From Utrecht to Beijing and Shanghai

Everybody was talking about China, Today designers went there. Curious about the new generation of Chinese designers and the status of design in China. Answers to these questions (and many more) are gathered in the book ‘Made for China / Holland’.
This cross-cultural project involved various Chinese design studios, design students in Shanghai, the Dutch language school China-Inside and the state printing office in Beijing.

Cross-cultural

Made for China

A succesful product tells a lot about the culture it comes from. Today Designers made a series of posters representing strong, typically Dutch brands. That express Dutch culture.
The posters were printed in Beijing and presented to Chinese design studios and universities, with accompanying questions like ‘What are your icons?’ and ‘What does that say about your culture?’.

Lecture and workshop with Chinese students

With the same posters, we held a lecture and a workshop at the Shanghai School of Design. The students were given the same challenge: visualize China’s strong brands. The project has led to a pretty book full of nice-to-know facts and figures. We learned for instance that the word ‘Hema’ (a Dutch department store) means ‘hippopotamus’ in Chinese characters and that Li-ning is one of the worlds leading brands in sporting goods.