1) Start with a Good Design Brief: Put serious effort to help your client writing up a good design brief that includes all the design requirements and expectations.  Many Chinese clients have no experience working with design companies and have no idea how to write a proper design brief. Providing them a design brief template might be useful. This can also provide you the opportunity to discuss about a more wider or meaningful scope, to make the project more interesting. Always question your clients what their underlying reasons are to initiate a project. Does it all make sense? Figure out and show that you care what they really need.

2) Explain Your Design Process Carefully: Show your best case studies that clearly illustrate how you approach your creative process in order to provide the client a good idea of what they can expect. Most of your clients in China might not be familiar with the design process, especially if they are not designers themselves. And try to customize your case studies or presentations to adapt to the client’s industry. Some of them are able to see how their needs can be fulfilled (or not) throughout your presentation. Or better, explain how the design approach from one of your case studies can be applied in your client’s case.

3) Show Strong Leadership: Be prepared and act as a strong leader by guiding your client from the beginning to the end of the design process. Most of them really need a lot of help, even if they do not ask for it. I often deal will clients who are not very strong leaders themselves or are not capable to provide strong opinions on certain things. Be present, wise and be more direct (careful though) to push things forward in the right direction. Do not be afraid to do things that others might not do so easily. Get out of your comfort zone and at the end your client will appreciate it.

4) Communicate Pro Actively: You need to initiate or develop deep conversations or ask your client a lot of questions to understand them as much as possible. Find out their challenges or difficulties. For instance, I remember a situation when a client could not make a choice between different concepts, because they were afraid to make the wrong decision. In a long silent moment, I broke the silence by asking directly what bothers the client in this moment of making a decision. I started to explain that we can minimize the risk by creating a functional prototype to evaluate the concept better. I told them that we could step back if the prototype is not good enough. Actually, they had no experience developing prototypes and have no idea how meaningful it can be.

5) Allow Client Involvement: Involving the client during the design process as much as possible will lead to more success. Trust in China is relatively low. Frequent communication and reviews, in order to include their feedback, definitely help gaining trust in order for the client to accept the final outcome. Be careful though, that you are not letting them to design, but apply their input in a wise way. The whole trust issue is actually making the creative consultancy work very challenging and is perhaps the most biggest hurdle to innovate at a large scale in China. I have mentioned in another post that Chinese people are quite afraid to fail here, and trust is very much related to failure. How to make your client trust you that you will not fail? Or how to make your client trust you that some failure can be accepted?

I’d love to hear your stories or advises from your experience working with Chinese clients in the product design industry.

1) They treat consultancies as vendors. A vendor delivers a product after an order. Therefore the client does not expect a process of design iteration. They do not expect any risk. They sit and wait for the vendor to deliver without collaboration at all.

2) They expect more than what was agreed in a contract, because they often have no clear idea what they really want or expect from the beginning, as they are inexperienced in new product development. They learn during the process, and ask for more.

3) They often do not understand what it takes to create innovation. They set unrealistic expectations and goals. They do not understand that innovation takes time, money and risk. They do not understand that their own capabilities are limiting themselves. They cannot accept failures. The product has to be perfect. They are comparing everything with the iPhone, but they do not understand the real innovation behind the whole product/system.

4) They think they are the designers and want the designer just to draw their ideas out. They simply do not trust the designer.

5) They gather as much people (5-10) as possible for any design review meetings, and 99% of them do no contribute  at all.

Again, all the above are not always true, but often recognizable for designers working in China. So what’s in for us? As design consultants, we need to learn working with these clients. Both parties need to adapt.

By the way, the text on the t-shirt is reflecting what clients usually ask for a design: we need it fast, cheap and good

The designers respond with: it’s going to be ugly, it takes time, costs more money, or it just cannot exist.

I am glad that I have a new update here that might interest you. I have launched a new blog ChinaDesignHub.com to promote quality designs and news from China. Read more HERE to learn more about the purpose of the site. I hope you like it and I’d appreciate if you could spread the news about it.

Cheers,

Waikit

He was especially interested in my design experience here in China.

You wear many hats. In your line of business you must cater to both Western clients as well as Chinese clients. How do you deal with these two demographics and what is the biggest challenge?

Waikit: If we are talking about the industrial design scene, then I can tell you the main differences from the perspective of working with Chinese clients. First of all, the design in China is still in its infant stage, which means that most Chinese clients are not experienced enough to understand how to apply the value of design to their maximum capabilities and in an effective manner. Because of this lack of experience and understanding, it is huge challenge for industrial designers here to get respected and work effectively with clients.

Read the full interview HERE

It is a shame that I haven’t touched this site for more than a year.
Yesterday, I was rechecking this site and reread my own very first posts and I was touched by the motivating comments by the good hearted folks like you.
Also it reminded me the purpose of starting this blog: sharing my industrial design career development, experience and life in Shanghai, China!

Wow, I am already living and working here for more than 3 years, since I left my little peaceful ‘kikkerland’ (read Holland). And you know what? I haven’t been thinking going back at all.

So what is my status now? Well, I am still working at Speck Design since I joined it in august 2009 and it has given me a tremendous learning boost in a very short time.
I have been working on many different projects for both Chinese and Western clients. My responsibilities are varying from researching, designing, engineering, prototyping, managing, recruiting, sales to improving company culture and process.
And the best experience of all, is to get know the Chinese clients and to learn how to serve them. They are, in general, much different than the western clients in some ways.

I have spoken about the key characteristics of Chinese clients to a group of 30 Dutch product design students who were traveling to Shanghai to have glimpse of industrial design in China.
The big difference is that Chinese are more concrete thinkers VS abstract thinkers among the Western people. This difference explains almost everything of how design works here in China.

Have you ever wondered why Chinese are so fast in detailed 2D renderings or super fast in 3D modeling?

Why are so few Chinese product designers less skilled in sketching?

No wonder why so few design studios here has their own workshop, to build quick and dirty mockups or more refined foam models.

The answer is that most Chinese clients are not able to think abstract or conceptual.

And what is the underlying reason of that? It is all about costs and afraid to fail!

Many companies do not have an innovative culture, as costs are extremely sensitive in product development decisions, so therefore clients are used to judge designs on costs in the very early phase of a design process. Consequence of this, is that designers need to provide them design drawings with as much details as possible. No way that you give them concept sketches.

Low costs means there is no time for process, so usually Chinese clients do not appreciate research work, which is in most cases too abstract for them. Also, it means there is no way to go through an iterative design process, in which different design concepts can be explored

Many company cultures and hierarchy issues create this non innovative culture, as the big boss cannot fail and lose face, and therefore his subordinates cannot try things out and innovate through trial and error.

The fierce competition between many companies don’t give them time to think about what to do next, no time for design strategy consult, at least no long term planning. This is a very dynamic economy with unexpected things that can happen in a short time.

But the next question is, does China need a lot of innovative companies now? It depends on how you define innovation. Let’s say that we agree that the iPhone is an innovative product here.

Hey, check this ‘Shan Zhai‘ product here. What do you think it is?

Guess what this is?

A Chinese designer told me that you can divide Chinese clients into:
- Pathfinders: very few of them are pioneers and they do invest in innovative product development, like JiuYang
- Leaders: companies like ChangHong who has a big market share, but not really developing breakthrough products. Some of them become pathfinders.
- Followers: many companies here are following the leaders, developing the same products, but with different aesthetics, extra functions, lowers costs and quality, but still making a lot of profits. And very few of them want to become leaders or pathfinders by being more original in design.
- Copycats: too many companies here are creating ShanZhai products, like the one in the picture above.

Anyways, the Chinese market is much different than the Western market (I am talking about Europe and North America), and is actually not asking too much for innovative products, like the iPhone. Be aware that most Chinese consumers are less educated or poor to buy and appreciate design products. But it has been changing very fast since the last decade.

This is also explaining why Chinese designers seem to be less creative. I am hearing and reading this statement from the West a lot, and I want to defend it. They are creative and has great potential! But it is just that they have very few opportunities to show and develop their talents.

One day, design is mature here. Companies are learning to use design in the correct ways. So be ready, build relationships and prepare yourself for a lot of real innovative design work in the near future in this huge market here!

The first one was Xi Tang, which I have actually visited it twice, once just with my wife and the other time with my family who came to visit us.

Xi Tang became ‘famous’ after Mission Impossible 3 was filmed there. I remember that I had just bought my first SLR Nikon D40 camera on the day before I went to Xi Tang for the first time. We stayed over night to experience the night scenery and the quiet and peaceful night. By the way, if you go during the work week then you do not need to pay the entrance fee.

Two weeks ago, I went with some friends to another water town called Wu Zhen. We rented a 8 person van for around 800rmb. The obvious difference between Wu Zhen and Xi Tang is the size. Wu Zhen is much larger and spacier as Xi Tang is a very compact town.

I would still recommend to go both towns if you don’t have enough of these water towns after one visit. These are great places for great photo shooting, having Chinese tea or traditional Chinese food along the canals. Go there if you want to escape the crowded Shanghai.

I felt that I needed to do something else to develop myself further in a different way for the time being, as I thought that it was not the right timing to find another design job during the recession.

I decided to improve Product Design Forums and Product Design Hub was born out of it to primarily fulfill the need to find the best information from the big amount of discussions, tutorials and advices that have been posted on the forums.

So I spent one month on the web design of Product Design Hub, learning and using the open source Content Management System software Joomla as the backbone. The site was launched in March and the feedback has been good so far. The blogging part of the site is not going as smooth as I wish, but I still see a potential to attract designers and companies to share their design stories and experiences with the industrial design community. If you are interested to know more about contributing articles, please visit this page.

In April I started to work on a freelance project for a Dutch company that is specialized in developing temperature control devices for the greenhouse use. Together with a Dutch friend we are responsible for the complete development from the first sketches to the manufacturing of a family of products.

The tooling started begin this month and the the first test parts came out from the molds. Here is a picture from the mold factory, in which you see a female employee working in front of a plastic injection molding machine:

But then in May I started to feel that I need to go back to work full time in a design environment, as I discovered that I am more interested to work with other designers and people in a design studio where I still can learn a lot of things and also the recession is not making me easy with my online business and freelance work.

So I started to look for job opportunities here in Shanghai, because I still love this city and I still believe that the future in design in China is bright. You can read more about my job hunting experience in a later post.

At Asentio Design I participated in different kind of projects and I was given different responsibilities that helped me to improve and develop a variety of skills, which are:

Research: analysis, interception, interviews, market research, trend research
Conceptualizing: brainstorming, organizing & selecting feasible ideas
Sketching: pen sketching and marker renderings; Delivered hundreds of sketches that communicate principles, forms, functionality and manufacturability
2D rendering: learned to do 2D renderings in Photoshop, here in China it is usual to communicate with 2D illustrations, but I was more used to use presentation drawings in the Netherlands
3D modeling: regular 3D modeling in Rhino 3D for presentation and prototyping purpose
Prototyping: defining CMF of designs, realizing mockups and prototypes (semi functional)
Client communication: communicating design decisions in a clear and efficient way to client and team
Project management: managing a small team of 3 designers (+ researcher in initial stage of project)
Internship coordination: responsible for recruiting and guiding international and local interns
Company’s representative: representing company’s design work and philosophy at a design exhibition in QingDao

After an half year working for Asentio I was given the opportunity to be a project leader for a project commissioned by a large American corporate client, named Cisco, who asked us to help them developing a design language for their first series of surveillance cameras and to create user friendly designs in terms of installation. That project is my successful highlight as a designer and project manager so far, as Cisco realized our design into a real product with a brand new design language and user friendly installation method.

Cisco’s first surveillance dome cameras

I am sure one day you will see the design in public spaces, like the airport, bank, office, hotel, etc..
You can read more about the product at Cisco’s site

Furthermore my Chinese language skill has also been improved a lot, which is a very important skill here if you want to communicate efficiently with your local colleagues, clients and vendors and it comes really handy in your daily life. I feel much more home here in Shanghai when I am able to communicate well with the local people. Understanding the local humor is also a joyful plus. I always try to speak Chinese as much as possible, without being afraid that people may laugh at me, which happens all the time.

So what happened after I quit my job? You can read that in the next blog post

Fortunately, there are 3 German (again) designers, Boris Brawer/Jonas Vollmer/Tim Richter, who have taken the initiative to continue the ‘Designer Gathering’. Thanks guys for organizing! Man, seems like German designers are ruling in Shanghai

We are going to meet on:

July 3rd 2009, 7:30 pm

Abbey Road

45 Yueyang Lu, near Dongping Lu

???45??????

Oh yes, please add your comment if you want to join, as the organizers need to make reservations. I make sure that you will be put on the list of participants. And if you are local Chinese, then you are also welcome of course.

CU there!