NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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Designing the Future: Exploring China’s Design Transformation
Lorraine Justice, Ph.D. Swire Chair Professor Head of the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic
GK VanPatter Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute Co-Founder, Humantific Making Sense of Cross-Disciplinary Innovation
NextDesign Leadership Institute DEFUZZ THE FUTURE! www.nextd.org Follow NextD Journal on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nextd Copyright © 2004 NextDesign Leadership Institute. All Rights Reserved. NextD Journal may be quoted freely with proper reference credit. If you wish to repost, reproduce or retransmit any of this text for commercial use please send a copyright permission request to journal@nextd.org
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1 GK VanPatter: Congrats on the new move, Lorraine. We heard that you had taken a new position as Head of the School of Design there in Hong Kong. With so much going on in China that relates to the next design landscape, we thought we might spontaneously check in with you. China has become one of the hottest subjects in American business this year. We have seen Fortune magazine do a special issue on China (October 2004), and a recent issue of Business Week magazine (December 6, 2004) had China as the cover story. When did China appear on your design education radar screen and how did the Hong Kong Polytechnic find you in America? Lorraine Justice: I had traveled to China in 1989. The Tiananmen Square uprising had just happened and unbeknownst to me, the US government had stopped all travel to China. My husband and I were in southern China at a conference and we were the only foreigners at the conference, except for a fellow from Austria. It was a scary experience at times, but we were treated so wonderfully and the people were so friendly and genuine. After that trip, I ended up having friends from the mainland that I kept in touch with all these years. I began my informal study of China then and always wanted to go back for a visit. I had the opportunity in 2001 when I took a group of IDSA educators to a joint conference I co-hosted in Beijing. That experience confirmed my appreciation of the people. I was at Georgia Tech serving as the Director of the Industrial Design Program when I got a call from a search firm. I was happy at Georgia Tech and was working hard to grow the program, but this call intrigued me because of the scope of the School at PolyU (45 faculty members and 800 students), and the fact that I knew mainland China wanted to put in a minimum of 400 design programs in the country. This was also scary and exciting at the same time. The US has about 58, with only some of them in the top tier.
2 GK VanPatter: It sounds like you are in for a great adventure. Can you tell us something about why you went to Hong Kong to become the head of a design school at this particular time, rather than stay in America? Lorraine Justice: I saw this as an opportunity to really affect design education (for the good) in the world on a vast scale. I was also frustrated with the universities and the corporations in the US. I worked in both for many years and the structure and atmosphere was not inclusive for design. People were protecting their own turf on all accounts and didn't have room for the new guy (design). Many of us in the design profession spent every day promoting design through our work and other venues, but people are loathe to give up what little power and security they perceived they would lose if they made design important. I did see improvement over the last twenty years, but what alarmed and amazed me is that the Chinese government understood design and all its implications. I realized this situation in the US was the same as the one we had with Japan and the automotive industry. The US automotive industry did not wake up until they got their butts kicked by the Japanese. I fully believe the US can rise to do great products, but it will have to be a top-down approach. We educators can provide the best design students (granted this is difficult!), but it won’t make any difference in Page 2 of 14
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many of the companies. The creativity is often stopped at middle management. Senior management needs to send the signal to middle management that innovation through the design process, crazy as it can be, is effective. Design education also needs to dramatically improve in the US. We need to make different design students that can rise to the occasion once they are given the chance.
3 GK VanPatter: I want to ask you more about China, but before we get to that, help us better understand what you mean by “people were protecting their own turf” in the US. Who or what disciplines are we talking about? Perhaps it might be useful to use a construct from Edward deBono here. Edward talks about various types of blockages to thinking. He describes three types: 1. blockage by a gap, 2. blockage by there being something in the way, and 3. blockage because there is nothing in the way . . . also meaning blockage by perceived adequacy. What is the nature of the blockage that you experienced in America in the realm of product design? Lorraine Justice: Well, I would have to say I perceived and experienced all of these blockages in industry and academia. Although things are changing somewhat in the US (too slowly for me!), the business schools and engineering schools had difficulty understanding the value of design, even though in some cases it was explained and demonstrated to them over and over again. They are starting to understand, but it has taken 20-plus years. I think people are overloaded and don’t want to always take on new initiatives. I do acknowledge that designers may not be the best people to explain their worth, but we now have business people telling business people the value of design. In many cases they don't get it or don't want to get it. The linear thinkers who often run corporations get frustrated with things that deviate, and creativity and innovation have to have that deviation to explore opportunities. I do have to say that the “ego-based” designers have not helped the design field at all. They have put their arrogant and crazy personas out there, and many people believe all designers are difficult to work with and do not relish the thought of collaboration. Hopefully, the design prima donna will go away in the future . . . and artists and movie stars will fulfill the star function. 1. How does design help the bottom line? Well, often times incorporating design thinking in a company is an investment in the future, just as you might invest in an expensive piece of equipment. But I understand the equipment is an immediate write-off and provides immediate output. Incorporating design thinking into a corporate or academic culture is a belief process more than an R&D process to me. The corporate culture needs to embrace design thinking. Many people are unwilling or even unable (because of their own training) to change their thinking about including truly innovative processes. Design helps the bottom line by coming up with those innovative products that sell. I don’t believe innovation can only come from marketing and engineering. It is the emotional side of product “lust” that makes people have to have an item, a desire or a need, but the designers can combine the aesthetics and usability concepts to achieve a fabulous product.
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2. Bad experiences with designers. I will be the first to acknowledge that designers are/can be difficult to work with. Much like scientists, they are so engaged in their thought processes – and they must be engaged to be successful – that they often cannot articulate the nebulousness of design thinking. I consulted for a corporation who fired six designers in a row. I realized they were hiring the wrong type of designer. They were hiring designers who were trained to be self-expressive rather that useroriented with a team approach. This particular company was a science-based organization and the design fit was all wrong. I helped this company find the right type of designer through a search firm and the results have been fabulous. 3. Fear of Change. I believe underneath it all the tired and weary corporate or academic person may not want to undertake a new inclusion such as design processes in their work day. It is something else to learn. It is similar to the older generation of workers who had to embrace computers or become obsolete themselves. Design may be perceived this way in some organizations and can be met with resistance, even if subtle. As with computers, it will be the new generations of corporate kids and assistant professors who were trained to understand and include design thinking in their work who will eventually make the change. It will take years and years in the US for this to occur if changes are not required by CEOs. It will happen sooner if China starts to design every product on earth. Can you tell I am passionate about this topic?
4 GK VanPatter: Thanks for sharing this. It is a story that we often hear behind the scenes, one that is rarely covered in the traditional, promotional-oriented design press. Our own experience is quite different. Would you be interested in hearing a different perspective on this? Lorraine Justice: Absolutely.
5 GK VanPatter: OK. I can explain this in five minutes, but it took me twenty-five years of practice in unusual settings to figure it out. A key ingredient in our own experience is that we have long since set aside all the entanglements of what designers once were. We have set aside the academic debates around what design is and is not, how it is or should be considered different. We have set aside the idea that design is a specialized language that others need to learn. We have instead moved to a universal language. We have long since changed our focus from how to be different than others to how we can add a type of value that is much needed and in short supply on planet earth. We have found those to be two very different questions, two different routes to embark on. One can arrive at difference, but have no value that is needed and in short supply. To understand what is in short supply we have to better understand the way real people work. It is no secret that today many people work in organizations small and large, so designers must understand what goes on there. This is a much wider take, a much broader conversation than looking at the way humans design/develop products. Product design is small potatoes in comparison to human performance. Page 4 of 14
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All over the planet humans are interacting with each other, struggling to solve complex problems and generate new opportunities. Therein lies tremendous opportunity for a rethought design. We seek to place next design leaders at the center of that opportunity universe. In order to get there, we must step outside of ourselves. That is the short version of the story. It troubles me when I see business people telling business people the value of design. That alone should tell us something about the state of design education today. We must discover and explain the compelling reasons why human-centered design needs to be at the center of all forms of human interaction. This is very different from battling for a seat at the product design table. To be brief, this is the route that we take in everything we do. Lorraine Justice: Well, GK, we really are talking about the same thing. Design is not just about making an object. It goes much further than that. Designers can revamp systems, systems that involve humans. Yes, our designers should be equipped with leadership skills, etc. I guess in my way, I think bringing design values and thinking to the corporation would help everyone in the long run, and at least balance out the way things are done. I am talking about the designer who wants to change the world to be a better place, object-by-object or process-by-process or environment-by-environment. I am not relegating design to just “cool products”. But this is such a slow, slow process and I am getting frustrated. I don't want people to experience economic hardship just to force them to understand that products, lives, interactions need to be designed differently. When I bring up these issues, people either think it is an issue too large to address, and therefore impossible, or start pointing fingers. I know that things will evolve to a better place that includes human-centric thinking on a larger scale, but when will this happen? I am reading a book right now on relaxation and I remember that good designs often come from that state of mind, the flow, the arena of creativity which is so difficult to achieve in our stressed culture. So while I am still pushing for designers to be fully appreciated (provided they rise to the occasion, and that is another topic), my main goal really is to change the world. Yes, I am a product of the ‘60s!
6 GK VanPatter: From our perspective, it is not so much about the big picture as it is about hands-on work in the trenches with real people who must work in a crossdisciplinary manner to address complex challenges. Notice how I did not say “design challenges”. To be clear, I’m not talking about bringing this issue up in conversation to explain why design is important. I’m talking about taking hold of the way people work so we are there leading the process. There is a big difference. Very specifically, I’m talking about designers getting themselves trained to the point where they can do that. Once we leave behind design’s attachment to object creation, many opportunities (and new responsibilities) in the trenches become clear for design leadership. Unfortunately, graduate design education has been very slow to step up to that plate. Many are still back there in the old value system. They want design to be valued for its difference rather than for the manner in which it can add value. That positioning strategy has long since stopped working in the marketplace.
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When we go into organizations to do transformation work, we are not asking people to reconsider their work and interaction behaviors as a long-term, fuzzy big picture goal to contemplate. The world that we construct makes it very clear that unless they master new cross-disciplinary skills, new inclusion models, new ways of maximizing brainpower, their organizations will be left behind. Although it is not reflected in design academic settings, working in cross-disciplinary teams is already the way of the world. Most design educators to whom I speak with have no idea that this one marketplace development alone represents gigantic implications for what design leadership must become in the 21st century. Designers must take the reigns of human work reconstruction. We must reconstruct not only our place at the table, but the entire table and how humans interact around it. We reconstruct those rules and behaviors. We place tools in the room that become part of the interaction. Intertwined is the construction of the environment itself. We then connect that reconstruction to human performance. Graduates from business, science, engineering, etc. cannot touch that ability with a ten-foot pole. We can even construct such environments in a language that users from business, science and engineering are familiar and comfortable with, but we construct in such a way that who dominates and how has fundamentally changed forever. To say this another way: We have already fundamentally changed the way that humans interact in cross-disciplinary problem solving settings, and in doing so we have changed the role of design. From our perspective we must have new smarts to undertake the challenges that design faces today. Some design educators do not like to hear that news. What we are really working on here is the reconstruction of the world of inclusion. A reconstructed design can bring a lot to that table, but we have a lot of work to do in the realm of design education to get there. Design education has a huge role to play, but there is no time to waste now. The window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely. Others outside of design are becoming aware that the window exists. Time is short now. In our view, we get to culture change and to world change through the reconstruction of inclusion. Who better to take hold of those reigns than human-centered designers? Lorraine Justice: Even though I am in design education many years in the US and now in China, I can identify the problems that exist between the disciplines. But more importantly, I can identify the issues with "growing" designers to embrace more than the object. In some ways, we were further ahead in the '70s in design education because it seemed to embrace internal as well as external values. And although design education has migrated toward the "user-centered" model, it has paradoxically moved toward learning about users in order to sell to them. That seems fine on the surface, but a lot of this gets translated into "find the consumer's weak spot", design for that, and sell a million! So while I thought we were making progress moving toward designing for the needs of other people, I see it turning into something crass. Whereas the model of internally inspired design created a lot of design "rock stars", I believe there were many designers who were intrinsically following their internal need to create good design and processes. So, back to the question of having designers rise to the level where they truly can impact the way we work and live. Unfortunately, we ask 18-year-olds to come into a bachelor design program and design for other people. They have not had much experience. Page 6 of 14
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Most of them really want to draw cool cars and products that they use in their lives. I have, fortunately, met several young students who wanted to do medical products or products of a mature nature. But we are still talking about products. How do we move these 18-year-old students, or 21-year-old students doing a Master's, into the frame of mind of leadership? Is it an ethics course? Is it a leadership course? Is it a planning for change course? Is it "how to take down the big picture, turn it over and start to draw a new life" course? Is it "new thought" courses? I think it is. I think we need to have programs arising out of design that take those students with leadership potential and put them through new thought courses that allow them to address the type of deep change that is needed in the individual in the business world and how to design and affect that change. So maybe it is combined with a bit of sociology, design research, business, and new thought courses that deal with the inner parts of us (physical, mental and spiritual). Yes, I said the "s" word, not the "r" word (religion) . . . big difference. I am largely talking about values in human behavior in relation to anything spiritual. I think these new leaders need to be supported, directed and groomed to be leaders of industry, change agents in corporations, consultants, etc. Where do products fit into all this? They do, but at the very end. We are first designing an atmosphere, culture, and places of ease for people to trust themselves again. We have it backwards now: design a product that people think they want (that is how we ended up with plastic wood-grain on everything in the '60s), and it will make them feel good (for about an hour), and then we look around for another product to purchase. In the short-term, that is so good for the economy. In the long run, we all will suffer if we keep focusing on objects. I know we have a window of opportunity. That is why I hurried over to China. If I have a chance to affect things for the better, I will. I have a chance to start new programs and design the designer, so to speak. If we can create those new programs that help designers rise to greater leadership and have the smarts and inner core to do the work, I do believe the world will be a better place.
7 GK VanPatter: Let me try to build off a couple of things here quickly. As you must well know, several leading graduate design schools are investing heavily in the user-centered movement, promoting that route as the future of design. From our perspective that activity represents all good news that adds huge value to design, but adopting a focus on user-centered product development precisions does not in itself address the larger issue of how designers will learn to tackle large, complicated, fuzzy challenges that are not connected to product development. It does not address the issue of how designers will compete in the multidisciplinary leadership space. To build on what you were saying earlier, many challenges facing organizations today, facing the world today cannot be addressed by creating more products. We call this Choose Your Precisions. I talked about this a little in the Design in The University Conference where the Proposal for the New Design School at the University of California was being discussed. There is a set of new precisions being sold right now connected to research that do advance design, no question. Those precisions, those values, however, do not connect directly to the new terrain of having to lead complex projects in multidisciplinary settings. Part of our mission here is to point out these are two different sets of precisions. I placed these in the form of challenges at the University Page 7 of 14
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of California conference. The challenge of “How might we create a leading design research school?” is very different from the challenge of “How might we create a leading multidisciplinary design leadership school?” I also noted your facts regarding the average age of design students. Our focus here at NextD is particularly on graduate education. We find the average age in graduate business school is not different than that of graduate design schools. In spite of such constraints, we see business schools on the move towards the multidisciplinary team leadership space. Make no mistake about it. MBA students are learning problem solving, team dynamics and innovation skills that are far in advance of those being taught in most design schools today. This is a reality that the design education community must wake up to and that is part of our mission here. This is what the community needs to be concerned about. From our perspective, the more fundamental problem, beyond the age of students, seems to be a lack of awareness/understanding among many leaders of our graduate design institutions regarding how the context for design has changed in the real world. To say this another way, we see this is less of a student problem and more of a teacher/leader problem. There seems to be a tendency for design education leaders to still view design as a closed empire without understanding that many of the sacred, tribal dynamics of that empire went out the window with the arrival of cross-disciplinary teams. I am referring not to designers-only teams, but rather cross-disciplinary teams in the sense of including many other disciplines. In a closed empire, designers lead design, but for many designers that empire has not existed for many years. How and where designers work has changed forever. Our design education institutions have been extremely slow to catch onto the new threats and opportunities there. At NextD, we often hear from designers working on the front lines in cross-disciplinary work environments where they are facing levels of complexity in challenges that their design education did not prepare them for. We see the need first-hand, but our graduate design schools seem presently to be ill-equipped to help. I remember being at the Organizational Futures by Design Conference in 1997, held at the business school on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. There I saw graduate business students present their design projects. That was one in a long series of “aha” moments for me. The truth is that many of our most high profile design education leaders entirely missed that train mounting the tracks that is now directly on top of us. Many still resist acknowledging that such a train exists at all. In the emerging terrain of cross-disciplinary work, designers must now compete for the opportunity to lead. We must start educating design leaders in that context, not in the context of the lost empire. Good bye, plastic wood-grain! Hello, complex world! Lorraine Justice: Thanks for your comments, GK. I agree with many of them. A lot of the problem is time has stood still for many of the people who are running design programs in the US. The field is suffering from lack of expertise, lack of support, and lack of vision. Looking back, I almost had to leave for a while. The design programs are all under the thumb of art, architecture or engineering. There are no resources for them to thrive or drive the vision. It is a pathetic state. Internally, many of the design “oldsters” do not want change. I remember when I wanted to get a Ph.D., I got a lot of flack from Page 8 of 14
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colleagues for that. I remember when I helped bring computers into the department or went over to the other disciplines on campus to interact. As a young assistant professor, I was told to not make waves and stay in my own back yard. So, I have always been a design activist. It is true that many design schools are heralding design research as the new change in curricula, and yes, that is a start, but it is myopic. The major change about this effort is it wrestled the "designer as artist and expresser" designer into the "I now design for other human beings" designer. This is a huge mental shift and it is not to be taken lightly. However, this is akin to assembling parts to build an engine, but finding out you still need the rest of the car parts to transport people. I know I am being harsh on designers, and I am one, but I have watched our field lose leadership in interface/interaction design to the computing discipline, research to the sociology discipline, design management (and now possibly leadership in creativity) to the business discipline, anthropometrics to the human factors people, and so on. Designers have wanted to stay on the “boards” and create, rather than taking on more responsibility. Now, having said that, I believe it will take a different type of person to assume the role of a design leader. And I say “design” leader because I still believe the field of design has something different to offer than the “business” leader. We must first understand who we need for this role. Will it be early change agents that need to be educated first and "sent out there" before design leadership roles catch on in business? Will it be people educated from the business, design or engineering, etc. professions? When we first understand who it is we need to educate and for what purposes, we can then design the appropriate curriculum. Yes, the graduate design schools today are hampered with old curricula. Yes, the design professors themselves need to upgrade their skills and ideas. Yes, the designers need to step up to the challenge of a greater role. I am concerned that should one profession take hold of design leadership, it will end up being another unimpressive effort in multidisciplinary education. What type of person would I want for a design leadership role? I would want to see someone who knew a lot about the hard (cash) and soft (people) aspects of the world. These change agents (initially) would have to have the chutzpah, charisma, and substance of knowledge of design and world systems so that they command attention, respect and excitement for what they want to achieve . . . and be effective in a multidisciplinary setting. These design leadership change agents would also have to understand that they are being trained for a tough job. People like new ideas, but often don't like change. Are there any programs out there that address these issues of "how to be a successful change agent", design thinking and understanding the hard and soft world systems? No. They have to be created. I do have a chance to create something like this type of curriculum here, and may very well do so in the near future. The benefit of doing this type of graduate program in Hong Kong is that it truly is the East meets West mindset, and the government and education administrators are strong supporters of design. While the West has more experience with traditional design education curricula, it is also hampered by it, and so there may be a greater opportunity for change here in Hong Kong. So, I am not at all recommending a leading design research school. That is happening on its own. I am not recommending a multidisciplinary graduate program. That is Page 9 of 14
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happening on its own. I am recommending a new program that is quite revolutionary for higher education.
8 GK VanPatter: You raise numerous important points here, among them the loss of leadership that has occurred in the design community. I wish we had more time together. We likely need an entire conversation on design education challenges in general and another on China. Two huge topics! Regarding your comment about the needs and suitable participants of so-called change/innovation agent education, I can tell you that based on what we are seeing here at NextD, we have no doubt that reinventing this space is a huge opportunity for several design education institutions. We see tremendous interest from mid-career designers in advanced design leadership skills. We believe this skill building is best offered to designers as executive education. On the question as to whether such schools now exist, if we are talking about models for change agent education, I believe the answer has to be YES. Such programs do exist. Are they found in design education institutions? NO. After receiving several inquiries, we are testing the waters on creating some kind of global design leadership forum through NextD, so let’s talk more off-line about it. In the meantime I recommend that you connect with Uffe Elbæk, Director of the Kaos Pilots (Business) School in Denmark. More than any other school that we have seen so far, they really have a sense of how to educate innovation agents today (not product design leaders). We believe that design educators can learn a lot from the Kaos Pilot program. Another person you should reach out to is Dr. Min Basadur, Professor of Innovation in the MBA program at McMaster University in Canada. He also works in China. Both are good friends of NextD. The truth is we are a million, trillion miles away from having to worry about design dominance of leadership. The movement on part of business schools is one of the central reasons why we created NextD. If the central task of design is to humanize the world, we certainly do need a new generation of human-centered design leaders. More on that in our next conversation! Can you tell us more about the programs that you will be launching there in the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic? Lorraine Justice: Well, GK, I am glad to say I sat in a meeting here yesterday at Hong Kong Polytechnic University where the President brought all the Deans, VP’s, and Heads together to discuss the importance of design to the university, to Hong Kong and to China. I was astounded. It was a historical meeting for me. I never experienced this in-depth understanding and support for the design profession. He went on to tell them design is not just making products, but it is in every area and can provide innovation. He also told them that if they do not feel a direct benefit from design, they need to support it for the good of the school and Hong Kong.
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The effects of this one meeting immediately set up a "design" conversation on campus. I had departments ranging from engineering, medicine and business, to hotel and tourism contacting me to see how they can integrate design. I was glad to see the conversation start, even if things were not always well understood. I am hoping this will lead to a new type of curriculum in our Planning and Development masters. It is more of a “thinking” degree rather than a “doing and making” degree, so stay tuned. It will be our experiment with something different in a traditional university setting. In addition, I have started a design education stream where practitioners can come to learn how to be a design professor, or (for those who are already teaching) to obtain a higher degree to update their skills. It is the content of these programs that is revolutionary, not the names of the degree. We will start to educate professors for mainland China and other parts of Asia, the US, Europe and Latin America, and imbue in them the traits that will make them effective in education and business. These graduates will be a new type of leader, trained in a blend of design courses. Those people who want to focus further on something special will go on to do a Ph.D. Since there is not such an entrenched structure and culture in Asia for design, in some ways it will be easier to influence the profession. On the other hand, the people who are now teaching design in China often have an arts or engineering background because there were not design programs to begin with, just like in the US. If those design educators in China are resistant to change of any kind, then it will be a repeat of what it was in the 80’s in the US with the clash of arts and crafts versus research and usercentered design. There are still the other issues on “making” that need to be addressed. It is a chance to incorporate sustainability and human issues as well, so our undergrads will get primed with values. China as a whole is gearing up to say "designed in China" along with "made in China". For the younger people out there who don't remember, a lot of products used to say "made in Hong Kong". Most of those factories have now moved into the south of China. There are thousands and thousands of them between Shanghai and Hong Kong. In order for the factories to make a profit and not lie dormant, they have been instructed to develop their own company products to make in the factories in between client jobs. So all of those factories are eventually going to have their own design departments or design consultants helping these factories to put out their own products. This is a different model than most of our American companies. The factories are either owned by one company or, if they are an independent manufacturer, they rarely put out their own products, although there are a few exceptions. China does not have enough designers to design products, let alone provide design leadership. The world doesn't have enough designers to supply China. So, yes, China is throwing big bucks at design. Hong Kong has generated 250 million (HK) dollars to start design activities in the city, and the universities are strongly supporting design. So it is a government-initiated endeavor, unlike what is happening in the US, where it is almost a grassroots effort to promote design. China knows that in order to compete in the World Trade Organization they will need to improve design efforts so their products can compete in the world market. This information will be like a bullet from a silencer to the
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West if people don't realize what this effort in China means in the large scheme. It is not just about product design, or even the world economy. It is about the education in general that will become most important.
9 GK VanPatter: If China brings 400 design programs on-line in the next five years, it is bound to make a few waves. We would not be doing our job here today if we did not touch upon the business impact, the realities of China becoming a design leader. China has already become a product manufacturing juggernaut that has a significant impact in the global marketplace as it undercuts the price of products from many nations. Here in the US, China has become a feared manufacturing competitor to the point where some are suggesting that America may rethink its promotion of globalization. The cover of Business Week shouts, “The three scariest words in US industry: ‘The China Price.’” A massive shift in economic power is underway. Clearly this is not something to be taken lightly. Part of what seems to be in the mix there is cheaper labor. Stories abound where white collar jobs are being moved off-shore to China. In the last few years, we have seen technology companies moving software engineering jobs offshore where they can get four engineers for the price of one in America. With that very real shift already underway, let’s connect the dots to the realm of design. Let’s pick a discipline. What do industrial designers make in China today? From your perspective, what happens when Chinese industrial designers compete in the global marketplace? Or when the cost of Chinese industrial design is built into new products offered in the global marketplace? Lorraine Justice: Right now in China, most of the design comes from Europe and the US. A new design position has occurred and I call it the “design quality control guy”. It is the designer who has to go to Asia to make all the quality control checks at the factories. They do not trust engineers to be sensitive to “feel and finish” issues. The industrial designers in China today are doing what the industrial designers in the US are doing: they are designing all types of products. The designers in the West say the designers in the East are not innovative. This is not true. It is the people hiring the designers who are not innovative. So there is a big push in the corporate culture there to understand innovative design processes. I will be delivering executive design courses in the near future to the watch and clock industries. I will then move to the electronics industries and so on. Many people say the mainland Chinese designers are undercutting prices. Again, the salaries all over mainland China are extremely low. Hong Kong designers are also being affected by the low design salaries in China, not just the Western companies. It will be interesting to watch what happens. Will the mainland Chinese designers raise their rates to match the world, or will they keep their rates low? It can go either way and it is too early to tell.
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10 GK VanPatter: Let’s talk about the harsh realities of design and innovation for a moment. Apart from all the excitement and press about China, we both know that the rules of becoming a manufacturing/making leader are very different from the rules of becoming a design leader. During the dot-com bubble years, many young people from China came to the US to attend various technology and computer science schools and then returned home to start Chinese versions of the most successful American technology companies. I understand that this remains a popular formula for success even today. In the realms of vehicle, furniture and electronics manufacturing, similar processes are underway in China. This formula of importing/adapting an idea, a product or a business innovation that exists elsewhere is quite different from the creation of original innovations for a modern world. It is likely going to be a tremendous challenge for China to truly grasp what it will take to create original products and business innovations if it wants to become a design/innovation leader today. That awareness and the realization of such skills is not something that occurs in any culture overnight. It will likely be a long, difficult road. I can see design educators having their work cut out for them there. I would welcome your thoughts on this. Lorraine Justice: It will take several years for the change to take place. Certainly long enough for the US and the rest of the world to position themselves in the global economy. It could take as little as five years or as long as twenty. We will get an inkling over the next year or two for how fast “ramp up” will take in mainland. We are talking about mainland here. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong are all on their way to deep change. I read recently that the mainland government of China is becoming more conservative again and is taking a hard line against liberals. This is the greatest thing that will affect design in the mainland culture. There has to be an amount of mental freedom to exist to be truly innovative. If the culture is such that minds are directed from deviating from the norm, then we are looking at the twenty-year scenario. I think the real clues are in the philosophies of the mainland government, right now.
11 GK VanPatter: Ten years from now, where will China be on the world stage of design? Lorraine Justice: Ten years from now, we will see fabulous products and processes from China that will enrich our lives, probably in ways we cannot yet imagine. That is the hope, at least. We have been so dominated by Western thought, I am looking forward to a type of balance in the world. Men in China can talk more freely about sensitive issues. They will say things like, “He has a warm heart,” compared to the US version of (grunt), “Yeah, he’s a good guy”! Very different ways of “being” over here that I find fascinating. Every day has been an adventure. I am not blind to the problems, and there are many, but until light is shed on issues, they can’t be addressed. I consider myself a citizen of the world. Page 13 of 14
NextD Journal I ReRethinking Design Conversation 14
Designing the Future
I am also hoping that the world in general may end up with better leaders, lives, and products, and that is why I work so hard. Thanks for the chance to discuss this, GK.
NextD Journal RERETHINKING DESIGN
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