Milan Furniture From China

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Below is a library of images assosiated with the Milan project

Milan Funriture Festival

IDEO WEDO UDEO

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.

Real Fake Exercise Equipment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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