My China Reflections

Leaving China

2007-01-12T07:43:00.000+08:00

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

2007-01-09T11:38:00.000+08:00

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

2007-01-09T10:38:00.000+08:00

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

Christmas in Hangzhou

2006-12-25T08:32:00.000+08:00

For me, a significant part of being somewhere for a year is spending Christmas there. This was in fact the first Christmas without my family but that did not affect much. The Chinese love to celebrate, so there were decorations and seasonal songs in every store. The Koreans from the international dorms are also really into Christmas so we ended up having Christmas dinner all together at an Indian restaurant. We chose this place because everywhere else was either booked out or far too expensive for Christmas. Places were marking up to 600 RMB per person. At the Indian restaurant, which is usually quite busy, there were no other customers and we had a private room to ourselves.

West Lake on Christmas day.

After lunch, we walked around West Lake to one of the many Haagen Dazs icecream stores to have dessert. We had fondue with seasonal ice cream. Following this, the Koreans had to return home, so it was just me and 3 other Australians. We decided to take a trip on a boat around the lake which was quite lovely.

Later that night, we all went to a Christmas concert at the Hangzhou Grand Theater and then to a coffee shop downtown. At the end of the day everyone was tired. It was a good Christmas.

Robotic Lawn Mower

2006-12-20T17:16:00.000+08:00

In connection with our robotic vacuum cleaner project, we worked on a long term project with the same client for a robotic lawn mower. In this project, ZJU was combining a number of its mechanical, electrical, robotic, and design teams with the engineers from the source company. That meant a few things but the biggest effect of working with such a large and specialized team was that our job as designers and thinkers was shown in full light. Sadly, most of the requirements of the finished product were predetermined so we did not get to go though a complete design process to find the consumer needs. Instead, we concentrated more on facilitating the work of the engineering team from an elemental design efficiency standpoint, as well as outward styling and communication with the client and various ZJU teams. In addition, Lab 318 and Lab 127 were providing the modelling as we had a few fulltime CATIA seats on our permanent team.

My role on this project was as a consultant to some of the aspects of the design team from Lab 318. Although I was not directly involved in the design, I aided in the design of algorithms for path finding.

This project is obviously quite large and many months by many people were spent on it so it was not worked on by the design team every day. However, it was really interesting to watch as over the months the product came together into firstly a finished concept, then a prototype and finally go preparation for manufacture. As my involvement was limited to research and some advising on certain aspects, I was not too worried about how things went on the project. Instead, when it was the center of every one's attention, I could watch closely in an effort to understand the subtleties of their immense pipeline and learn more about the Chinese design method.

After watching many meetings, of which I could only understand the drawings and 1 in 100 words, I found that in general their overall method is similar to that which we would discuss at RMIT. That said, their concept methods and development methods seem to be a bit different. For concept work, they would not research first then build a set of parameters and sketch around that idea. Instead, they would guess what they were making and do a lot of concept sketches, then build backwards to get a well designed set of interior workings. In the outward-in process, although they would ship some of the work to engineers, they would continue to work with the engineers quite closely. For this particular product, we used Lab 127 to house the prototyping and development sectors so when the mechanics were being ironed out, this lab contained a few ID people, a few engineers and a few CATIA modelers. They worked one-to-one to build the good practices and effective structural design into the shell that the design team had previously carved out. Once a mechanical system was decided upon, the files were sent off to a prototyping company (the same one I burnt my foot at, in fact) who returned a fully functional frame a week or so later. I do not know much about the early history of the electronic systems for this project, but once we had a base to work on there was a motherboard strapped to it and tests were being run to develop a home friendly and functional robot. As far as I know, this process is still underway.

Upon reflection on my encounter with this project, I think I have now seen a product go from a list of needs on a piece of paper to a nearly consumer-ready, autonomous disk that cuts grass and recharges itself. Details aside, the fact of watching a near complete product pipeline inclusive of virtually every respect of the final outcome was pretty impressive. Despite my small role in this project, I learnt a huge amount about what can be done with design. It seems the value of this education is the communication I can help people have.

Kitchen Sucker

2006-12-13T20:49:00.000+08:00

This project was for a subsidiary of FUDA and involved developing and combining a number of technologies they had been working on to create a stove system. The technologies they were trying to showcase included: a rotary exhaust fan system, a light that keeps vegetables fresh, a UV disinfection system for plates and a touch controlled electric stove top designed for the fast cooking styles common in China.

My involvement on this project was as a consultant in various aspects of the development and embodiment of the final outcome as well as in a site visit to inspect design realization and manufacture quality. I was not a core part of this project as it was ongoing from before I arrived and is even now still in refinement.

I think this project is not very interesting which is partly why I was not very involved. However, it is a great example of the differing needs between markets. First and foremost is the lack of an oven, something that very few Chinese households have. The features which were included are also interesting. In China fresh food is very important and often meat will have been killed hours if not minutes before being cooked. They prefer not to refrigerate things if it can be avoided as it is said to change flavor, so things like this LED system are rather important. Similarly everyone is concerned about cleanliness of things that they eat off, there is a zero second policy¹ in China, so a solution like UV plate disinfecting is a key feature. Neither of these things would be included in a western version of this project and of course it would almost certainly have a oven as well.

Another way in which this project had an impact on me was in the prototyping. In the west, we continuously talk about how poor the quality of Chinese manufacturing is, but the reality it is only like this because the western companies push the budgets so low. In fact, the amount of highly skilled labour available in China is disproportionately large in comparison to most western countries and the level of manufacture quality available, if you pay a humane amount, is far higher than most factories in the USA or Australia can offer.

In this project FUDA, our client, was prototyping continuously and often members of the team would go and stay with them for a few days as they prototype-stormed to have a better inclusion of engineering and design with a faster turn around. What was really impressive is that the 2 people doing the prototyping were so fast they could make accurate, functional mock-ups in an afternoon and have production grade prototypes in a day or two. Before going to China, I had never seen quality and speed like this in my life.

¹Derived from the "10 second rule", which states that food that has been dropped on the ground is still safe to consume if you pick it up within 10 seconds of dropping it.

Vacuum Cleaner Project Zero

2006-12-13T15:26:00.000+08:00

This project was a long term effort to create a great robotic vacuum cleaner. When I first interacted with Lab 318, the project was in its third revision and almost everyone had worked on some aspect of it at some point. Like our other long term fullscale project, the Robotic Lawn Mower, we did not talk about it every day. Also, because it was it was only a revision, we did not need to redevelop everything from the ground up. As far as I know, the task started as a face lift on the current frame and then some performance improvements were included in the mechanical object and software.

My role on this team was quite small in the grand scheme of things because most of the permenant crew were not English speakers. At first, I worked on some of the early concept work when the face lift was being set out. Later I worked as a consultant using prior knowledge of the end market place as well as knowledge of robotics and algorithm design which would be used to construct more efficient artificial intelligence. Finally, I went to the manufacturing facility in one of the later stints with the company's engineers.

This project was interesting because when I first saw the tell-tale shape of a robotic vacuum cleaner in the lab back in February, I thought that they may have worked on the original product. However, it was not until much later, after working in the same lab as the core team for about 3 weeks, that I was lead to understand that this one was made by another company. The company is FUDA, a long time client of the lab that dominates the vacuum cleaner market in China. Though the form of our robot was not all that different from early birds like the Roomba, it had been completely designed in house and seems not to have been a copy. I think their visual similarity is more likely to be an effort to capitalize on the success of the original.

Despite the mass of work assosiated with this project, it seemed never to really dominate the lab. This may be because our deadline was distant because there was a version already in the market but its effect on the working method was quite noticeable. It was hardly talked about until it was on the verge of completion, at which point we had a press conference with a number of local news companies.

As you may imagine, the team for a project like this is quite large. However, the industrial design group's connection was always very strong. At the moment, for instance, this project is in the hands of electrical engineers in Lab 127 for refinement of the motherboard, but they answer to the design team back in Lab 318 who are in charge of the human interaction so involvement is as high as ever.

Designing Interactions and Bill Moggridge

2006-11-27T12:56:00.000+08:00

When we visited IDEO they had mentioned that there would be a book opening for Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge and that they would be going. We were very interested for obvious reasons so we went up to Shanghai again to attend this even as well as view a Design Korea exhibition.

We caught quite an early train to Shanghai and spent all morning looking at Korean design companies that were interested in providing work to the Chinese market. There was also a lot of student work some of which was breathtaking and quite a bit of other technology related stuff being put on display. It was quite a nice event and it included a few of the big companies like Momo Designs and Samsung. After this, we went shopping in Shanghai for a bit and then had lunch at a rare western restaurant. Then we walked for about 2 hours to the place the book opening was to be held. It was a small gallery and studio used by a local design and art group.

Some of the robots from the Design Korea Show

The talk by Bill Morggridge introducing the book was quite interesting and we got to meet up with a lot of the people we knew from IDEO from our previous visit. One of our team won a copy of the book. At one point, I was introduced to Bill but I didn't really know much about his work at the time so I did not talk to him for long.

The event was quite interesting and when we finally left we caught a slow train home that got in to Hangzhou at about 2 am.

In retrospect I obviously should have had some thing with more impact prepared for my interaction with Bill. He was kind and easy to talk to but I had been too busy to do any background research on him so we just talked about immediate things. I was not astounded by this man.

IDEO WEDO UDEO

2006-11-15T11:01:00.000+08:00

After having returned from my summer holiday and then getting settled in the lab, people had started talking about changes that may occur and developments of the lab which may cause it to become more innovative. As I have discussed, a lot of it's work up until this point was more like that of a classic design consultancy. They have had a bit of competition in this sector and are interested in moving meta to get a competitive advantage. In discussion about this with some of my colleagues, I was reminded of that well known company IDEO and remembered they had a Shanghai office. I decided it could be interesting to pay them a visit and I knew that they were generally interested in seeing students and that sort of thing, so I sent them an email. The email address I had for them was defective so I tried a few other things to no avail. However, a few weeks later Soumitri and Simon were in town and Soumitri mentioned that he had the address of someone in that office through another friend. He gave it to me and when I sent the new address an email I got a response within a few hours. They were interested so we worked out a good time for everyone and made our visit.

The time we spent with them was interesting because we did not go with an idea of what we wanted from them and we did not go with anything to show them. They ordered some food for lunch and asked us to introduce our practice. They then talked about what they do and how their office in China interacted with the global company.

I was the team leader of this endeavor as I had originally expressed the interest. My involvement included initiating contact and scheduling as well as developing and managing relationship. Though we intended to continue the project, it is now over as many of the core people involved are no longer part of the lab.

This may not seem like a project as such, but if it is approached in that way the whole thing becomes a struggle to communicate well and offer a good client to costumer relationship. We never decided what service was going to be provided by whom or for whom but we had an interaction that needed to be managed. So I think we can think of it as a project.

Immediately after leaving the IDEO office all the Chinese students I was with started talking about how they thought this company could not work with Chinese clients very well and how it did not match the fast-paced nature of the Chinese market. This is of course true and I spent some time talking to a few IDEOers about this problem. In the coming years they are interested in opening up this office to participate in the Chinese design market more completely.

I learnt a lot from this little project. I learnt that people do respond to an honest request even when they are a design company that most designers look up to. I also learnt that everyone needs help thinking, even IDEO. Of course I also learnt a lot about how IDEO thinks and how they select people for jobs which may one day be important to me. This task built confidence and understanding in me and the team and has helped a few of the lab members get jobs and recommendations for further education programs.

As IDEO is a kind company, they gave us a few souvenirs including copies of the Art of Innovation in Chinese and The Ten Faces of Innovation in English.

After IDEO we went shopping and then to IKEA before returning home to Hangzhou that night.

Materials and Form

2006-11-06T21:46:00.000+08:00

This project was a book for Ying Fantian that would be published under his name and the names of the editors. The book was to be oriented around the topic of modern materials and how they can be used in design tasks. Although the book was not well defined at the start of its writing, by the end it was to be something like a reference text designed to offer a standardized information model on the topic at hand.

My role on this project was as an assistant editor. My tasks were to help ensure that the English components were grammatically correct, to generate content at times and to offer suggestions on structure and style of the information used. In addition, I was extensively involved in the translation of parts of the text that started in Chinese.

This project was rather peculiar for a few reasons, but I guess the main one was that when I came aboard the task I was asked to do was to paraphrase an existing book on materials and put it in a usable format. It was then to be put directly into the project database. Following this, I was given another text with accompanying images and I was asked to extract articles again to expand our project database. These articles were slowly gaining Chinese counterparts as one of the other members of the lab translated them. At that time I was given the task of correcting other articles that had started in Chinese and then been put through the Google language tools to make them into rough English. I did a few single articles like this then just as I left the lab one Friday afternoon I was emailed a few documents accounting for about 200 such articles. I was going away that weekend and would not have my laptop so I spent most of that night working with another native English speaker from the international dormitory to translate as many as we could before I left. At the end of all this we had a huge bank of materials information in Chinese and English with images that had been sourced from a variety of locations including other books and undocumented websites. What I found peculiar here was not the fact that it was a lot of work to write a book, but that in China we did not have to make a bibliography or anything like that and we seemed not to have to think about credits on the images. On a few occasions I tried to ask if this was actually the case and the person I was working with would try not to understand as much as possible. (I am also guilty of having done this at times during my stay there.) I did not mind that I was participating in what we in the west call plagiarism - it was just an odd way of doing things and I was not too used to it, so I asked questions some times.

As it may sound, I was not well informed about some aspects of this project, and was not involved in it's management at all. The person in charge was not in the lab and the person in the lab working on the project was doing all she could to fix things up in the time frame and with a small budget. She was basically doing everything except the English half, which is what I did. She was not the best of project managers and most of the time I had no idea what was going to happen next.

I think this project changed the way I look at books. Firstly, it made me realize that writing a hundred pages is not that hard. Secondly, I was shown firsthand just how useful it is to have good information sources. Thirdly, I was exposed to back-end practices and fourthly, it was made clear how not to do a project like this in the future. Being a design student who has trouble sleeping because I often can't stop working, I was continually thinking about ways to do this task better and ways to make it more useful for the end user. Sadly, I was not able to do much to affect these aspects as the project was quite rushed and I had very little say.

In the end I think the book has not yet been published. I am not in the information chain on this project so I may never know what's actually to come of it.

Translation Tasks

2006-10-13T10:37:00.000+08:00

Between major projects and smaller projects there were even smaller tasks such as helping translate a page or so from English to Chinese. The reasons people needed things like this would vary quite a lot but often it would be to do with impressing clients or customers by showing more international influence. In industries like this in China, it seems that international connections are directly akin to value so they are used whenever possible.

In my work translating I often found myself rewriting very rough translations, from people in the lab or Google translator. I would often work with a Chinese student to help ensure that the meaning was coming across appropriately and it was not uncommon that we would find some concept that could not be communicated. At a time like that, I would research into the area at hand in an effort to find out what they were talking about. On a number of occasions I was told not to change things too much but in general the results were quite readable as far as I could tell.

Some of the projects that I worked on in this capacity include the Tire Pressure Gauge, the Automobile Air Cleaner, a Text Enlarging Device and Visa as well as other applications for schools and that sort of thing.

Wireless Tire Pressure Gauge

2006-10-12T21:47:00.000+08:00

This project is a combination of custom tire valves and a central display unit that can warn of pressure loss in any of the tires. Our task was to give an existing system a face lift and make the central control system easier to interact with. We worked on this project for more then 3 months. It is now in production.

My role was consulting, which in this case meant branding and copy and just about nothing else. The project was underway before I joined Lab 318 and I only had a chance to become involved towards the end.

I thought this project was quite cool once I got involved and knew what was going on. The device worked by having a wireless valve cap on each wheel that would transmit pressure information back to the central unit on the dash of the user's car. It would indicate if there was a flat or if there were pressure differences between the tires.

In the copy that was written for this product, some statistics were stated that claimed that more than half of the serious automotive accidents today are made worse by inappropriate tire constitutions and that this device would substantially increase safety I do not know it this was true but if so it seems like a revolutionary product. At the time I had not seen anything like such a turn key solution.

Automotive Air Purifier

2006-10-11T20:56:00.000+08:00

This project involved designing a small device that would filter the air within one's car and indicate its quality or health threat at any one time. Our task was to modernize the look and feel of the product and help integrate the new technologies better. The project was short term and the product is now in production.

My role was that of a consultant, although it ended up including concept development, presentation copy writing and branding for an international market.

Strange though it may seem, the awareness of Chinese people about air cleanliness is quite high and given the feature-oriented technology market, many products are sold that offer readings of air quality and breatheability. As it is a common product, I was asked to look at the way people lived and interacted with this sort of technology from a outside standpoint to offer pointers on design for the final product and product strategy. I was introduced to the project about 3 days before leaving Hangzhou for my summer travels and told that I should keep an eye on the way people did things in different parts of China and try to observe emergent habits involving small personal devices that could make our product more appropriate for the cramped marketplace. I did this; however, when I returned from my travels the project had already started, as a few of our full time staff had been working on the form for some time. They were then implementing the technology within and thinking about how best to market their new product. I was put on with a group of 2 or 3 other people to develop the copy and brand identity of the project.

The technology used in this project included carbon catalytic converters and ultraviolet light to ensure clean, oodour-free air.

This was an interesting but small task so it was out the door before anyone had a chance to get sick of it. A few weeks later, we presented it to prospective clients at the Canton Fare in south China as a representation of our work.

Weddings and Photos

2006-10-04T20:39:00.000+08:00

In China, it seems that people are always getting married and subsequently always having wedding photographs taken. Unlike the western world, this is quite a lengthy ordeal and often extends well beyond the wedding day. The tradition is to create books and books of images of the couple in various situations and doing various things. The outfits can range from Indian traditional clothes, to pirate outfits to native American costumes to typical wedding clothing underwater with scuba gear over the top. The couple will spend a lot of time and money ensuring they have an appropriately eclectic set of albums.

In order to support such a strange industry, many places that would usually be professional photography stores often team up with costume stores that stock rent-able outfits designed specifically for this purpose. It should also be noted that almost all wedding dresses are rented, regardless of the price of the wedding. Also, the bride does not just rent one gown - she often wears up to 10 different gowns on her wedding day alone.

As well as the odd photographs, couples usually like to take photos in beautiful places with traditional wedding clothing (western style). So whenever one goes to a pretty place like West Lake, it is likely that a number of wedding parties will be spotted. Perhaps a few brides and grooms and a photo team. Interestingly, there is not a huge concern about shoes and the bride will often were sneakers under her dress. Also the weather seems not to affect their propensity to go on such photo making expeditions. They are there rain or shine.

Qian Dao Hu

2006-09-30T09:01:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-20T20:32:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-06T20:53:00.000+08:00

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.

Dali and Going Home Sick

2006-08-24T22:40:00.000+08:00

The last major stop of my summer travels was Dali, a city near a rather large lake sporting a few temples and a lot of minority culture representatives. Our time there was brief and perhaps the best part was taking a tour around a few attractions on the lake. That said, it was a nice destination and we had a great time there.

Traditional clothes to this region.

The end of my holiday had arrived so I returned to Kunming with Jenny and then flew home to Hangzhou. I had spent most of the travels quite healthy, apart from almost dying in Yangshuo. But in regards to my stomach, I had not had much trouble. The night before going home though, we ate at a restaurant known for its gut wrenching ability. The next morning I was fine but by mid afternoon I felt quite ill. I spent the entire flight back to Shanghai feeling awful but by the time we arrived I was feeling a little more lively. We then got a cab home to Hangzhou.

Though I began feeling better that evening I was still vaguely ill a month later. I think I had a stomach parasite but I never addressed it and now whatever was wrong is better. At least I feel a little less like dying every-time I see food.

Dali

Xishuangbanna and Damenlong

2006-08-20T22:28:00.000+08:00

This place seems unlike other parts of China.

From Kunming, we travelled to south Xishuangbanna, a 10 trip on an overnight bus. Here we were rather close to the border of Myanmar and it looked a lot like Thailand. We only had a few days here and most of that time was spent eating banana pancakes because we found a restaurant that made brilliant ones which were the highlight of our trip to Xishuangbanna.

Me impersonating a tree root.

As a side trip, we decided to go 70km further south, making us only 10km from the border to a small town called Damenlong. Usually 70km of driving does not take too long, but on this occassion there was no road and there was a lot of mud as well as a few trucks stuck in it here and there so it took us about 5 hours. To remind us of our efforts, when we got there it was pouring with rain and a seemingly quite uninteresting village. Despite the telltale signs of a meal that would probably result in food poisoning, we had a few noodles while we waited for the rain to pass. The reason we had ventured to such a remote place was that the Lowly Planet guide advised it for 2 temples of the local religion. We visited one then shortly returned as we did not find it too intriguing. The return trip took closer to 4 hours.

Friends eating in Damenlong.

I think this insane day-trip was interesting because it exposed a lot more of the culture than might usually have been experienced. Life there is not at all like life in other places I have visited.

A few days later, we returned to Kunming for one night before going on to Dali.

Please view more photos of these places here.

Xishuangbanna

Kunming and Matilda

2006-08-17T21:38:00.000+08:00

Kunming before the day starts and me without having washed.

The train was quite fun and a lot less interactive than my train ride to Beijing. There were four of us at this point but we were spread out between two roomlets. On a train like this, there are soft beds and hard beds. The soft beds are in lockable, air conditioned rooms with 4 beds and the hard beds are in open ended rooms in carriages without AC. We were on hard beds so it was quite warm. Our trip started at 9 am and would end the following day at about 6 am. Despite being too hot most of the day, the evening cooled down and we had a good sleep.

Matilda and Jenny.

The next morning when we arrived in Kunming, it was too early for most shops to have opened. We walked around, found an internet cafe, eventually had breakfast, and then got in contact with Matilda, a friend of Jenny's. She had a bit of extra space at the apartment that she was living in so two of us stayed at her house while the other two stayed in a nearby hostel. We did not do much in Kunming apart from eat brownies and buy pirated dvds. Also, 3 out of 4 of us (plus Matilda) got ill from food, something that Matilda and her friends say happens a lot there.

We were tired. This is Matilda's couch.

After a few days, we took a bus down to another city, Xishuangbanna. A few days later, we were back in Kunming for another night before going to Dali. Jenny and I eventually returned only to leave the next afternoon to go back to Hangzhou.

Da Zai

2006-08-13T20:27:00.000+08:00

The view out my window.

From Yangshuo, we went to Guilin where we booked a train ride to Kunming for a few days later. We left Guilin the same afternoon to a small village high in the mountains called Da Zai. To get there, we had to take a bus along a series of mountainous dirt roads, but because there had recently been a lot of big storms many parts of the road were missing. These were in the process of being replaced by men working to repair them and there were piles of dirt and rocks that had fallen.

We eventually got there and on leaving the bus, we were confronted by a crowd of old women who wanted to carry our bags. We told them that would not be necessary and we were happy to carry them ourselves. It turned out this was a pretty stupid thing to do because although they told us it was only a simple 20 minute walk to the place we would stay they did not mention that it was actually 30 minutes and involved climbing over several mountains and many hundreds of stone stairs. During this process, one of my friends nearly passed out as we were carrying quite a lot of stuff. When we eventually reached the top, we were given rooms with amazing views. We walked around that afternoon and I ran into some pony problems on the mountainside.

Pony Problems. It was hogging the pathway. To my right is a steep drop off.

The next day, Jenny (one of the friends I had been traveling with) and I got up early and looked at the sun as it rose. It was quite nice but very small and way too early in the morning so when we returned to the guest house we both fell back asleep. In the next two days, we walked up and down the big mountain as little as possible, it was just too big and steep. Nevertheless, we did go down to the village below and tried to swim in a small creek. It was a bit too cold and because I had only recently been deathly ill, I decided I should not get cold.

These are local women showing us things they would like to sell us.

The local people were quite cool, although some of them spent a little too much time trying to sell things to me. They listened to really great music but sadly, I did not get any recordings. On other interesting thing here was that around mid-afternoon we would be asked what we wanted for dinner - chicken or pig. They would then kill the appropriate creature to make us a meal. At one of these meals I gave in to the efforts of one of the locals and bought 2 plain silver bracelets.

This is me on my way down. Yes, I am carrying a freshly tailored suit. I did not think that through so well.

During our stay, we found a much quicker method of descent, so on our last day we used this instead of the route that had originally been taken. We caught the bus back to Guilin where we stayed one night for one night before leaving by train the next morning.

Guilin seemed to be quite an average city so I do not have any pictures. When we went to pick up our train tickets, it seemed quite likely that the agency we had asked to book us a ticket had run away with our money. In the end, they turned up with tickets for a later train and we set off to Kunming, a 21 hour trek on a "hard sleeper" train that had no airconditioning, even though it was a 40°C+ day. However, the trip wasn't too bad and we had quite an interesting time.

Here is a collection of images from my stay at Da Zai

Da Zai

Luckily I was in room 11. 11 is my favourite number.

Yangshuo

2006-08-10T20:06:00.000+08:00

Pretty nice view I think. Lots of little mountains.

Our first stop in our travels was Yangshuo, a small tourist city in Guang Xi province. It ended up being a 12 hour trip by bus - it was made longer because some of the roads that they would usually have taken were washed out by the typhoons a few days earlier. The bus we took was a sleeper bus, which meant that instead of seats, they had rows of bunk beds. The trip was quite good, although the beds were not quite as long as I'd hoped. Sadly, my phone was running out of power so it beeped a lot and I needed it on so I could stay in contact with Fan’s travel guide friend, Richard. Also, I had a temperature of 39°C for the whole night and was feeling a little sick.

Inches from death. Or at least a little sick.

When we arrived early the next morning, Richard met us and showed us around. He also showed me to a barefoot doctor, as my high temperature and illness were becoming an issue. The doctor looked at my tongue and gave me a poisonous drink with twigs that I was to drink 3 times a day for the next 2 days. She also said that if my temperature was not down by later that evening, I would need an antibiotic drip and some Chinese medicine energy solution. By that afternoon, I was beginning to feel better so I went for a boat ride with my other 3 friends to see some of the the famous mountains of the area. However, I began to feel unwell again by the end of the boat ride. When one of my friends went back to the doctor's place to pick up the rest of my medicine, the doctor was alarmed enough at my symptoms that she caught a motorbike back to my hotel room with my friend so that she could examine me in person. She determined that I was still too sick and that I would need a drip. (In China, drips are the preferred form of medicine for anything ranging from a cold to impending death.)

Her establishment could not offer such services, so we went to the establishment of a friend of hers from university, who specialised in drips and more Western medicine. This drip room was a small shop that opened out directly onto the street. They gave me the drip and complementary grapes.

That night, I sweated so much I had to change shirts many times and used every one of the shirts I had brought. The next morning, I felt a lot better and went for a bike ride to a place called Moon Mountain and then climbed it.

Moon Mountain was about an hour’s bike ride from the city. The mountain gets its name from a huge hole through the middle. They say that in the distance from every angle it looks like the moon at a different part of its cycle. In any case, we climbed first to the hole and then to the ridge above the hole. There were old ladies selling bottles of water at the top who were in much better shape than us. We were quite exhausted and they were casually running up and down the mountain with styrofoam freezers full of chilled water and juice. After that, we descended and returned to the city.

One of my friends Kayaking.

The next day, we went kayaking with Richard’s brother which was great fun except that we got exceptionally sunburnt and one of my friends ran into a tree, flipping her kayak and almost losing her camera in the water. The other friend who was with her had to jump in the river to retrieve the waterproof bag. He was very anxious to do this as it held his camera as well as hers.

On the way back from kayaking, we say a truck that had fallen off a small dirt road into a rice field. We had to wait while a crane lifted it back onto the road. This was quite cool and it was really interesting to see how the people dealt with such an occurrence. It was certainly treated a lot more casually than I imagine it would have been in a Western country. But perhaps that is because that kind of thing happens more often there.

That evening, we went to Richard’s house for cooking lessons. It was quite fun, although I think I will not open a restaurant just yet. We also got Richard advice on how to precede with our travels and where to go next. He was very helpful.

Here is a small collection of photos from my stay in Yangshuo.

Yangshuo

Back to Hong Kong

2006-08-08T19:51:00.000+08:00

The view, looking north, from the Peak.

Before heading out on our travels, we had arranged meet a two friends in Hong Kong. These were the two friends that we would go backpacking with. I also had to pick up the suit I had ordered. This time, we knew our way around a little better and managed to visit the Peak as well as going to the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, as it had just come out in HK and would not be out in China for many months.

Mongkok makes Shanghai look like a village and Melbourne look like a distant training post.

We then took a train up to the border at Shenzhen and caught a overnight bus from there. It is important to note that the day before leaving HK I though I was dying because my wrists looked thin and the day I left I started to have some sort of cold.

A classic Hong Kong Island Street. Note the tram to ecstasy.

Foshan and Fan Ginsong

2006-08-01T19:43:00.000+08:00

This is Fan and me at a one of the largest ceramic showrooms. As you can see, my leg is still wrapped with a compression bandage.

I knew that Fan Ginsong lived in this part of China, so I had contacted him a few weeks earlier asking if he would be interested in meeting up. He was interested so I scheduled a time to go to Foshan for a few days. It turned out that Foshan was only about 2 hours drive from Zhongshan so it was not a problem for a friend and I to get there by bus. Fan then picked us up and took us to their international dorm (in China these often act as hotels as well as dorms) At the time there were almost no students because it was the holidays.

Fan gave a tour of the inner city and left us to walk around for the evening. The next day he showed us their student work from the previous year of graduates and then he took us to the more industrial parts of Foshan, we visited a few of the many furniture markets and ceramics show rooms. These were quite impressive - huge buildings full of furniture of many types. The industrial ceramics were also very impressive. Companies supply incredibly accurate mock wood, brick and stone for external and internal use in architectural settings that is visually indistinguishable from the real thing.

While in Foshan, we discussed the rest of our trip with Fan and he offered to ask a guide he knew in a city we had planned to visit (Yangshuo) to help us. He gave us the phone number of the guide and called ahead about our visit. This proved quite useful later in our trip. We left Foshan after three days.

This is a caterpillar. I saw it at a temple in Foshan

My 21st in Hong Kong

2006-07-25T19:28:00.000+08:00

For my birthday, a close friend showed me around Hong Kong for a few days and took me to a great restaurant. We started out from Zhongshan on the morning of my birthday and took a ferry to Victoria Harbour, HK. When we arrived in Hong Kong, we secured our accommodation and then spent the day shopping in Mongkok (a shopping district on the Kowloon peninsula) where there are many camera shops full of rare stock and other nice things. I was very interested in getting a Leica CM or a Zeiss Ikon by Carl Zeiss. Of course, these cameras are several times my budget so I came away with nothing but it was nice to see them for a change.

That evening we went on a another ferry that took us around the harbour during the impressive Hong Kong Light Show. Eventually we got off and walked to a restaurant at Causeway Bay that was in the front of the Hong Kong Convention Centre. I was able to recognise the building because there have been a few Jackie Chan films that feature this building. In any case we had a great dinner and then a whole Haagen Dazs cake (bar one piece we gave to a child from a near by table). After dinner I was feeling "bao si la", (full to the brink of death) so we decided to avoid too much more food or activity after that.

This is the cake, it consisted of 1kg of icecream and needed dry ice to stay cold while we were aboard the ferry around the harbour.

The next day, we continued the quest to look at all the great things available in Hong Kong and walked through Causeway Bay (on Hong Kong Island). At one point, not knowing what to do next, we took a random tram just to see where it would go and for the experience of riding a tram. It ended up that the tram took us to some rather remote and industrial part of Hong Kong. We looked around the wharfs for awhile and then caught another bus. This bus went back to the very top of Tsim Sha Tsui, which was quite a long trip. We then took another bus back to Ocean Terminal, a huge shopping complex, and explored that for awhile.

After three days, we were to return to the Mainland but before that we looked around Tsim Sha Tsui and I had ordered a tailored suit. We would be back in a week or so to pick it up and meet other friends.

Our route back to China included a day trip to Macau which was quite interesting in comparison to Hong Kong. Hong Kong made me think of a Britain that does not rain all the time, where you can buy good local food and where there is an Asian drive for shopping. The public transport is great and most other public services are well designed. Macau, on the other hand, seemed a lot more like its father nation, Portugal. The roads are winding and city planning was done after all the buildings were built. The food is of course great because the fusion has had a long time to develop. I though that Macau felt a lot more European and seems to have retained more history. That said, we did not visit any casinos so perhaps my impressions could be skewed.

This is the Zeiss Ikon, probably my favorite camera.

Heading South

2006-07-22T01:10:00.000+08:00

These are the friends that saw me off as I left Hangzhou. Younghee's Boyfriend, Younghee and Shemmy.

After returning from Beijing, I left my ATM card in Shanghai Airport and spent a long week back in Hangzhou preparing to head south. I was to go to a place called Zhongshan where the family of a friend of mine was from. We would stay there for about a week before starting off on an extended travel though mid-China.

Zhongshan was a rather small village but quite a nice place to rest as my foot was still healing. I was staying at the house of a friend's grandfather and essentially every day after Yum Cha, he would go off to play Mahjong for the rest of the day. We had a nice time not doing to much for a change.

After a few days it was getting rather close to my 21st Birthday so we across to Hong Kong. We would return to Zhongshan a few days later before meeting other friends and leaving for our travels.

Bejing and No Great Wall

2006-07-12T01:01:00.000+08:00

Upon arriving in Beijing, Morgan and I started a search for our hostel. This took only a little while so we had the rest of the afternoon to walk around. After putting our stuff down, we decided to go see Tiananmen Square and see if we could get into the Forbidden City. It was quite nice and completely unlike a city in south China. One thing I noticed in particular was that the buildings, though not that tall, were just enormous in grandure. Beijing is not studded with sky scrapers like Shanghai - instead it just has a lot of really big buildings, perhaps a large city block wide and 10 or 15 stories tall.

After walking for a short while, we ran into a girl who was interested in practising her English and exploring Bejing with some companions. So she showed us around for the afternoon and pointed out some of the more famous restaurants. That evening, we met up with some other friends.

For the next few days, we travelled inner Beijing and looked at a lot of the sites including Mao’s body which was quite interesting. We then went to visit the Summer Palace which was rather impressive though quite similar to Hangzhou - there was an artificial lake which was designed to be pretty and pleasant to be near.

We were interested in going to the Great Wall but we planned things poorly so we ended up not having enough time to get all they way there and back before our flight left.

I thought Beijing was quite a lovely place and although I was ill almost the entire time with some strange stomach problem I find that I recall the food as being great. One particularly memorable restaurant was a very traditional Tibetan one we drank yak wine of some description and ate food I had never imagined.

Here is a gallery of our trip.

Beijing and Morgan's Visit

Morgan and a Train to Beijing

2006-07-09T11:19:00.000+08:00

Soon after recovering from not being able to walk, it was time for summer vacation so I only spent a short time back in the lab before leaving town.

As part of the vacation, an old friend of mine, Morgan, came to visit. We started in Hangzhou and I showed her around with a few friends. Then we went to Shanghai to visit some of the more famous sites. We spent one night there before returning to Hangzhou for a few more days. We had planned to take a sleeper train to Beijing to meet up with some other friends but I failed to get train tickets in time so we were forced to postpone our trip a few days and take hard seats on the 16 hour train.

The train ride was quite interesting as it was full of people - so many that more than half the people in the carriage could not sit down. We were seated opposite two mothers with their two young boys who did not sleep well, which added to the interest. I was sitting next to a girl from Hangzhou, Eve, who later became a close friend. We started talking because her English was not too bad. Her family were sitting near by and they gave us food during the trip. We also talked about the soccer because that night was the final in the World Cup. A friend who was watching the game back in Hangzhou sent me frequent updates on the game via SMS and we were all sad when we found out who won.

That night many people did not sleep and just stood there or slept laying on the floor of the train. It was a surreal experience.

The next morning atendents came around with boiling water for tea and instant noodles. For obvious reasons I was quite nervous about this activity.

Eve, the girl I was sitting next to, got off about an hour before Beijing. We decided to stay in contact.

When we arrived we found somewhere to stay and something to do.

This is some mountain we passed in the train.

Vacuum Cleaner Project One

2006-06-28T20:18:00.000+08:00

This is an image of my most successful concept.

This was a 3 month project that the lab was involved with. The task was to offer a face lift to an existing vacuum cleaner to make it more appropriate for an international, namely European, market.

My role was as a design team member and I was primarily involved in the design elements listed below:

Concept work: I was a core concept designer and the company liked my concept. However, at this time I injured my foot so I could not make the necessary developments to bring my concept back for the second review. Elemental Design. Our client brought us a basic element set that we needed to keep in tact for the control system of the unit. I worked to explore interface designs and other aspects of the elemental array.
Consulting: I was part of this project almost all the way though and because it was intended for a European market they asked me to offer any international experience I had in this area. The main service I provided was in suggesting styles that the European market would be more or less interested in.I burnt my foot during this project so my work was not consistent. After the appropriate amount of healing I returned to the lab to finish my contribution to the project.

This is an image of the chosen concept.

The product is now in mass production.

This project may mark a turning point in my design ideology. Before having done this project I had a lot of knowledge about all the practices and methods used to do such things but I had not actually ever put my ideas together to form a full pipeline of this time. At RMIT many of the projects I had been involved with were much more about either technology or concept or theory. This was perhaps the first time where all of these things really came together for me. It should also be made known that, prior to this, I was completely unconvinced that anything I could draw could be useful to anyone. However, when I was told that I needed to make sketches for that afternoon of 3 to 20 vacuum concepts I somehow managed to come though. In fact, they thought I was drawing too accurately and that I should ease up to let the concepts develop more. I did this and my colleagues seemed to see my work as not only acceptable but even worthwhile - something I thought would never happen if I were drawing. I later realised that the degree of professionalism common in China in this sort of environment was not what had been suggested to me. It is not a shell of skill and technical ability without a strong theoretical core but almost the opposite. It came to be obvious that their theory and design studies were so strong that there technical ability just fell into place and, if you look carefully, you can notice this in their outcomes.

I learnt a few things on this project and it opened my mind to what I could do. I think this was perhaps the most confidence inspiring thing I did in China and repercussions of this project have changed the way I look at my work and my future in design.

Recovering from Tea

2006-06-26T10:38:00.000+08:00

Eventually, I started really getting better and the doctors asked my to start putting weight on the burnt leg again so that the skin would learn to stretch properly.

After another week, I returned to the lab and I could walk short distances. I had trouble walking for too long and would often need to sit down after a while. I also had to wear a compression bandage for the next 4 months.

I was happy to have lived through it and started to realise some nice things about the odd hospitals they have in China. They are very casual and very to-the-point. They do not waste too much time on paperwork and medicine and treatment is generally very, very cheap.

As I had spent the previous three weeks not walking and essentially lying in bed, I have a few photos of my typical days' viewing. The ceiling, my desk, a wall…

I was very excited when I had skin on my leg again, and even more so when I could actually start walking.

Graduation

2006-06-14T10:58:00.000+08:00

While I was immobile with a missing leg, the fourth years graduated. This meant that many of the people I had worked with during the semester were no longer students at ZJU, although a few of them stuck around to do a masters degree.

As I was incapable of walking, I missed out on the graduation party and graduation exhibition. They did sent me photos though.

This is the head of the former Creative Group I worked in at the beginning of my stay. Here he is demoing his graduation project which went on to become his job at a company that liked the design.

Actually Finding a Burns Hospital

2006-06-12T09:49:00.000+08:00

A week and 3 days after my burn, one of my classmates, Blake, offered to accompany me to the hospital. He got a taxi to come to the back door of the dorm although they are not usually allowed inside the university, I hopped down the stairs and into the cab and we set off. As we pulled out of the university the driver asked where we were to go. I said the name of the hospital from the day before - the one with the microwave for human flesh - but Blake thought that was not a good idea. He then talked with the driver about which other hospitals were okay. There was a burns specific hospital however it was a long way away. In the end the driver said he would take us there anyway.

Eventually we arrived and I was seen rather quickly. They were shocked at the prior treatment and said that it had been treated as a much smaller, less serious burn and that I would need a skin graft. They then debrided the wound, which includes removing all the dead skin and flesh - in this case, skin and flesh that had started to heal incorrectly. This hurt quite a lot. They then washed my wound and dressed it. Again the pain had changed and become more evident so I was a lot more on edge. When everything was done I hopped out to wait for a taxi back home.

I returned two days later. They opened the wrapping and started to wash the wound as before. This time, however, after washing it the first time, they poured alcohol over it to ensure it would not get infected. There was no warning and it was quite painful, perhaps the most painful part of the whole experience. After that they rewrapped it and we talked about healing times. They expected it to take a while - 5 weeks to a few months without a skin graft and only 2 or 3 weeks with a graft.

My parents were still worried about this whole thing and to add to the confusion they were travelling separately in different parts of the world so communications were poor. They were trying to find out if someone could give us an idea of whether I needed a graft or not and how it should be dealt with generally. Our doctor friends in the States and Australia agreed that it was being dealt with well and that it would probably heal without a graft although a graft would speed things up. They thought if they were treating it they would not graft because there were still visible hair follicles in the photos I had sent. This meant the skin had somewhere to start growing from.

I went back to the hospital every two days for a few weeks eventually to find that it was improving rather well so the doctors said I did need not a skin graft. I was, however, still not walking and was hopping everywhere instead. In China they do not give you crutches or wheelchairs unless you really need them. The burns hospital was filled with patients who were hopping around because they had burnt part of their legs or feet.

Because the hospital I was going to now was more burns-oriented, there were more burn victims and everytime I went, I would see young and old with burns more serious than mine. It was also surprising to see that, on ocassion, a woman with child who had been scalded all over and was screaming continously would be ignored and made to wait until the doctor had free time, even if he wasn't dealing with anything particularly urgent at the time.

This is a small library of images from my legs recovery

Spilt Tea

Finding a Burns Hospital

2006-06-04T09:39:00.000+08:00

The day after being burnt, I returned to the school hospital. This time, I was just accompanied by a western friend who could only speak some Chinese. This did not turn out to be a problem and the nurse redressed my wound. The next day, I was to redress the wound myself as that part of the hospital would be shut so she gave me the appropriate materials. This also went to plan. The following day, Monday, I returned to the hospital and the same procedure whet forth. At the time she expected me to be healed in about 2 weeks. A few days went passed following the same pattern. On the Thursday of that week however she scowled at my gamy leg and sent me to see a doctor who said I had an infection and that I would need antibiotics. They then redressed my wound and gave me a prescription to take to the drip room, a room full of sick people connected to drips hanging from metal hooks in the ceiling. It went on like this for a few days.

In the meantime, I was not going to the lab as I could not concentrate very well and I was still shaking from the shock. I was eating okay and have a few friends who were eager to take care of me while I was less inclined to walk. To avoid staying in my room all the time I went to a few relaxed places around Hangzhou and went on my first boat ride there. I was so ill at the time that I spent most of the trip sleeping or at least in an immobile state.

After 3 days of penicillin, I decided it might be a good idea to search for a English speaking doctor at a different local hospital. This proved an interesting effort because although when I arrived at the hospital I was was seen to immediately ahead of the other 20 or so people waiting for attention, I was not led to see someone who actually spoke English. Instead I was taken to a doctor experienced in another area who could speak about 10 words of English. He said that the previous hospital had been using a drug that was too weak and gave me a stronger antibiotic. He also prescribed something he called microwave treatment. This involved placing something like a griller near my leg. It then made my leg feel really hot as though it was re-burning it. I think to some degree this is what it was doing but I think the object of the device was to dry the wound. As well as this I was asked to stop walking on that foot. So the hopping began. At any rate it hurt quite a lot and that evening I called people from the lab to ask if they could accompany me the next day to ensure we were all on the same page.

At the same time I had told my parents and started they had contacted a few doctor friends. I had sent a few pictures home and they had been comparing notes. No-one seemed to know anything about this microwave thing but they said medicine in China was older than the most western medicine so perhaps it was quite an effective method. I also heard from the supervisor of one of my friends from UTS that when she she scalded her foot in China a few years ago, she was also given this microwave treatment.

Spilt Tea

2006-05-26T08:57:00.000+08:00

Shortly after being moved into Lab 318, I was taken to a prototyping company for a meeting and to check up on some work they were doing for us. After seeing some of their model making spaces, we went into their meeting room and sat down. As is customary in China, they brought tea out to us in disposable clear plastic cups. At the time, I was looking at the furniture and thinking how it was so uniquely Chinese and I was trying to work out some characteristics that could be represented generically.

One of the secretaries (or something like that) came out with the first two cups of tea and placed them on the table. The cup that she put in front of me was a little crushed but I did not react to that. I then considered sliding it over to one of the people sitting further from the door but I did not, I just listened to the Chinese as they talked about they work going on between Lab 318 and this company. I could not understand much as my Chinese was still quite poor at that time so I was listening carefully for any word that I could pick out.

Suddenly there was a sound as the cup of tea in front of me keeled over and spilt its contents on the glass table. The water spilled off the table and down to my left foot which was on the ground directly under the table’s edge. At first I moved quickly to avoid being in the way of the water but my sock was already soaked. I was asked if my foot was okay and I responded that it was not too bad. I calmed myself and decided that the pain was not significant. I have done this in Kung Fu quite a lot so it was not completely new. As I sat I decided that it did not hurt enough to be serious and decided that I could ignore it. I think they offered to let me wash my foot or at least take my shoe off but I did not want to disrupt the meeting and I did not think it was very serious so I just told them it would not be necessary and went back to trying to listen for Chinese words I knew and trying to extract the meaning of their conversation.

As we left I noticed that I was a little more shaky than usual and on the drive home I decided that I should have a proper look at my wound when we got back to the lab. In the car I sent a text message to a friend back at the international dorm saying “tea no foot, pain!” I meant to write “tea on foot…” but the predictive spelling on my phone is not always accurate. After that, we discussed finding apartments in Hangzhou because at the time I was thinking of moving out of the dorms to cheaper accommodation.

When we arrived at the lab I walked in and sat down as quickly as possible. I then removed my shoe and on of the guys from the lab who spoke better than average English came over. He was outraged when he found out that I had been so burnt and not done anything. As I removed my sock I managed to also remove most of the affected skin. The lab members then decided I should go to the school hospital so I gathered my things. They found keys to Ying Fantian’s car and Blake, the boy with good English, drove me there.

The hospital smelt strange and a few people let me go before them in line as they thought my burn looked serious. The doctor agreed that it was not a good idea to have avoided washing it. I then went to a nurse who dressed my wound and told me to return the next day for redressing. My colleagues then drove me home. They had to go back to the lab so they left me at that point.

After settling in to the new pain, the dressing had reminded me of what I was feeling, so I called the friend that I sent the text message to and explained the situation. She went and bought me a few things and then came to my room. One of the things she tried to get me were some flip-flops. However, when she went to a nearby supermarket and asked for the appropriate size, she was laughed at and told that no-one needed shoes that large. She then explained that I was tall and western and then they understood how such a large foot could exist but the still could not help the fact that their shoes were all much smaller. As a band-aid solution, she bought me a pair that were a few sizes too small but still the biggest that were made. We thought I could get some larger ones latter on and the ones she bought were quite cheap. I am actually yet to replace them but that is another matter.

The day went on and we went to a restaurant for dinner, but the food was not that good. At that point I could still walk, just not very fast.

Photo Management Software Lecture

2006-05-18T12:53:00.000+08:00

I have been running tutorials and subbing for teachers of CAD and a few other software packages since high school because it is something I love doing. In China, most of the people I worked with were quite good with CAD programs but were interested in photo management packages. At the time I was testing out the Adobe Lightroom Beta and Apple's Aperture and a member of a Photoshop training team, Jiang, asked me to do a guest lecture on these packages and how they can be used.

My role was to demonstrate the use model and then show some quick work flow techniques.

This was an interesting learning experience because in some ways it failed to work as expected. First of all, I was presenting about 2 Apple-only packages to people who had no interest in ever using Apples and secondly I was speaking about photo management packages to a crowd of people interested in image manipulation and generation in Photoshop. These photo management systems are designed for photographers and studios and all the tools that I was talking about were oriented toward that sort of work flow. I think that the talk I gave was dry and perhaps a bit boring but the real problem was that my audience was interested in something quite different.

At the end of it Jiang came up and said, "I guess I expected something else, but that software seems interesting." What I learnt from this is that it is much more important to know what people are looking for than to do a good job. I also learnt that it is a lot harder to listen to someone speak for a long time when you only understand half the words they are using - not that that is a surprise, but it was the first time that I had talked for an hour and then found that most people were still thinking about the beginning.

The Real Introduction to Lab 318

2006-05-10T19:28:00.000+08:00

Lab 318 is essentially a commercial design studio based within ZJU and run by members of the design department. It is populated by students from the fourth year of the undergraduate program and masters students, as well as including a number full of time employees. We are made up of a few core teams that generally participate in different kinds of work. However, we often cross pollinate and most people work on at least 2 teams at any one time. The focuses of the teams include electrical, manufacturing, innovation, commercial work and competition work. During different times of my stay I worked on 4 of these teams but spent most of my time in the innovation group. We would often break a major project between the teams to either get multiple outcomes from one brief or to build parallel work flow. Out clients range greatly but during my stay we were gradually moving toward a more innovation centered work flow so we held preference for jobs that would call for this.

Changing Work Places

2006-05-08T19:14:00.000+08:00

One day, after the mid-semester, week-long May First holiday, I got up and left as usual to go to the Creative Group room where I worked. On my walk there I ran into a boy who I had met when I first met ZJU students. His name was Blake and we said hello and he said something about some lab being closed and that I should go somewhere else. I did not really get the message and we were walking in opposite directions so it was disregarded. When I arrived at the the room it was locked, which was not a huge surprise but not normal, either. I had a key so I let myself in only to find that all the computers and everything else of value had been removed. I was a little shocked and called one of the lab coordinators, Chen Zhiliang. He said that over the holiday the Creative Group had been dissolved and that I was to be moved into a different lab. He then said I should go home and that I would be contacted about where to go later.

I waited a few days and was called by one of the other lab members. He asked me to meet him and he walked me to Lab 318, where I would spend the rest of the year working. At that point I was a bit lost as to what was going on here and there but I moved my stuff over to the new lab and started going there every day. This was the beginning of a very new interaction with ZJU.

Hangzhou CBD

2006-04-29T21:13:00.000+08:00

Downtown Hangzhou is a series of long shopping streets that seem to be always populated and bustling. Although it has its share of restaurants and other food vendors, most shops are fashion or sports goods in this area.

At the south of the main CBD, there is a traditional street (Hefang Jie) that sells a lot of old wares and has some famous tea houses. Further north and closer to the lake, there is a more expensive area that has some of the better brands as well as more restaurants and hangout spots. There are clubs and other night culture venues throughout the central city, although we did not go to these much as ZJU students were rarely interested in them. As well as stores, they had what people called 'the markets' which are enclosed alleyways in some building that were full of tiny shops and often very crowded. Many of these would extend under the ground a few floors and above ground 5 or 6 floors. They would be full of many kinds of fashion products and accessories and bargaining is expected. The target market is generally girls under twenty five; however, most of the larger facilities catered for a larger demographic.

Throughout my stay I often walked through the central streets of the city to go shopping or to find a new restaurant. However, most things available did not suit or fit appropriately. For obvious reasons, shoes that fit me are not common in China. However, while I was there, I did find some that were too big and I eventually bought a pair in the CBD, although they have proved to not be too comfortable. I think they have culture on their side because they need not create fitting options for more than a few races of Chinese.

Red Dot 2006

2006-04-28T11:12:00.000+08:00

This was an effort that the Creative group (and later some other ZJU competition teams) put towards the 2006 Red Dot Concept Award competition. This competition is open so we spent a lot of time looking for a good approach.

My role on this project was as an innovation team member. During the course of the project I did a few specific things for the team including a few "Getting Out of the Box" sessions and another "Looking for Need" workshop. Details on these are below:

"Getting Out of the Box" sessions: These were a number of occasions designed to press some of the importance of leaving the lab and seeing more of the world to get more informed design outcomes. We walked around some areas of Hangzhou for quite some time, documenting human behavior and looking for weak signals and discussing design needs that we were seeing or experiencing.
"Looking for Need" workshop: This was a workshop where we discussed finding the need behind a design and finding a need before creating design. The goal was to start to introduce some of areas of interest for our Red Dot submission to find some problems that were not too big to tackle.

I was not part of the finishing team because by the due date of this project the Creative Group had dissolved and I had been moved into Lab 318. I was then busy with other projects and a new team was created to finish up the Red Dot submissions.

I was only really involved in this project for a few weeks but during that time I became a lot more confident that I had something valuable to offer others and I became a lot more able to speak publicly and without prompts. I think I also learnt about managing group projects and working towards a team ideal a little better. These things mentioned, I think I learnt more by watching the other student's approch to the project than by my own experience. They worked so much harder and did so much more contextualizing research than any other group of designers or design students I had ever worked with. I got the impression that they were really interested in their work and they they were really interested in winning. I found out later that this paid off.

Freelance Quality Control

2006-04-26T11:46:00.000+08:00

For a few months I worked as a freelance quality control consultant for an American start up called BoomYa Inc. Eugene, a friend of mine from early in my stay in China, was associated with this business and needed some help appraising manufacturers and designs and things like that.

My role was as an contracted consultant and in meetings I would always introduce myself as a QC person although the actual work I did for the company also involved some design consulting. My involvement included working on the following tasks:

Visiting many manufacturers with a company representative and later with the owner with an aim to come to a manufacturing agreement and establish an understanding of the expected and required quality standards;
Assessing manufacturing facilities and methods to aid development of a production pipeline;
Addressing quality issues in production lines of future products;
Offering design consulting to optimize product cost efficiency and marketability.

This project was a great experience for me in many ways. I learnt a huge amount not only about working with companies and meeting their expectations but also about how people in this context are lenient in certain ways that one may not expect. I was continually amazed by how much simple things that I knew could be useful to other people. Information that I thought was common in an industry setting became decision changing on a number of occasions which was an interesting responsibility.

As well as the working experience I was exposed to some of the innovation common to Chinese manufacturers including making EDMs out of old end mills and some of their ingenious ways of carrying large payloads on bicycles.

I also realized that presenting and communicating well makes a huge difference. During one meeting I quickly mocked up a Maya model to demonstrate how we wanted a part made and the manufacturers thought this was the best thing since fried rice. My model was simple and but it served in ways that no sketch or words could have.

Toward the end of my work for this company I was asked to make a judgment call that may have destroyed the future of the company. I thought for awhile and eventually came up with an answer but I was really reluctant to do so because I was relatively nervous that my lack of experience would cause a long term problem or bankruptcy. In the end it seems to have turned out fine. The company has not yet gone into full production as they are having some issues their engineering department in the States.

Scaffolding and Building

2006-04-16T21:06:00.000+08:00

Animals have a big role in building construction, especially when it is in a less easy to reach place like this mountain top.

In China, construction is fast and uses a lot of methods which are not commonly seen in the West. Bamboo is often used for scaffolding in a number of ways and, because most of the builder are very used to this tradition, when they use metal, they use it as if it were bamboo. So in the making of new buildings they often seem to create a compete shell out of long metal rods, about the size of the bamboo that would be used, all bolted together. As the building grows, the structure remains and is used as a transport system and holding structure. Then at the last minute, when the building is complete, they deconstruct the shell to reveal the new building. They still use bamboo a lot as well as traditional techniques to get fast production on a small budget.

Only rarely do they use elements that are much stronger than these metal rods, so when doing things like a new bridge - where there would usually be a huge need for load bearing support structures - they just bolt thousands of these poles together to create a connected 3D matrix. That means that the bridge is supported by essentially solid metal below its surface. This method is quite safe as it makes it much less likely that the bridge will fall while in construction, but it is resource intensive and time consuming. However, this is not a problem for the construction managers because in China, there are always people eager to work at jobs like this so they can easily find good employees. As a result, the workflow of the construction site is much quicker and tighter paced. They also have a tendency to work all the time, as opposed to Western construction companies who are likely to stop if it rains or if the wind is not blowing to their liking. Similarly, there are no problems with unions. Instead, there are government organisations and there are certain rights to walk away from things that people are not interested in taking part in. In the end, it seems hugely more efficient than the Western methods and in general better for a larger percentage of the population.

West Lake at Night

2006-03-31T20:47:00.000+08:00

Anyone who has heard of West Lake has probably heard of its beauty. But unless you have gone there and lived there for a little time, it might be hard to understand this beauty.

At night, it is no less pretty. It sits quietly reflecting area-lights and the misty sky so there is always a moving gradient of colour with long reflections of buildings and lit places on its shores. While you might think that this is a common property of metropolitan lakes, West Lake has an odd tranquility at night that seems quite unique. I think this is largely due to its size - it is not too big but not too small. It is large enough that it is not easy to see across, but small enough that you can see the other side. Also, the skies in China offer a lot more light than say, Australian skies, so even mountains on the distance are dimly outlined, making the whole scene much more contextually interesting.

During my stay, I would often go with friends to shop or eat by the lake and spent many evenings sitting or walking along its shores. They say that without West Lake, 80% of Hangzhou would die from heartbreak.

Here are a few other pictures of this nature

West Lake at Night

Living as a Celebrity

2006-03-29T20:31:00.000+08:00

Being tall and white in China, especially in the more rural areas, is an easy way to be noticed. Children would gaze up as though I had just changed their lives and I would continually hear things like "Na me gao!" which translates to "so tall!" or "lao wai", wich means foreigner. Unlike in a Western country, where if people said too many things of this kind offence might be taken and therefore expected, in China this was a well practised reaction to people of my kind. In fact, at no point during my stay did I feel as though I was being challenged or made a mockery of, by Chinese people at least.

In some places people would approach and ask to take photos which was quite an interesting feeling. Being an instant celebrity is worthwhile for ones confidence and the opportunities and friendships that can be made are quite endless. On the 16 hour train to Beijing I met a girl from Hangzhou who I would later meet again and become good friends with. In Beijing, Morgan and I met a girl who helped us around because she was interested in practicing English. I think in the end I learnt more Chinese in our interactions than she learnt English but it was a good time nonetheless. People were not only more willing to talk to me than they might be in other places they were also more interested in helping me. I once went to the hospital where there was a queue of 20 or more people waiting to see the doctor. However, as soon as the nurses saw me, they led me straight into a doctor's office where I was seen to immediately. I also had 6 or 7 nurses looking after me the whole time.

I think in the long run this is not a good thing for China. However, it does allow for great steps in foreign relations.

The Old Chinese

2006-03-25T20:27:00.000+08:00

In China, there are a lot of old people. There are a few reasons for this, but one outstanding one is that they are taken care of and they take care of themselves quite well. Because there are so many old people, and because there are many fewer children (whose parents are busy trying to support their family’s) the grandparents are often seen caring for children. They are well respected and well cared for, in some ways they make me think of fat and sassy things, although rarely are they either.

Linyin Temple, like many places in China, is often full of grandparents and children. The location itself is a medium-sized Buddhist temple surrounded by a large garden. While it is not cheap to get into the garden and you need to pay again to get into the temple, it is quite a nice place to walk and explore the caves. As you can see, there are also vines that grandmothers would climb on.

As well as taking care of children, the ancient in China often get up very early and walk around doing odd exercises. These can include almost any normal activity as well as a lot of rather unusual ones. Some that ought to be mentioned are walking backwards for extended periods, throwing oneself against hard objects, shouting loudly over bodies of water like West Lake, and ballroom dancing next to the lake at 5:30 am. I am too young of mind to understand the full benefits of these activities but they must be doing something right because these people are not at all young, often above 80 and often they will spend the rest of the day looking after a 4 year old.

Old people in China are very active and are often seen doing things that seem, at first glace, to be more suitable for younger and fitter people. For example, very old people still ride bicycles with complete confidence and ease to get around the city, often with large and heavy loads strapped to the bikes. They also continue to work in the family business long past the Australian retirement age of 65. Also, on multiple occassions, my friends and I have struggled to climb some mountains (like Moon Mountain in Guilin and Yellow Mountain in Anhui), only to be passed by old people in their 70's who were not only going faster than we were, but were carrying boxes of drinks from yokes on their shoulders so that they could sell them to us.

Zing Gang and a Workshop

2006-03-20T22:07:00.000+08:00

As part of our preparation for the Red Dot competition the creative group went to Zing Gang, a larger newer campus of ZJU, to do a workshop on innovative pipelines for groups.

Before we started they showed me around the campus for a while. It was quite beautiful and very spacious although not quite complete. Between classes the rodes teamed with students and bikes and during classes they were baron with almost no one walking around. It is enclosed but so large that walking through it would not be convenient for most people so the only people there were students.

The aim of the workshop was to help students work together on innovative or concept rich projects from a western point of view. I was talking about a few ways of looking at tasks and breaking them up to create better work hand offs within long projects. The method I was discussing involved having various meetings involving the whole team to ensure continuity and being true to the intentions of other project teams within the group.

Before I started talking we walked around to find a good place for everyone to sit down. There is a body of water in this campus so we thought sitting near it would be nice. I found a tree and tried to climb up and sit in it so I could look over the group better but as I swung on the first branch it broke and I fell to the ground. This was quite amusing and we eventually decided sitting on the ground would be safer. On later attempts of climbing on things I was cautioned as people reminded me of this incident. Perhaps one day I will learn.

After introducing the ideas we did a trial run with a slightly reduced work flow as we only had one afternoon and a team of about 20 people. We started with a finding need exercise in which people would conduct random interviews on the streets of the campus during lunch time. After a while we presented findings back to the group and moved on to information processing and then brainstorming.

By the end of the day we had a lot of concepts and were all tired so we went to a restaurant just outside the campus and had a big meal. That night I went to a Korean drinking party that turned a bit risqué before ending with an underage American boy passing out. I for some reason offered to carry him off and which was quite a ordeal. Eventually I got home to find that I had had some form of food poisoning and was quite ill for the next day or two. I miss China.

Design Boom: Shelter in a Cart

2006-03-17T10:39:00.000+08:00

This was a group approach to a Design Boom competition titled Shelter in a Cart. The aim of the competition was to develop a cart for homeless people that could be used both to move belongings as well as provide shelter for the owner.

My role on this project was as a member of the core innovation team. In this role I helped manage other parts of the team and helped people contextualize homeless situations around the world. I also ran a workshop called "Finding Need" that aimed to help people look at ways to find problems that are not too hard to solve. I was asked to do this because I had been working for a company in the United States doing a large scale feasibility study on a management work over that required me to find problems within the current system that were solvable within the context of the desired change.

I was not able to be part of the finishing team as I was out of town on another project during the time of the final push.

I think that I learnt a few things from this project, but what has seemed most valuable was the knowledge that things I know and have learnt through experience or formal education can be useful for other people. At the time of this project I was struggling hard to overcome the language barriers and although a few member of the team were quite good at English, most had quite a bit of trouble and at this point my Chinese was non-existent.

New in Shanghai and a 3D DCC Conference

2006-03-17T10:09:00.000+08:00

As Jiang and I shared an interest in 3D digital content creation, he notified me that there would be a conference in Shanghai on teaching and practices in DCC. I of course went, but because I was on a business trip for some of the time that the conference was on, I only got to go to the last day of the conference.

I arrived in Shanghai city for the first time late at night at the old South Station. At the time I spoke no Chinese and was new to everything about the layout of Shanghai so I was alarmed when the train stop was in the middle of seemingly nowhere. After a few moments I found someone with a pay phone (in China pay phones are often privately owned by small businesses on the side of the road) and called Jiang - however, he did not answer. I tried again and it continued not to work. Eventually I walked around and after a short while I ran into Jiang and Dr. Yao. They took me to dinner with some of their friends and we then went to Dr. Yao's home to spend the night.

The next morning we got up early to attend the conference. We started by visiting the head office of Compaq and HP in China and after a brief talk there we went to Autodesk Shanghai where they showed us some product road maps for their Discreet product lineup. They took us out to lunch after that and that was all that I saw at the conference.

That afternoon Jiang and I walked around Shanghai city and much later that evening Jiang had his camera stolen at People's Square station. This was quite a sad happening and we returned to Hangzhou the next day.

Yu Mao Qiu

2006-03-05T19:38:00.000+08:00

In China, most people play some kind of sport and often they will ask you to join them. The most popular sports are table tennis, badminton, soccer, tennis and basketball in no particular order.

When I first went to China, I had only ever played soccer out of these sports but relatively quickly I was being called upon by my Chinese and international friends to join them in playing various sports. I am quite frightened of balls in general so I never participated in soccer or tennis and only once in basketball, but I gradually became able to make returns and eventually play volleys in ping pong and badminton.

In badminton, I have a large advantage because I am not that short and neither are my arms, so I can avoid the usual running around and just stand in the middle of the court. In ping pong I have the same properties, but it turns out that they are a disadvantage in this sport. I am too tall, so getting low enough to really gauge the ball's movement is a little tough. As I was playing with my lab mates one day, one of them, Dr. Yao, insisted that I lower my stance and instantly I found I improved immeasurably. I went on to beat him once or twice as well as a number of the other people in the lab.

On another note badminton in Chinese is "yu mao qiu", which literally translates to "feather ball". I think that is a pretty nice name.

Creative Group

2006-02-27T19:37:00.000+08:00

After about a week of waiting to be placed in a working environment I was called by one of the first students I had met and he chaperoned me to my work place. I talked though the nature of the group and a short while later it was lunch. After lunch, the guy I already knew had some stuff to do so I returned to the lab to finish up the day with the rest of its members.

The group I was to be part of was a team of about 10 students all working to win as many competitions as possible. Although there was no full time management, a member of staff would occassionally come in to offer a hand. The rest of the time 1 or 2 of the students would keep the team moving although most of the members were also working on their own projects in their spare time. They had a great track record!

We participated in a multitude of competitions and I was given a key. My colleagues were also interested in my work and when I showed them they asked me to give a few talks about a some of the things I had done.

Pizza Hut Celebrity

2006-02-23T09:25:00.000+08:00

After a short time in China, some of the Westerners I knew yearned for pizza. There was a Pizza Hut in a shopping center near our campus so we set a time to eat there. When we arrived, we found that there was quite a queue and that it would take 20 minutes to be seated. One of us stayed in the queue while a few others, including me, walked off to do various things. I was about 100 meters away at an ATM when one of the employees ran out to talk to the lone Westerner in line. They were interested in getting me, the tall white guy, to come back the next day and take part in a "party" concerning a new product.

We eventually entered and ate and at the end of the meal they came by to ensure my presence the next day. They were also interested in my one other Westerner of our group, but they had no interest in the rest as they were all ABC or something similar. They wanted white people.

I came back the next day with a couple of friends and they swept me and my white friend aside and explained the evening's activities to us. They wanted us to help introduce the product by sitting on display and eating a new pizza in a "western" way. There were three of us all together and they had each of us pretend to be from different countries. They asked me to eat the pizza from the crust first and then work back towards the center. Another person had to fold the pizza and eat it like that. My friend was asked to roll it into a cylinder and eat it in this way. We were also asked to say a few Chinese words which I could not do well at the time which just added to the mayhem.

After the oddities of pizza were over with, we were ushered to sit with our other friends. Oddly, all the other spectators had been given free pizzas and salads and other things. Our friends however had not been given much at all. The one of us who spoke the best Chinese argued with the manager and eventually got us some free pizza but certainly not enough.

Eventually they started playing games. One in particular included putting a balloon connected to a pump under someone's shirt and pumping it up until it popped. It was all quite strange and amusing.

The pizza we were advertising was stuffed crust. Sadly all their pizzas were quite bad so we tried to avoid Pizza Hut in the future.

Here are a few more pictures from the event.

Pizza Hut Celebrity

Waiting for Appointment

2006-02-22T12:00:00.000+08:00

After having met with Ying Fantian I was told that I could move into a lab soon. However, I did not have a good way to contact people at ZJU so for a week or so I had no appointment. This was not a problem as I had only just arrived and was happy to look around Hangzhou more, settle in a little more and make some more friends. And that is what I did. I visited many of the attraction around Hangzhou and started getting a hang of the eating and shopping scene. I also made a lot more friends from all over the world, especially Korea. At this point I was not meeting a lot of Chinese people however that would change a lot in the weeks to come.

Buying a Camera

2006-02-20T12:27:00.000+08:00

This photo was one of the first shot with my new camera. Note the exesive noise in dark areas.

After being in China for a week I realised that not having a digital camera on such a trip would be really lame. So I went out and bought one.

Usually when I do things like spending money, I set aside a short while - perhaps a matter of weeks - to decide which product to buy. I care quite a lot about this sort of thing so it was a surprise to me that when it came to buying a digital camera I would not think about it at all and just go shopping.

I told a few of the guys from the lab that I needed to buy a camera and asked if they would show me where cameras could be found. They took me to a digital supermarket which had quite a selection of products and vendors and we strolled around for a while. Realizing these people may be busy next time I could get a camera, I decided to buy one on the spot. My budget was about 6000 RMB and the products I was interested in were prosumers or something close. We looked for quite some time and in the end I decided to buy a little Panasonic.

The next day I was a little sad because it was far too noisy in most situations. After some time I worked out how to take photos that are not bad with it.

Registered Student

2006-02-20T12:11:00.000+08:00

As a result of Ying Fantian's return to China I was able to complete my registration and formally become part of ZJU. Although I was registered as an Industrial Design student, the nature of my work there was not really clear. What happened was that I went to the office where registration would occur and they asked me questions like who are you, why are you here, why should we let you study here, who is paying for you to study etc. Of course I did not have all the answers as it was a virtually informal exchange. Ying Fantian had advised me that he could be contacted if there were problems so I presented the registration officer with Ying's phone number and a short conversation between them ensued. After about 2.5 minutes of talking the officer hung up and said, "It will be no problem" and gave me a student card which resembled a small passport. My fees would be payed by the university and I would pay the international student accommodation fee. Still no information on what I would do for the year but that was going to be sorted out later.

Meeting Ying Fantian In China

2006-02-19T16:04:00.000+08:00

I had met Ying Fantian a few times by the time I got to China but at no point had we spoken at great length. This is because he can not formally speak English though his is seemingly quite capable of communicating with it. He drove to my dorm in his Jeep Cherokee and Jiang Hao came to get me from my room. We drove around for a while looking for a restaurant and eventually went to a small place that served nice stuff. During our drive we had had a look at another restaurant and, when parking to go in, Ying Fantian decided that the parking garage was inconvenient so we just jumped the curb and parked on the foot path in front of a police person.

During diner we talked about the work that I would do and decided that I should be involved in a few parts of their program starting with a lab of some sort. We decided that for the time being it was impractical for me to go into normal classes because they would all be in Chinese. We also decided that I should be involved with other aspects of their industrial design course and do things like workshops and competitions.

Snow in Hangzhou and West Lake

2006-02-18T15:47:00.000+08:00

One morning I woke up, played with my computer and talked to my family online. After a little while I decided to look out the window for fun and found that the ground was lightly covered with snow. I like snow so I called Eugene and we went for a walk.

This time with a map in hand we managed to walk to West Lake, a famous lake in the west of Hangzhou. It was gorgeous. We walked around for a while before realizing it was cold outside. We then returned to the dormitories and had lunch.

My clothes and feet were made completely wet by the snow. A quite upsetting experience.

First (Illness and Australians)

2006-02-17T15:16:00.000+08:00

I am a sickly person so after a few days of not eating and changing flavours of air I fell ill to something like a cold. I spent the day in bed and rejected an offer for lunch with Jiang Hao and some unknown girl.

Later that afternoon I got another invitation by Eugene to dinner and because I was feeling a bit better and hungry I went along. At dinner I met some of his new friends, a group of Australians from UTS. They were all there studying Chinese, although a few of them were already quite proficient. At that point I did not know much about people in Sydney so I was a little skeptical.

At the end of the meal they asked me to join them all in drinking but I was still not that well so I went back to bed.

My First Interaction with ZJU Students

2006-02-16T14:12:00.000+08:00

Though I met someone and had started eating I was still worried that my involvement with the actual school might be flawed. I spoke no Chinese and I had no contacts in the design faculty at ZJU at that point. I was still thinking about moving to Foshan (where Fan Ginsong worked). Contacting Australia was futile as there were numerous problems with email and phones at that point. Eventually my father contacted Simon Curlis directly, who asked some of the people in one of the labs at ZJU to contact me. They did later that afternoon and took me to see a lab (later to be known to me as Lab 318) which at that point was in a state of change. I looked at the work of a few of the lab members in particular Dr. Yao and Jiang Hao. They both work with Maya and Jiang and I discussed this at length. Later he and I went do dinner back at the Liu She Shan Shetang. Life was good.

That afternoon I was informed I would meet Ying Fantian the coming weekend and we could discuss my work for the year.

First Contact

2006-02-15T15:44:00.000+08:00

A few days after landing I met the first person I could effectively communicate with. I met him during a lunch time meal in the dinning hall at the base of the building I was living in. I was placed at a table with one other person by a waitress. At the time he seemed to be Chinese so I just sat and waited for food. After a few moments he asked if I spoke English and we stuck together for the next few months.

His name is Eugene. H is from the Philippines and was at ZJU to study Chinese and carry on some business, which at this point was undisclosed.

Comunication Confusion

2006-02-15T15:22:00.000+08:00

After "settling in" and eventually starting to eat again, I remembered that I used to talk to people sometimes. At that time I could not remember who but I know that I did talk to people and for some reason I almost missed the feeling. My parents would call me on a daily basis as I had no way to call them because I did not know how the phone system worked. I could talk to them, but the inkling I had, had reminded me of a time when I would talk to other people as well.

After a few days I thought language might cause a problem. I had mutually communicated with about 3 people since landing, including ones in other countries. The two people in China that I knew at that point were Ying Fantian and Fan Ginsong. Ying, my to-be director was in Australia on holiday and Fan lives in another province. Ying was to come to town a week later and sort everything out then.

I could not talk to people. I wanted to find a solution that would let me talk to people, so I started thinking about switching to Fan's university where he told me there were a number of master students who would speak some English. Obviously I did not end up doing this, as eventually I got a response from a few more of my contacts.

Liu Xue Sheng Shitang

2006-02-15T09:12:00.000+08:00

The dining hall at the base of my dormitory, which I eventually learnt was called the Liu Xue Sheng Shitang in Chinese (literally, "International Students' Dining Hall") was a rather good example of Chinese methodology. Eating there involved first going to a desk and ordering. For those who did not speak Chinese, this meant pointing at some pictures or a list of dishes they would hand you when noticed. As you ordered they would write the dishes you wanted on a piece of paper then add the prices up and total it. You would pay them and be handed a receipt with three layers. You then need to sit which can happen by handing your receipt to a serving person and letting them chose your spot or just sitting down. Either way the serving person for your part of the dinning hall would write the table number on the receipt then take one of the layers. After a short time the first of your dishes would arrive at a local hub with a counter and some plates and chopsticks and other supplies. When plates arrived at these hubs they would have clothes pins labeling the destination table clipped to the rim. Another serving person would then pick it up and deliver it to your table at this point they would take another of the layers of the receipt. Eventually all your food would arrive and the final receipt would be taken.

To get a drink you could either by a bottle of something from the other end of the ordering counter or just pay for a paper cup which you could then fill from a cola machine. If you got a bottle they would bring you plastic cups when you sat down.

The dinning hall seated about 250 people and was often quite crowded. It had many serving staff and they would often shout things to one another. Occasionally people would argue about this and that but usually it was a more uniform roar of everyone talking. A great place for meetings.

The food was edible and very cheap so I went there quite a bit at the start of my stay.

Settling In

2006-02-14T15:01:00.000+08:00

For the first few days in China I had still not eaten for some reason. It was not that I was sick or anything, I was just too busy not eating and walking or sleeping or laying on my bed looking at the ceiling, to actually eat. This may seem strange but in fact I did not realize that I had not had a meal until a few days later. I had bought a few little pieces of food, like a piece of bread, or some yogurt but that was it.

Apart from not eating, I spent my time as might be imagined. The first day I thought it would be nice to see West Lake and, having a relatively good natural sense of direction, I set out to walk there. I walked in a large square that I thought should intersect the lake early on. I found out later that the stadium near the school was actually round and I had walked around it a little too far. So my square of walking that afternoon completely avoided the lake and instead took to some parts of Hangzhou that I would frequent later in my stay.

The rest of these days was spent on the internet or, as I said, sleeping and laying on my bed.

Arriving at Zhejiang University

2006-02-13T14:16:00.000+08:00

At first the taxi driver did not know where the International College was. This caused only minor problems as he asked a student inside the campus and soon found the right place to go. When we arrived, I walked down a slope with my luggage and entered the building I would live in for the next year.

So far, so good.

I then had find out if there were any rooms. Not speaking any Chinese proved to make this more difficult but I managed (by way of an administrator who had given me his mobile phone number) to get a temporary room for the next few days until things were sorted out.

After putting my stuff down I remembered that humans are meant to eat and looked for some food. By this time it was about 10 pm so the restaurants nearby were already closed. There was a shop nearby but for some reason I did not go there and found an internet connection location instead. Using this I emailed my family saying I had arrived and gave them my room's phone number so they could call me. They did so a few hours later and my life in China started.

Arriving in Hangzhou

2006-02-13T14:00:00.000+08:00

The bus from Shanghai Pu Dong Airport took about 3 hours and by the time we got to Hangzhou it was dark. We had made a few stops along the way, one of which I had thought may be mine but someone convinced me otherwise. When we reached our actual destination I proceeded to de-bus and found myself in front of a large stadium which I later discovered was just walking distance from my school. I caught a taxi and presented the driver with a piece of paper in Chinese about what to do with me. This was effective enough and I was taken in through the back gate of Zhejiang University.

Ariving in China

2006-02-13T13:00:00.001+08:00

My trip took me from Gainesville FL, my home town, to Charlot NC then LA CA where I had an all night layover. I then flew to Vancouver Canada and finally to Shanghai China. When I landed it was mid afternoon and after getting though customs I found a way to get to Hangzhou. I was aware of a bus service that would take me there but I was also aware that it stopped early in the afternoon. Luckily I was ready to go before this time and managed to catch the last one out.

My first impression was quite good. Everything was going pretty well. I was happy to see a new place and content in most other ways. On the bus ride to Hangzhou, I found that China seemed like a nice environment and that the people were quite friendly. I did not understand anything of the Chinese language at this point.

Leaving for China

2006-02-11T10:55:00.000+08:00

When I left Australia at the end of second year, I was not sure where I would live for the following year. There were a number of options and I had a number of opinions on what I would like but there was truly no concrete preference of what should actually happen. Basically, the options available to me were as follows:

1. Go on exchange to China for the whole of 2006
2. Go on exchange for one semester and then return to Australia or decide to stay on for another one in China
3. Go on exchange to South America
4. Go back to Australia for the first semester and then go to China in the second
5. Just go back to Australia.

The options go on...

After being in Gainesville Fl for a few weeks I started emailing Simon Curlis and other involved people in Australia and things were still equally as vague. Things continued this way until communication stopped all together, which I later found out was due to Simon having been involved in a motorcycle accident. It was quite serious so I started interacting more with Soumitri Varadarajan, the RMIT Industrial Design Course director at the time.

Eventually I found out some details about the people in China that I would need to contact and got together with a Chinese speaking colleague of my father's to communicate with them. We tried to call them but, unfortunately, it was Spring Festival (the major Chinese holiday of the year) so no one was at the school. Ying Fantian, the course director at ZJU, who we tracked down to Australia, was able to be contacted and he suggested I just come to China and we would sort things out later.

In the last week before I would have to leave America to go to either RMIT or ZJU I started to worry a little. No tickets had be bought and I did not have a visa for China, nor did I have the required medical documents and so forth. I decided it would be worthwhile to try to go to China so I bought the cheapest ticket I could find, a week before my departure date. As a backup I also bought a ticket to Australia for the same day so if I could not get the visa in time I could at least get to RMIT on time for the start of term. I sent off my passport 4 days before my flights to try to get a fast visa. In the meantime, I worked to find some sort of lodging in China and fix other requirements of the trip. I sorted out the medical stuff but accommodation was still uncertain. My visa returned and I decided that I would go to China. I packed some things and that was that. I made a lot of phone calls that week.