Leaving China

After 11 months to within a day in China I did not want to leave and even now still want to return.

While there I had collected so may acquaintances that a week before leaving I needed to start tracking them down to say good bye. I had dinners with many of them, including my class, and then on the day I flew out I had a long bus ride to Shanghai Airport during which I SMSed everyone in my phone contacts list, mentioning my departure and thanking them for helping me have a great time in China. I flew out that afternoon to the United States to visit my parents and fix my Green Card before returning to Australia two weeks later.

I was very sad to leave China. Being there taught me a lot about the world and the work I should do. More importantly, it was one of the only places I have visited in recent years that I really appreciated. At the moment, I intend to return in the next few years to work or continue my studies.

Last Class Dinner

A few days before leaving the country, I invited Lab 318 as well as a few other students out for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I had informed the restaurant a few days earlier that I would bring a group of about 30 students so they set aside a few tables and made one long one.


The whole group except for a few people who had to leave early.

We had a really great dinner which, because it was in China, only cost about AUS$100 for the whole meal. Afterwards, we all went to KTV. Eventually I had to go to start packing and so I said goodbye to everyone many times and went forth. On the way home, I went with a friend for a drive around Hangzhou one last time. The driver took us to a temple we had never visited at the edge of the large river to the south of the city.


Blake, Eric, and I at KTV

Milan Furniture From China

The Milan Furniture Festival is quite well known around the world. This year, ZJU became the first school in China to be invited to submit work for it. That being the case, we considered this project to be quite a serious representation of Chinese Industrial Design and its education so we set high goals. Our aim was to design a brand that would work well with both the international concepts of what China is and what China actually is to its people. With this brand we went on to generate a line of products to be displayed.

My role was as a Project Leader. However, I was also heavily involved in the Design Team. As a project leader it was my responsibility to head one of the two project teams. The other was to be lead by some other students and Ying Fantian. I was put on as a team leader because of my international experience and interest in project management. During the project I worked with about 10 people, a few of whom I had not worked with before.


This is a house found in Anji, a village known for its bamboo and used in film "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon." We were inspired by the organic form created with straight members.


Before I was given this project, Ying Fantian made some suggestions about the brand we should form. He suggested that China had a lot to offer in the area of bamboo - especially in certain applications that could not be found in any other countries. He also was of the mind that implementing technology in excess within a product was close to uniquely Chinese. Given this realm of thought, my team and I built a our brand around bamboo technologies and creating products that held elements of design that might be common in western furniture, such as the ones our work would be compared to in Milan, while also using elements of the traditional design of China.

Being associated with bamboo, we decided to create products in two subgroups, grassroots and modern design. For the purpose of a brief this would mean we were to use the same design system and elements to create two relatively different approaches that would appeal to different slices of society, both affected by the western world but nonetheless fundamentally Chinese.


This is one of my concepts inspired by the house seen above.

We were given a 4 x 3 metre exhibition space in Milan and decided to split it to suit our separate product lines. We asked people in the team to offer some concepts for each sector which we would go over in meetings. We would talk about each concept and I would put minutes online. We would then request that people develop the seemingly most successful concepts and come up with some more new ones.

As well as holding regular meetings to create our brand and then demonstrate it with a product line, we also did an amount of research into a few areas. Our prime interest was the innovative use of bamboo, so we contacted a some local establishments associated with this science. We found a few manufacturers as well as a research center that agreed to support our interest. They offered us information on many materials made from bamboo and showed us an extensive sample set that we later used in concepts.

In the end, we presented our work to Ying Fantian after he returned from Australia in January 2007. As I was leaving China a few days later I gave my position to Yao LinNing, one of my classmates. Later I was informed that there was no final submission made to the competition because the lab and manufacturers were understaffed during the New Year holidays.


This is a bowl using carbonized bamboo which ends up being quite similar to a low density ceramic.

This project was an interesting experience for me in a few ways. It was the first large project with very little guidance that I had managed alone. It involved about 10 students in my team and counted for about 1 month continuous work by everyone, although some of the team was only with us for the last two weeks. It was rushed and on occasions a bit stressful but much less so than large projects I had done previously. When I look back on it I think the main reason we were not so anxious is because we were part of a system and we could count on the system. We did not imagine that it would take the place of our work if our work was not good enough, but the system was there working beside us and would take the concepts that we delivered and help us turn them into a finished project. The system was the lab and the fact of a lab manager and a secretary. In this project, they were not commanding us. In a sense, I was commanding the team but I decided to lead a flat team so everyone had an opportunity to contribute interesting ideas. This meant that we could count on one another and we could move together though our individual ideas. We tried to ensure that there would not be subgroups that may disturb our flow but we also tried to use our resources. I found that if we each performed our roles and counted on one another to do so as well we would work very efficiently.

Our output was not perfect but the experience was exhilarating and we all understand each other much better because of it.

Below is a library of images assosiated with the Milan project

Milan Funriture Festival