Qian Dao Hu

The Lake of A Thousand Islands, or Qian Dao Hu, is in a remote part of the extended Hangzhou city and takes about 3 hours to get to by bus. I went there over a long weekend with a friend, because everyone had told me it was a worthwhile trip. The township gets its name from a lake which forms part of its coastline, which has many small islands. However, they say in reality it is closer to a few hundred than to one thousand islands.



We arrived in mid morning and while taking lunch, 2 Chinese girls began to converse with us. They then offered to show us around town a little, an invitation we eagerly accepted because we had no idea what was what. They took us the the edge of the lake and showed us to a place where we could book day tours around some of the many islands. Then we walked back though the city to the other side of town where there was another coast of the lake. This area was like a large city square surrounded by shops. At the time, there were people but it was not crowded.

The girls left us, and my friend and I walked for a while only to run into one of the girls for a second time. She invited us to her house where her mother made boiled pork for us. Later that night, we went back to the city square with her. Now it was buzzing with life. People were renting out roller skates and there was a lot of other activity. My friend partook in this while I saw to some emergency work in an internet cafe. One of my classmates needed some help in writing some documentation for a few projects we were working on.

Later that evening, we went to the lake's edge and watched a beautiful fountain show. Fountain shows are quite popular in China but this was probably the nicest I have seen. They used lights underwater to colour it and had remote-controlled spray heads to achieve interesting patterns. It went on and on without repeating for quite some time.



The next day, we took a day tour around the lake to a number of the more major islands. They catered well for tourists of our calibre and provided a lot of interesting things to look at. There were monkeys, snakes, ostriches (which you could ride for 10RMB) as well as a mountain cable car that went up to a look out, each on their own island. It was very beautiful and had some of the clearest water I had seen in Chinese lakes.



The following day, which was our last, we went to the other side of the lake to see a activity park. It was ridiculously expensive so we just walked around before hitching a boat ride back to the main island. On the way home, I fell ill with a cold. I think there is some sort of trend here. Perhaps if I go traveling I should not return home, to avoid sickness.

Please view my extended gallery of this trip.

Qian Dao Hu

Outdoor Lights

This was a project that to develop outdoor lighting units. It was relatively short term but the company pressured us to be innovative.

My role on this project was as a consultant in early design stage but I was not heavily involved after that. Much later in the process I offered some technical knowledge in the use of production packages.

Real Fake Exercise Equipment

This was a brief project in which a Lab 318 client asked to have an OEM product re-designed so that they could compete with branded products they were already manufacturing for the Spanish and American markets. After completing some research we found that we were unable to make the supposed changes without breaching international and US-PTO patents. For this reason the project came to an early halt.

My role was as Project Leader so I had responsibility over the entire project. I was also involved as a research person so I worked with the rest of the group on patent searches and elemental design research in looking for solutions.

This was an interesting project because it asked me to do what western companies fear China is all about, copy. At first I had some concerns about its legality and so on but I soon realised that it was common practice and just part of the world so I made the most of the project.

It was also an interesting project because I was given quite a lot of responsibility and I was not managed at all during its course. In relation to this project I answered only to the Lab Manager. I was given a secretary to help manage information transfer because it was a research intensive project and I had 2 fellow researchers helping me read up on all the patents.

Patent searching is something that the workers in the Lab were quite used to as they would regularly have to approach projects similar to this one. I was amazed by how well they could understand the convoluted and impenetrable english of a patent while their spoken and written english was relatively incomplete.

When I reported to the Lab Manager that the project should be discarded because it was inefficient to submit to the clients needs given the circumstances of the protection in place by the USPTO, I was surprised that she was not affected and said, "OK, I will call the client tomorrow," and that was the end of that. I am not sure why it was so easy but for whatever reason we never really talked about the project again.

Upon reflection, I think nobody in the lab wanted projects like this though more than a few of them are likely to work again in such a context in the future. It seems to me that designers in China are not as they had been described to me and it was only market demand that made copying and so forth common place. The jobs available to designers in China almost all require such things, even in relatively high priced organisations such as Lab 318.