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

Christmas in Hangzhou

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

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

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

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.