlib library, a static inline graph works fine in my notebook, but it provides not much value as it flattens one axis where my data are concentrated....

July 28, 2022 · 4 min · 732 words · Tiffena Kou

Danshari - a radical way to declutter before clutter even happens

What is Danshari Danshari is a mental model pioneered by Hideko Yamashita via a book series in the 2000s, as a way to organize our lives by making deliberate choices. Per Yamashita, she got the idea from her yoga practice and a pilgrimage stay in Koyasan. I used the term mental model and not housekeeping tactics because I truly believe that this has far more practicality beyond just organizing our...

July 1, 2022 · 4 min · 1972 words · Tiffena Kou

Integrate Firebase CLI & Hugo with VS Code for a seamless development environment in Windows

In my blog post about deploying a Hugo site to Firebase hosting, I mentioned the inconvenience of jumping out of Visual Studio Code to use the Firebase CLI for project creation, maintenance and deployment. I’ve finally resolved this issue so that my workflow can now be kept 100% inside VS Code. My current workflow Here’s my current workflow on a Windows machine. I author my blog (via markdown and javascript/html files) in VS Code, then use Hugo to stage to localhost and generate static files for the site....

June 22, 2022 · 5 min · 965 words · Tiffena Kou