My
first observation has to do with China being a male dominated society.
Women have difficulties to pursue a career in non-female territories,
especially in higher positions. [001fish]
A friend of mine used to run a radio program here for women to phone in
and talk about their problems. She told me that after a certain amount
of time, most women who ran this program committed suicide, as they were
unable to take the emotional pressure.
Her question to me was: Do you think my job is bad?
In the 1960 and 1970 the public increasingly felt feminist activities,
and today’s children of that era are very much liberated and understand
each genders problems better.
Women can pursue careers and take leadership roles.
[002bra]I have never come
across a padded bra in a regular lingerie shop in the west.
Women buy bras, not men. A reaction?
[002mobile]In a recent television program a spokesman for the military
informed the viewers, that ‘the Chinese military needs to quickly update
its information technology’. He referred to the trend of the USA and Europe
to minimize the number of soldiers and increase the production of sophisticated
electronic guiding systems and other computer technology.
He mentioned, that it is difficult to find for example tank drivers, as
the minimum education level for such a job a high school degree is, due
to the technology involved in the task of driving a tank. Thanks to military
research in the west, we have transistor radios since the 1960ies and
have now microchips, the Internet, mobile phones, etc.
[003gun]My best friend in Vienna escaped
barely from Yugoslavia before the war started. 2 month before the war
began he had bought a plane ticket to Canada, packed all his bags and
used to sleep in his car, because the military police came round his parents
house sporadically. Usually they came around 1 am in the morning to ask
if he was in …
3 weeks before the war started, his car got broken into and his passport
and his ticket were stolen. At that point Serbia and Croatia had already
separated. The former capital of Yugoslavia was Belgrade, which lies in
Serbia. He lived in Croatia. There was no way for him to get there.
His parents paid a lot of money and people to get him a new passport;
due to their connections it was possible to get him a new passport. He
bought a train ticket from Zagreb to Vienna.
[004rust]On the day he left, his train passed
the border to Austria at 9:30am. At 9:45am Slovenia closed the border
and returned all following trains back to Yugoslavia.
He came to Vienna safely with just the things he could carry.
Since then he lives on a day-to-day basis.
[005house]Lybbeus Woods,
a famous American architect, works now at the AAA in New York, was invited
to a seminar to Sarajevo 2 years before the war. As a project he was asked
to design something, he thinks, the people of Sarajevo need most. After
spending time in the streets talking to people and observing the environment,
he designed a ‘portable house’. His idea was that people could fly this
house to any destination, plug it into existing houses for electricity,
plumbing, aso.
People soon were to find out how right he was.
[006hallstatt]This is a picture
of a town near where I was born. The town is ‘almost glued’ to the mountainside.
There is not much space, as the mountains almost push it into the lake.
One of my colleagues, when I studied architecture in Vienna, used to work
as an undertaker, at the age of 26 in that town.
You can imagine, what a problem it is, if there is not enough space. So
since hundreds of years, the villagers’ dig out the bodies 3 years after
they are buried, and clean the bones. The bones go into a special chapel
and are carefully arranged in stacks. The skulls are cleaned and then
carefully decorated with painted ornaments.
Usually the meat of a body is decayed after 3 years in the ground.
He told me, that due to the preservatives in our nutrition today, the
bodies they have to dig up look exactly the same as on the day they were
buried. So they don’t change their appearance.
Do we live longer because of preservatives?
[007glasses]When the USA developed their
first space rocket, a company called Polaroid was asked to come up with
a protection film, which would block direct sunlight through the capsules
windows.
The company later used the invented film and since then we have sunglasses
with UV protection.
[008skull]Between the environment and our
body lies a border – our skin.
Recent design, art and science projects are more interested in the inside
of the human being and the border, than the outside - A trend that was
noticeable in the 18th century. [008teeth]
The human is the standard for our designs. Like a heartbeat of the resting
person, the light of a Macintosh computer pulses when it is at rest. If
you close the door in a BMW, the light vanishes gently and is not simply
switched off. Why? What is the standard? - The human being.
[009plug]Any European country has only one
standard of plugs.
[010crane]China has to face a lot of changes
in the near future. Standards will come with the WTO, and even unfortunate
events like the recent virus can through a spanner in the works of progress.
[011mask]But, events like these are just another challenge for our creativity
and cannot stop us thinking about alternative solutions to a vast variety
of problems.
[012people_map]Science and
art/ design are more and more closely related. As a fun project, I analyzed
the seating arrangement in our office in London and the relationship between
the individual people – how much, who is working with. Very interesting,
and afterwards we changed the seating arrangement, not necessarily divided
by departments or tasks like designers, programmers, managers, etc.
[013quest]I believe we are
all visual people and filling in a visual questionnaire is much more fun
than filling in a form that says: age, name, birthday, gender, … aso.
(Explain)
[014restaurant]Psychology
is more and more important and I think has to become more sophisticated
in connection with design, a way of thinking China has a long tradition
in.
Not only in terms of feng shua when we make a new building, what colours
to choose or to answer the question of ‘how to arrange the furniture’,
but also in the above mentioned questionnaire, when we reverse the question
and ask people: ‘where would you like to sit in this restaurant?’ then
it tells us a lot about the persons’ confidence and generally how much
they think about themselves. |
