10 May 2007 1732H

BusinessWeek design podcast on design in China

Sad. The only time I can blog lately is when I’m stuck in Detroit at the airport and ironically, it would have been faster to drive back to Chicago from here at this point. Anyway, on to the blog.

Gordon Bruce talks about Design in China, implied, Westerners, designing for Chinese consumers, on this podcast from BusinessWeek. Takeaways: there is a government directed design initiative, but the biggest design problem is that “design to a Chinese person means form,” and this is a “cultural mindset.”

You mean, unlike the US or the so-called West, where you can stop anyone on the street and ask them if design means form and they’ll say no, it’s much more than that?

He goes on. The people making the decisions about the design curriculum are the politicians, who have no design background.

You mean, unlike the US, or the so-called west, where entrenched bureaucrats at colleges and universities who have no design background make ultimate decisions about funding and hiring and curricula? And of course it’s not political. It’s ‘collegial.’ Don’t forget the stakeholders we deal with on a daily basis. They don’t have no design background neither.

Furthermore, he avers, Chinese consider Western people to be far too simplistic, far too pragmatic with their solutions. The Chinese believe that if they throw a hundred bullets, maybe one will get to the center, as opposed to a individualistic, pragmatic approach.

You mean, unlike the hundreds of versions and revisions often asked for in projects here in corporate America, where poor project leadership and deep pockets leads, sometimes, to maybe one solution, often glommed together from several parts? You mean, design by committee here in the US isn’t ‘death by a thousand cuts?’

And that there is a hierarchical political system that is very much part of the business structure. “In America, business is business. But in China, business is politics.”

You mean, unlike the pervasive politics in the corporate environments of the US, or the so-called West? And I think your source has got it wrong. In China, politics is business. As it is here. As it always has been.

So you’ll forgive me if I’m a little skeptical about the whole thing.

There’s a part of me that says design in or for China is something of a load of crap. Design is a social, human activity, like language, and so it is happening whether or not Western elite designers come to China to educate the poor heathen Chinee with the religion of Western Design. In fact I think it would be best if like all manner of first contact that we honor the Prime Directive and let the natives be. You know. Kind of stay out of their business. See, when American or Western designers talk about design education for China, they’re really, whether they know it or not, usually talking about design imperialism, a kind of Western Design as a Second Language program to inculcate the foreigners with. It’s the latest chapter in China’s struggle with modernity. Fine if they want to come here, take the design knowledge back with them and take on leadership themselves. Even better really, since we do want to see China become a diversified modern economy strong enough to hold its own in the world with service industries and not just manufacturing.

So, there can be such a thing as design in/for China — it will happen whether or not Western designers come there or not — but there will be no such thing as Chinese design, per se, until China develops its own design vernacular. Ultimately I think that may be 100 years from now, when we become more used to the idea of a united China, which has to have a common culture, and therefore, the basis for a Chinese design vernacular, a design language, can therefore arise, rather than the China of Beijing, the China of Shanghai, of Guangdong, Hong Kong, Taiwan, which all have their own unique and locally relevant design languages. In other words, I don’t think that there is a design in/for China so much as design in/for Chinas. I feel like we have barely gotten past the era when we even considered that there was a world outside the ancestral village, beyond the nearest market town, much less an idea of cosmopolitan, united China where North and South are able to partake of a common culture, much less a common language.

Also, that there are design techniques — ways of looking, ways of describing and expressing, ways of thinking — that are not universal, are fraught with imperialist political relations and have hidden cultural values embedded within their analysis and perspectives. We call this orientalism, and a self-critical, reflexive approach is necessary to call its ideas and modalities and the tacit assumptions of their practitioners into question. Chinese design leadership and thought, influenced by the interplay of stylistic (”form”) exchanges throughout the East Asian market, dominated now by Japan (which had a very strong native design voice which had been strongly influenced by China, historically) and Korea (which learned from Japan and the US, former and current colonial masters, and before them, China), will come into its own when it criticizes these western-influenced learnings and creates its own techniques. You might even call it an anti-Design design movement, which itself ironically will be designed and have designed artifacts.

But when you consider that kaizen, that most essential paragon of Japanese industrial efficiency and quality, was itself derived from Western influences from Taylor, Deming, and Juran, one wonders if there is anything that can be considered to be culturally “pure,” insofar as it is not influenced by the design and intellectual imperialist influence of the US and the West. But what we are looking for is not so much cultural purity so much as a uniquely Chinese way of looking at, thinking about, and describing the world. Perhaps cultural purity is now and has always been a myth, but a uniquely Chinese visual language, I think it can be agreed upon, has always already emerged into and on its own, and will again, in due time.

I’m going to call my pal Joel, a usability manager in Hong Kong, to dialogue with me about this. Because I’ll be the first to claim, I know nothing about design in China. I have emptied the proverbial cup, and only then is it possible to begin true learning. And this goes along with what I have always believed about this sort of work: if you want to talk about design in China, don’t talk to Western intermediaries posing as experts, talk to the Chinese.

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