visionunion

Jia Wei:Taking The Pulse of Chinese Design

by CASA&design Magazine Zhou Wei

As Jia Wei’s assistant leads me into the office of LKK Design, she tells me with a sweet smile that Jia Wei will be with me shortly. I look around at the young people laughing and chatting and find myself drawn into the relaxed atmosphere of the office. My curiosity is also piqued: what kind of man is this Jia Wei, who by the age of 32 has created his own design brand, runs this easy-going team of young designers who are plainly on familiar terms with him and who has earned so many major international awards?
It’s not long before the man in question appears, wearing a light color shirt and a beaming smile. After a lengthy conversation I find Jia Wei to be someone very different from the popular image of a successful designer or businessman.
He’s neither arrogant or solemn. Rather, he possesses an easy-going and sincere aura that those around him also easily pick up. He smiles, “I see myself as a person who’s passionate about life and is full of curiosity.”
It’s these qualities that have marked his career as a designer over the past decade and more. His father was a business man and one of his father’s best friends was a student of Liu Guanzhong,widely regarded as the “father of Chinese industrial design”. On the advice of this friend Jia Wei’s father suggested his son study design, advice the younger Jia was happy to follow. His first day in class brought the realization that industrial design required much scientific knowledge drawing heavily on a knowledge of materials, equipment, software, models, craft skills and even psychology.
“There was so much that needed studying or could be studied. Industrial design can be a career of life-long learning and it can shape you as a person.” Jia Wei was excited by this discovery and convinced about his choice of career.
“I’m a very persistent person.” After graduation Jia Wei took a job at Lenovo designing electrical equipment, he designed more than forty products in the five years he spent at Lenovo and it was here he understood the lifecycle of a product. He founded LKK Industrial Design in 2001 and the company soon became an industry leader, winning the IF Award and Red Dot Award in 2006, 2007 and 2008, the only Chinese company to win three such international awards. In 2005 LKK began working in collaboration with Samsung on the design for the AFC system for the new No. 10 and No. 4 Beijing Metro Lines, one of the city’s Olympic construction projects. The success of this project led to further commissions to work on the refurbishment of the subway system in Shanghai.
Jia Wei is proud of the praise and approval LKK has received from its clients, but he also feels a heavy burden of responsibility. “LKK is one of the best industrial design companies in China and we have a duty to take a leading role in the sector.” Jia has his eyes on still more distant horizons, hoping that through hard work the currently status of Chinese industrial design internationally can be improved.
It’s an ambitious goal but Jia Wei is making concrete and careful strides towards it. For four years now he’s been thinking hard about what exactly design is, in readiness to further propagate a ‘Designed in China” concept. He has been reading classics of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, with which he seeks to understand the deepest essence of Chinese culture. Jia is in search of the aesthetic deep in the national subconscious of the Chinese people, rather than merely looking for superficial “Chinese elements” to add to his designs. Jia calls it an effort to “take the pulse of Chinese design”, which he tries to accomplish with a unique approach, “I’m a man of moderation and I want to make my own way using moderate methods. There’s a power in moderation even greater than the most overweening sharpness.” Jia smiles slightly shyly as he says this, but there’s a determination behind it.It seems that Jia Wei has learnt one of the most important lessons from traditional Chinese thought, that sometimes silk can be stronger than steel.

Q: Why did you pick Rococo (LKK) as the name of your company, and where does the name come from?
A: “Rococo” was a style of design popular in Europe in the 18th century and was heavily influenced by Chinese decorative art. It was a genuine combination of Chinese and Western aesthetics. The name represents our goal: to bring in the best of advanced international concepts but to have a Chinese style; to be a design agency that combines West and East and has a long-term vision.

Q: How do you view the current state of Chinese design?
A: We’re not short of good designers in China, nor good design agencies and good clients. What we do lack is a systematic approach to design, a design process with a particular cultural basis. I’ve always believed that it’s the underlying economic foundation that determines what can be built. The current boom in the Chinese art market is a result of the expansion of the economy.
I am convinced we will soon be seeing a similar boom in Chinese design. The important thing for a designer is to be able to use economic, artistic, cultural and scientific methods to make design something three-dimensional. Design that only considers artistic or scientific aspects is not good design. So many designers now fail to use this three-dimensional approach when they design a product. They only consider aesthetic aspects and try to copy that clean European look. That is someone else’s creation and they’ve been developing the style for decades now. Even if we do design like that really well, that’s not being creative, it’s just continuing what’s gone before. We ought to be creating an age of three-dimensional design
that is our own thing.

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“SSQ” toothpick container

Q: What is “Chinese style” in your understanding and as you hope to create?
A: The culture of the East has a kind of restrained fullness, a grand magnanimous style that is modest, elegant and non-ado. What moves me very much in it is the nderstanding of the relationship between Man and Nature, a harmony between Heaven, Earth and Man. It’s a symbiotic culture, very human but not anthropocentric. The smaller universe of man exists in the larger Universe and is only a single element of the larger whole. So much industrial design takes the human as its measure and alters nature to satisfy human demands, but the result is that you lose something even where you succeed. Take air conditioning for example. It can warm a room but it weakens our natural ability to control our body temperature. Products alter Nature and change the human body.
People are becoming weaker. This is not a symbiotic relationship, it is an isolated existence. When we speak of sustainable design we mean symbiotic design. Products should be in a symbiotic relationship with Nature, and people should be in a symbiotic relationship with products.
When the natural life of a product is over it should be reabsorbed into Nature. That is the ideal.

Q: What experiments have you made in creating ‘Chinese style”?
A: The toothpick holder we designed that won the Red Dot award is a good example. It was inspired by traditional Chinese religious practice and is very Chinese in style. After that,
we worked with Buddhist master Ming Zhuang on a system of visual guides for a Tang Dynasty monastery on Huangshan, including signs and labels. Ming Zhuang wanted to get away from the usual low status given to monks in temple refurbishments and pay due respect to “people”.
So we attempted a kind of “spirit guide” system that would allow the monks in the monastery to see directly the Buddha in their hearts. I’m currently leading our design team in a study of Buddhism and Tang Dynasty architecture. There’s a lot to learn and I would like us to be able to bring concepts from calligraphy and Zen into our design. There are so many essential things in traditional culture that can be a revelation for designers. If we want to take Chinese design out into the wider world we have to refine and explicate the essence of our national culture, as seen through modern eyes.

Q: What’s you goal in the next stage?
A: I want to establish types of thinking; establish standards; establish design methods and philosophies. Don’t they say the best companies establish standards? But this isn’t something you can achieve overnight; it’s a goal I want to realize over the coming three to five years. Why am I interested in Buddhism and Confucianism? I’m looking for the character essentials Eastern people, Chinese people share in common.
When you find that you will have your finger on the pulse of Chinese design. I see my goal as “taking the pulse of Chinese design.” (Laughs) I’ve been thinking on how to coordinate the relationship of design with people, the country, society and the client to create something symbiotic that everyone benefits from and shares in the honor of.

Q: So what specific ways do you manage your work with a view to achieving these goals?
A: The key is still people. I remind our designers that with every product they need to be thinking: why are we designing this? Who will be using this product?
What contribution is it making to people and Nature? They have to think outside of the design on the page; our designers have to take on a role of researchers, work towards a system of thought and philosophy so that their design is supported by an underlying cultural foundation.
We also have to be careful to choose clients that have a long-term view and ambition. Design agencies have the right and the duty to guide their clients. There’s no shortage of design studios in China, what we lack are design groups that are capable of influencing their clients.
At least now we can use Chinese design to achieve an understanding of Chinese culture. Chinese design also needs to offer an explanation of Chinese culture.

Q: How do you see the status of design?
A: The relationship between enterprises, consumers and designers is like a cycle of Nature. Product design is a merely a stage in the life-cycle of a product. If you over-play the role of design and mystify it, use fancy materials, you make the product complicated and over-elaborate and the end result is that your costs are high which not only limits its appeal to consumers, but also wastes resources which you will never recover.

Q: What kind of designer would you like to become?
A: I don’t think China is short of good designers, what it does lack is professional ones. There are no professional standards by which you can measure this industry. I think a professional designer needs to have passion for design, a sense of responsibility and sincerity in their job, and the will to learn. Design is like digging a well. If you haven’t found water it’s because you haven’t dug deep enough. All you have to do is keep on digging deeper and eventually you’ll find fresh water.

Q: Do you have any advice for young designers?
A: Study. Keep at it. Love life. A designer should be a person who really knows how to live.