An exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China.
Fun finding of the day — a recipe-diagram for cooking chicken with beer! (Rough translations given in maroon.)
Go to original post (currently down) or photo on Yupoo.
Via Global Voices Online’s Memedia translation (an old issue). Thank you tian for fixing my translation.
Happy Chinese New Year!
P.S. I really like this set of characters from 张小盒 (Boxy Zhang), but…
They do resemble these guys from Japan alot…
LiLei and Han MeiMei were the two main characters from a series of middle-school English textbooks used by Mainland Chinese students in the early 80s. I’ve unearthed a small wave of nostalgia about them online, including speculations on their love triangle with Englishman Jim Green and an annotated cast of characters.
Then some artists converted retro nostalgia into modern art, kitsch and a roadshow:
Interestingly enough, they also gave named them 李磊 and 韩美美 as they described in one of their first blog posts:
"他们没有中文名，我就先这样叫他们。试试看反响如何？大家有新意见么？ (They don’t have Chinese names, let’s call them this for now and see what the reaction is? What do you think?)"
Via Bigik.cn.
I recently discovered Charles Frith’s blog, Punk Planning, which details his journeys through China as a planner from the advertising world.
(FYI: In the advertising world, the planner is the bridge between the consumers and the writers/producers. They’re typically the ones running focus groups and interviews, and are responsible for crafting creative briefs to capture the essence of the consumers’ viewpoints.)
The writing in the blog is a little bit too rambly for my personal taste, but there are frequent gems, such as:
UPDATE: David Pescovitz over at Boing Boing has discovered that the artist responsible for these is Lei Xue, a Germany-based artist from China.
- Polythene sheet insulated windows… with a Snoopy decoration hanging in the middle of it.
- Coal fired oven (I really have a thing for kitchens).
- The outdoor fridge.
Check out Charles Frith’s blog — Punk Planning.
We had a visit in Palo Alto from Dr. Pan Haidong, CEO and founder of hoodong, China’s most popular wikipedia and wiki software. The hoodong wiki has over 1.5 million articles written by over 250,000 contributors, and the HDwiki software has been downloaded 200,000 times and currently supports over 1000 other websites in China. Pan Haidong was in town for a meeting with hoodong investors DFJ.
A common stereotype is that Chinese technology is not innovative but merely derivative. Americans talk about Chinese web companies and services in terms we can understand: "the Chinese Google," "the Chinese FaceBook," "the Chinese Youtube," and so on. And yet, with all of the web2.0 action in China, you know that there are things happening in virtual China that could be adopted and even monetized in the English-language environment. Says Pan Haidong, "At first we were the copycat. "C2C" is a "copy to china" model. Then we improved it and localized it and other Wiki developers outside of China learned from us and embedded these features into their systems."
Hoodong is an example of how we can miss what’s innovative about
Chinese online platforms, tools, and features, simply out of ignorance and the lack of
English-language information on such developments.
Notes from interview with Pan Haidong:
There was a lack of wiki software in China. Before HDwiki, there
were around 200 wiki sites in China, most of them using
MediaWiki–which is the basis for Wikihow and Wikipedia. But the
software is difficult to use in terms of user friendliness, features
and functions. It’s too hard for Chinese characters and doesn’t quite
fit Chinese internet user behavior. So that has made most of the
Chinese wiki websites stagnant and unable to draw in more users.
That’s why we developed our free, opensource software, the first of
its kind in the world. Hoodong wiki. We released the first version in
November of 2006 and by November of 2007 we have version 3 with added
functions, features, and more stability. There are about 1000 websites
using our software, consisting mostly of tech researchers, OS groups,
government, universities, and high school students.
Wikis are really popular in tech companies like Sina and Sohu
because it’s a very good tool or platform for the software industry,
for working on documentation. And it’s easy for tech guys to adapt to
this new software. Sina, Sohu, and Netease have a lot of internal
wikis.
I can’t quite get a good read on this conference, it has a mix of design/branding/art/architecture people from all over, and the scope stretches across innovation, design and brand. It has potential, and isn’t egregiously expensive, and would be good to check out if you’re in Hong Kong then.
I was clicking through news portal Daqi and noticed this obviously fake yet incredibly evocative photograph:
The author is 麦田精灵 (wheat field fairy), and the picture seems to have been hand-picked from a non-Daqi forum: the 云南信息港 (Yunnan Information Port)’s photo sharing forum. The user profile doesn’t yield much information about the picture’s creator, except that she has contributed to over 20,000 posts on the Yunnan forum and that she can be reached at km@sina.com.
A Daqi editor picked up these photographs off of the Yunnan forum and created a feature out of it on Daqi’s new photo sharing section (大棋图海). In this section you can check out the original source of the picture (a feature which is actually often missing on other sites), comment on the picture (actually links to the original Yunnan forum), and vote on the picture in two ways:
So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.
How is all this relevant?
糖果猫猫 popil is a Guangzhou-based designer (comic, graphic, fashion, animation) who runs a pretty little blog called "candy variety shop
糖果杂货铺." I’ve picked out two of her works below.
First up, an illustration of a street-market scene with a classical border. The title suggests its based on a 烧衣街 in Guangzhou.
Second up, a page from her sketchbook, an infographic of artifacts on a train in China, which should strike a chord with anyone that’s been in one.
Link to her old blog (where these pictures are from). New blog here.
Businessweek ran an article recently called Rise of the Asian D-School. (Here "D-school" is short for design school, not to be confused with Standord’s "d.school" which is Stanford’s catchy name for its Institute for Design.)
Summary: Asian design schools are ramping up to recruit and retain talent, and multinationals are arming themselves with these grads to conquer the Asian market.
Details that caught my eye: I was happy to see that my hometown’s Hong Kong Polytechnic University named, and that the school had made Businessweek’s top "D-Schools" list two years running. They also mentioned that "Beijing’s Tsinghua University recently hosted a sustainable design workshop with Milan Polytechnic University."
Are these signs that design in Asia is on the rise? Or are they false alarms? To answer that question, answer this one: How long are you willing to wait?
Businessweek: Rise of the Asian D-School.
An exhibition using "infographics" to compare and contrast cultural differences between east and west, from a Beijingnese artist in Germany.
See the exhibit online at Yang Liu Design; via Information Aesthetics.
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