Notable Books of 2012

Review: Phil Patton - China’s Design Revolution

Notable Books of 2012

Designer:

Phil Patton

Book:

Review:

The rise of powerful manufacturing economies is commonly accompanied by stereotypes: those who make well are mere imitators—clever copiers, not real designers. It was true of Japan and Korea during their rise to industrial power. It was just as true of the United States, as the image played out in Great Britain in the 19th century with the American system of interchangeable parts supplanting craft-based British makers. And it has been true of images of China over the last few years.

“Designed in California, Made in China” read the words on the back of the iPhone. But must design and manufacture be separate? That is one of the questions in the background of China’s Design Revolution by Lorraine Justice. Justice, formerly Director of the School of Design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and now Dean of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, believes China is on the verge of a design revolution.

The emergence of design in China is tied to the country’s rapid growth, and cultural shifts that Justice associates with the succession of generations in the country. China moved from a focus in the days of Mao on the “four basic goods” that Chinese households felt they could aspire to—the wristwatch, radio, sewing machine, and bicycle—to a new generation aspiring to living space and auto ownership and commensurate achievements.

Justice outlines a generation of workers in their thirties and forties, with “more freedom to create—and to consume—than their parents or grandparents.” They came of age during the economic opening of the 1980s and 1990s and are now dedicated to self-expression in ways that promise to contradict clichés of China as a collectivist society and an imitative economy. But fostering creativity needed by designers as a needed value might seem in doubt as long as artists such as Ai Weiwei face politicial oppression.

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