City of Design

 

From the City of Design website:

Makes one state-level creativity design industry garden base which to be able to satisfy the world well-known brand creativity design enterprise creation and the transaction digitized high end conformity. 

This will take more than one reading to truly appreciate the subtleties (and I don't believe anything is really lost in translation). The Chinese are doing something kind of amazing in a really H.R. Geiger kind of way. They are building a sophisticated infrastructure to launch its design professions and talent base into the 22nd century. Again, you will have to read this more than once, and you will have to read between the lines. This is possibly the most brutally honest (and contemporary) explanation of design as a legitmate atomic force in what is our global economic universe (which, of course, is ever expanding).

Strip out any notion of western design rhetoric (both pre- and post-modern), distill it into a "123 Strategy", pour billions of public sector money into it, and use it as the head of a global domination spear. This is no "Chinese don't innovate, they copy" cliche. What we have here is a most sumptuous "glaze reduction" that will turn western design academia on its head, since western intellectual hegemony is the complete anti-thesis to "digitized high-end conformity". The 1st China World Industrial Design Forum is happening next month. Wish I could go.

Is is diabolical? Of course not. It's no-BS honest. Design is the bling of capitalism.