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?
My colleague Jason Tester found this on CoolHunting.com: it’s called Rack Magazine. It appears to be going for a young male audience and has a half-dressed woman kneeling down and…looking into an open oven (an oven! very "chinese street")…on the homepage. Ａdidas is a prominent advertiser, but aside from that there’s no sign of who’s behind it. Clearly I’m not the demographic they’re aiming for, but what’s with the different English opening pitch and the Chinese opening pitch? Here’s the English:
WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S COOKING IN ASIA?/THEN OPEN YOUR EYES AND FEAST ON RACK/ FOR THE LATEST IN STREET CULTURE, FASHION,/ CULTURE, DESIGN, MUSIC, GRAFFITI, AND GENERAL MAYHEM/BILINGUAL/HOT/FITS RIGHT INTO YOUR BACK POCKET SO YOU CAN/EASILY TAKE IT HOME AND STARE AT IT FOR AS/LONG AS YOU WANT…/EVERYTHING A RACK SHOULD BE…/ASIA.THE WORLD.THE RACK
And here’s the Chinese, translated:
RACK IS A CHINESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL MAGAZINE COVERING GLOBAL STREET CULTURE, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON ASIAN-INFLUENCED YOUTH CULTURE. RACK IS THE ONLY MAGAZINE THAT CAN FIT IN YOUR JEANS’ BACK POCKET OR IN AN LV BAG. SURVEYS HAVE SHOWN THAT ANY OBJECT THAT FITS IN A POCKET IS A GOOD THING. CHINESE BROTHERS SHOULD PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION, YOUR HANDS ARE TO BE USED FOR CARRYING YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S LV BAG.
huh? If it’s all about chinese men, what’s with the focus on the LV bag?
The first issue features a piece on a new kind of street funk from the Brazilian favelas (it will be interesting to see what the "asian influence" is); an interview with fashion photographer Klaus Thymann; an article on V-Nutz, a Shanghai hiphop producer; and the guy below, a TCM doctor who walks around all day with pearl-decorated needles in his face.
If you really cared about emerging Internet practices and their social impact in China, AND if you were trying to keep up with social media, AND if you didn’t have all the time in the world to read blogs, AND if you read Chinese…you might just check out or even subscribe to Chinese venture capitalist and social entrepreneur Isaac Mao’s Twitter stream.
Here’s Joi Ito’s Twitter stream in English, which helps give an idea of how the streams can create a kind of ambient intimacy among users. But Isaac is stepping it up a level, to something that is closer to IM + blog + IRC/BBS. Not only do you find Isaac’s ongoing thoughts throughout the day (such as the recent: What’s up with Air China’s service? The flight attendant on an international flight didn’t know whether the meat in the main meal was pork or chicken, and in the end everyone voted and decided it was chicken LOL), but Isaac is using some very cool little applications like Twitterfeed, which lets you read the RSS feeds he subscribes to (blogs such as mindmeters, Techmeme, and 我blog故我在), and Twitterfox, which lets you view his buddies’ Twitter updates (also known as "Tweets"). You can follow conversations across Twitter, kind of like comments back and forth on a blog or a BBS, but all on one page, and often referencing blog posts, news, and random experiences nearly as they happen.
It starts to feel extraordinarily exponential…people like Isaac are moving fast with this stuff and are creating new virtual experiences and spaces as they go.
The screen below, taken from the QQ news page suggested by China Media Project, has a graphic-intensive title (roughly translated as "Uncovering the most fake reporter in history"), below which is a snippet of the latest news.
Then on the left are the previews/summaries of full articles accompanied by the respective photographs, and on the right are some primary sources that give a look inside the "fake reporter’s" world.
Then if you scroll down, there is an reader poll on the right and then a box on the left for reader’s comments (but in a format more reminiscent of BBSs than blog comments).
I find it interesting how they’ve managed to leverage the screen to put up multiple articles, viewpoints and pieces of evidence (rather than the typical one article per page format that most news sites take).
The feature article below, from daqi 大旗, uses a similar two column layout, with previewed articles on the left and reader comments on the right. What they also do is quote an excerpt from Baidu Post (the Baidu all-purpose BBS) as a way of putting up another viewpoint.
Note, however, that these are the dashboard views for feature news items that have had multiple articles written on them. So they do not replace the current single-page articles (which are linked to) but they do augment the currently article-centered news.
While IDEO and Frog have studios in Shanghai, Lunar in Hong Kong, and variousother companies have done work in China, none of them market themselves with as much flair as the:
The Red Network consists of Kaizor Innovation, Y Studios and culturalANTENNA, and is a "global alliance" of "ethnic Chinese with bicultural backgrounds."
Do they live up to their marketing message? I don’t know — their websites don’t show much in the way of China-based projects. Having said that, being "bicultural" myself, I’d check them out if I was looking for designers.
Thanks to Andy Switky of IDEO Shanghai for pointing them out to me.
Danwei has an interesting post about examples of Tibetan influences in Chinese typography.
I’ve excerpted some images & commentary from Danwei below:
The cover of an album by Han Hong, a singer born in Tibet whose songs
flavor generic Mando-pop with Tibetan influences. The 日 element in her
last name 韩 and the trainling stroke of the 红 are reminiscent of
Tibetan writing.
This is Fan Wen’s 2004 best-seller Land of Water and Milk (水乳大地), which centers around French missionary efforts in eastern Tibet.
The Chinese characters in the title are Tibetan-ized - certain
elements have been replaced with Tibetan vowel indicators, and extra
Tibetan letters and markings are strewn about randomly. It’s surrounded
by the familiar mantra of Avalokiteshvara (both rightside-up and
upside-down).
The best example of this practice is probably the movie poster for Lu Chuan’s 2004 western adventure, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol
(可可西里). To my eyes, the Chinese characters do a much better job of
evoking Tibetan writing than the examples given above, and the kicker
is that what at first looks like a series of vowel markings on top of
them turns out to be the the romanized title "Ke Ke Xi Li."
The video above was produced by the Shenzhen branch of the Institute of Digital Media Technology (IDMT), which is associated with the Global Digital Creations (GDC). The GDC/IDMT group is located in Shenezhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. The Shenzhen base is a production house as well as school; the Shanghai base is primarily a school; and the Hong Kong & Singapore are for marketing and operations.
Both the websites for the Shanghai and Shenzhen centers feature demo animations but the Shenzhen site is the only one that carries work with a distinctively Chinese style.
Backtracking to the video above, the questions are: what is lost in the transfer from 2D to 3D, can the style scale to a film (a tv commercial it can surely do), and how long will it take before someone tries doing so?
P.S. 2D animations of traditional paintings have been done in the past, I have a set of DVDs called 中国水墨动画 with a bunch in there — interesting, but it didn’t hold my attention beyond five minutes.
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