All posts by Michael LeBlanc

Attending Design Industry Annual Conference, Shunde China

During my stay in Foshan I was fortunate to attend an annual design conference in Guangdong Industrial Design City in Shunde. The purpose of the event is to support design—mainly industrial design—in the Pearl River Delta area by bringing together what they call “Three Regions Cross Straits” (Guangdong, China-Hong Kong-Taiwan) and link with other international players such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the USA. Mideathe world’s number two household appliance manufacturer in sales, behind Whirlpool—is based here.

Guangdong Industrial Design City is a design innovation incubation centre that holds design studios and showrooms. Shunde’s development plan for GIDC is to include a design museum, design hotel and restaurants.  I look forward to visiting again.

Design Education Case Study: Make your classroom!

I’ve had three opportunities to ask a design class to reorganize the desks in a classroom to better facilitate design activity. Because design is the practice and study of the artificial world, everything that we do has a design element, even the mundane task of moving furniture around a classroom. I would even go so far as to say that this seemingly simple task is a comprehensive design exercise that includes solitary design work, teamwork, recursion, and complex communication and decision-making.

The first two exercises were at NSCAD with Interdisciplinary Design students in their second year, and then last month at Foshan University with a fourth-year class of Industrial Design students. None of these instances were premeditated. The results of this latest effort provide a few insights into the differences—and similarities—between the Chinese and Canadian groups.

Main building, at its most flattering time of day.

To place this day in context, I was offered the chance to conduct a 7-day design workshop with Prof. Jack Fan’s Industrial Design students. The first day (with Jack interpreting for the students whose English was poor), was an introduction to the project, which I will talk about in a later post. Each class was to take place from 9am to noon in a classroom on the 9th floor of the university’s “Main Building”. On that first day, the class sat at tables arranged in the traditional manner, with instructors facing the back of the room and the students facing the front.

9:00 – 9:40

Boys moving tables

On day two, Jack gave his regrets; as Assistant Dean for the Design School, he had meetings to attend. So he asked Phoebe Guo, an interior design instructor—and, like Jack, a graduate of RMIT—to act as language and cultural interpreter. When the students had assembled at 9am, I looked at them from the front of the class, and they looked up at me expectantly. “This doesn’t look right,” I thought to myself. I didn’t want them to be asking me what to do all the time. I wanted them to think for themselves. What kind of “famous foreign professor” would I be if I didn’t push the critical-thinking/democracy/teamwork thing on them? But seriously, I needed to break down the hierarchy because I was depending on them to develop their own ideas and solutions to the design challenge. I didn’t want them waiting for me to tell them what to do, so I thought, “Oh, what the heck”. So after giving fair warning to Phoebe, who seemed up for the challenge, I gave them an assignment:

As a group, collaborate to re-organize the desks and chairs in the classroom in any design except for the current arrangement with me at the front and you facing me. Your re-arrangement must facilitate review and discussion of design ideas, so there must be a way for the instructors and the class to walk around the room to look at sketches.
Watching the boys move tables

I didn’t specify a time limit for this assignment because I thought that they would be done in a half-hour or an hour, maximum. I based this estimate on the time required by NSCAD students in the previous two instances. The method they employed was for several of the boys to discuss, argue and move desks around. The girls, although interested, hung back. By 9:30, the scraping of the tables on the concrete floor was starting to get on my nerves* and they didn’t seem to be any closer to a solution.

9:40 – 11:00

Settling into groups

After a quick conference with Phoebe, we decided to give some additional structure to the assignment: I asked them to

  • form into three groups. Each group needed to have an equal number of men and women.
  • work in groups to develop a design proposal using proxies (small pieces of paper representing the tables that they could shift around noiselessly).
  • present their proposals to the class and then the class would vote on the best proposal.
Group work: note student hanging back at left

In Canada, this would not be a problem. They would pull out their toolboxes and sketchbooks and get to work. In Foshan, the students had notebooks and pens/pencils, but no scissors or knives—typically a class is a sit-down, get the dope from the teacher and then go off to the dorm to compete the assignment. But they improvised.

The Foshan students were also unfamiliar with teamwork. After watching them for a while, I placed each student into one of five categories:

  1. This group, working as individuals

    Gregarious males who took on group leadership positions. They guided the design process in each group.

  2. Outgoing women who actively participated—most of the women in this category had just returned from two weeks at RMIT.
  3. Males who hung back to observe. Otherwise known as social loafers.
  4. Females who sat passively and watched others in the group work.
  5. Males who had “checked out” and worked on their own.
Group work: active, passive, and checked out (yawning)

Phoebe remarked that a couple of the males in the 5th category complained about the assignment and could not understand the purpose of it. After about 30 minutes, I asked each group to show us their ideas. One drawback of the paper proxy method became apparent when the students showed me the seating plans in their designs. Most students failed to catch on that the classroom desks, because of a horizontal bar at knee level, were not designed for seating at the table ends. I asked them to consider this, but they seemed to think that this was not so much a problem for them. When they tested it out, they discovered that the table legs did interfere, but they felt that they would be able to adapt. This brings up an interesting question about their design judgement: would a group of design students from another country—Japan, for example—be as tolerant? And if not, what might this say about China’s prospects to become a world design powerhouse?

Group One’s design

Also, at this point, some of the group members began to move to other groups to look over the other designs and chat about the various aspects of the designs. When the group leaders wandered over to other groups, I thought a consensus might develop and a vote might not be necessary. But it was.

11:00 – 11:40

Each group presented their design and after much discussion, they decided to vote. Then the question was: how do we vote? About 15 minutes of back-and-forth, they decided to vote using the following rules:

  • Group Two’s design

    one vote per person

  • you may not vote for your own design
  • in the event of a tie, the design with the fewest votes will be dropped from the balloting

I don’t remember if it was a secret ballot, but I was quite impressed with their vote design; once they had decided on the rules, the rest was fast and easy. There was no tie, and the best design won.

Conclusions

Group Three’s design

After one workshop with Chinese students in China, it’s difficult to make generalizations, but I can offer these impressions:

  1. The Chinese students took longer than Canadian students to complete the assignment. I think part of this is due to the general unfamiliarity with group work in Chinese education. Time was probably wasted because of this unfamiliarity and additionally because of resistance to the assignment. Not all of the Foshan students considered this a design problem, so there may have been some foot-dragging. Group work is not a big factor in my teaching, because I think that the best design work is done by individuals in a solitary environment. But there are situations where designers need to work in concert with others and the skills that are required in these situations are different and complementary from that of classical design education.
  2. Discussing the merits of each design

    I think that the brightest Foshan students understood the root of my desire in this assignment, which was to undermine in a very physical (and noisy way!) the system of hierarchy that cuts across all aspects of their education system. The rows of desks facing the front, the lectern facing the back of the room, the teacher telling the students what to do and how to do it: this is the Chinese model. I do not think that design is always taught this way at Foshan—especially with western-educated instructors like Jack Fan and Phoebe Guo—but I think that it is a default state of mind that is comfortable for both faculty and students. These attitudes are reinforced through the entire system: macro-educational aspects also mitigate against change. The design curriculum and individual course content is defined not by the school but by the government. As a result, to give an example, visual communication majors in China are not taught HTML, Javascript, app-making or any ‘back-end’ technologies. These very necessary aspects in graphic design education are only taught to computer science majors, and as a result, designers in China do their work in Photoshop and then “throw it over the wall” to developers. This used to be common design practice up until the 1970’s in the West, but the news hasn’t reached the top.

  3. You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it

    Group dynamics among the Foshan students was also different from my students in the west: in Canada, students have a refined sense of egalitarianism. If anyone takes on the role of group leader without first passing several stages of group interaction, they are usually slapped-down with the proverbial “Who do you think you are?” In contrast, Chinese students default to having a leader quickly emerge who is usually male and a top student scholastically. I’m not intimately familiar with the group dynamics during the design process at this stage, so I cannot go into detail, but my observation is that there’s much give-and-take in the group sessions, but that the group is ‘moderated’ by the leader.

The ‘nternational Exchange Center. My home for the week.

* My bête noir on this trip to China was the sound of chairs and desks scraping on concrete floors. During my stay at Foshan University, I was domiciled in the International Centre, which was (mostly) a men’s dorm. I was on the second floor of a four- or five-storey building. There was activity in the room above me, as was evidenced by the very loud and reverberant scraping of chairs, which would interrupt my sleep two or three times a night. This was (of course) not done on purpose, but it did make me question my understanding that electricity in the dorm rooms was turned off every night at 11pm. It may have been, but it was no guarantee that some students would be burning midnight oil for one reason or another.

“Ni Hao: Is it my set or yours?”

I’ve been back in Canada for more than a week now. I had hoped to post more regularly while I was in China, and although my ibVPN.com account worked well at first, once I moved into the dorms at Foshan University, it failed me. In August of last year, China started blocking VPN access in universities. I was aware of this, but hadn’t thought through the fact that I would probably be staying on campus for almost two weeks. The one on-campus exception was a nice little café on the east side of the campus, where they serve espresso coffee at a reasonable price and the WIFI is VPN-unimpeded. Only problem was that the café doesn’t open until 2pm, so for morning access I had to stay in my room without a VPN.

As I discovered, the Great Firewall needed about two minutes to find the ‘kill switch’ for my line, so I was able to sneak peeks into my Twitter account or the New York Times by logging into the VPN, caching the contents and then logging out before getting dumped. I also had three internet devices—iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro—that I could rotate to give me a little more access.

One evening, my patron, Kate Guan, took me to a western restaurant owned by a friend, close to the Foshan Swissotel for dinner. Joining us was Reme (a Taiwanese-Canadian and Kate’s chief ESL instructor), and after about twenty minutes an old school friend arrived who works at the “media agency”. I will call her ‘Ellen’. When Kate asked me if I knew what a “media agency” was, I assumed it was a marketing/advertising agency where they make ads and place them in various media. Kate and Reme laughed and told me that in China, the media agency was the national government’s censor. Ellen is involved with newspaper, broadcast and internet censorship in Foshan. Once this fact was established, Kate and Ellen spoke in Cantonese and Reme quietly interpreted. She was worried about her son, who arrived in the USA to study in a community college, but was having difficulties and wanted to come home. The problem was discussed for a few minutes while I sipped my Tsingtao beer. What Reme was telling me, however, was perplexing.

I was not confused by the fact that Ellen had placed her son in a western school. It isn’t unusual for Chinese Communist Party bigwigs to send their children to the west for higher education. A joke that had been going around Beijing during the recent 18th Party Congress was that the enormous traffic jams and other inconveniences in the city could be avoided if the bosses simply visited their children at Yale and Harvard at the same time. The reason I was perplexed: she wanted her son to experience what it was like to live in a society where one is free to think and say pretty much what one wants. Kate, a Chinese-Canadian who took her daughter to Vancouver and, over time, obtained citizenship for both, appreciated this. I was disarmed by Ellen’s candor. She could tell that I was very interested in her story, and I diplomatically encouraged her to continue.

After graduating from university, Ellen started work at the media agency in 1989. For those of you who don’t know, a major event in Tiananmen Square didn’t happen that year, so it was a busy time and they were hiring. All new employees at the media agency must swear allegiance to the party. Membership is mandatory. I won’t apologize, as some Canadians have, for China’s system of repression. I can’t account for the reasons Ellen came to work for the media agency. I still question the morality of the work she does, but I now understand how someone like Ellen—who may not agree with many of the policies of her central government—nevertheless continues to loyally do her job because it enables her to improve the prospect of freedom for her progeny. I admire her sense of deferred gratification.

The more I learn about China, the less I know!

It was the day after this enlightening encounter that I went online to look at this blog, and was surprised to see that it was unavailable to me.

For me, at home, I can pretty much suss out on my own any problems I might have with the internet. It’s usually a matter of cycling the power on the cable modem and the router, or calling Eastlink if that doesn’t work. On the other side of the wall, things are more complicated: how to know if the problem is with the blog server, the Great Firewall, or local internet conditions? On top of this, I have seen first-hand how some blogs are inaccessible in China, and I do know that because this blog often features YouTube videos, it can be unavailable in China also.

So, like the old saw about bad TV reception in the years before cable-tv… is it my set or yours? Had the Chinese tagged this blog for censorship? Should I ask Kate to ask Ellen if there is anything she can do?

As it turned out, it was unavailable from November 14-23 because the Korean company that hosted the co.cc domains—this blog was identified as ‘leblanc.co.cc’—shut down without warning on November 14. All network requests for leblanc.co.cc came back as unknown. It wasn’t until I arrived in Shanghai for one day before my flight to Canada that I could request Hostgator‘s help in re-assigning the blog to a new domain, which they did within 24 hours (and a small fee of $37.00—well worth it).