Reflection 2
I couldn’t recall how many times I’ve visited the Metropolitan Museum, but every time there’s always something new or things that I’ve never seen before that inspired me.
This was the first time I entered the ancient Egypt showroom, and then I realized that the showrooms of Ancient Egypt and ancient Asian countries were alined right next to each other.
Besides the cultural differences, the one thing that appeared most frequent was various types of ancient recordings in the forms of painting and writing. It brought my attention to the differences in their writing utensils, which differed by culture and time.
I tried to imagine the procedure of people in the old times trying to improve their writing utensils, especially the form of paper. When people first wanted to record something, they painted everything on rocks. Then after they move out of the cave, they might want to record on more portable materials that were easier to organize, such as a slab or a clay tablet. As the historical progress moved forward, people began to come up with problems like” How can we communicate more efficiently with people living at other places?”, “How could we make those records more portable?” or “How can we make those writing utensils more affordable?”… Those questions might not be directly linked to writing utensils itself, but after all, people probably realized that improving the writing utensils would be the one of the solutions to it. The Papyrus we saw in every ancient Egypt showroom and rice paper in ancient Asia showrooms all represented not only writing utensils themselves, in behind them, were solutions that ancient people came up with to solve problems raised by different scenarios at their time.
The process of how people invent and optimize writing utensils relates me to some of the strategies we went through in design thinking. Designing something was never a single-layered and straightforward process, and solving one problem does not mean solving the entire wicked problem. As we researched further, newer problems emerged. Those problems might not be directly or obviously linked to the original problem we’re trying to solve. But as we research further, we will notice that they are interconnected in a way that’s not visible in the first place. There’s no such thing as a “cure-all” solution to everything, and the only thing we can do is to optimize our design and let those new findings further develop our answer.
