Category Archives: Interior design profession

Service Related Businesses in China

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In order to have good service related businesses, you must have more polite and nice people in the society. After decades of prosperous economy development driven by mostly manufacturing in China is slowing down, China is trying to promote service related businesses at home such as senior caring facilities, hotel and restaurants…etc. You might think China will have no problem to make this smooth transition since the economy development in last few decades in China was extremely fast. Well, I will say it will take China much longer time to have top notched service related businesses in all spectra, and the very reason is because of China’s super fast economy development.

The extremely fast economy development in China has elevated many people to middle class, millionaire or billionaire status, but it failed to elevate most people’s sense of responsibility, integrity or etiquette in the same time. In contrary, the fast boomed economy made people become greedy money chasers, they became very selfish, rude, and hostile to others. Everyone became everyone else’ competitors, For being successful, stepping on other people’s backs in order to climb to the top becomes necessary. People lost the compassion towards others because they were not considered as human anymore but competitors, and if they are my competitors, why should I treat them nicely? Having that in mind, you won’t be surprised to see people often arguing on the streets, pushing people hard and fighting for seats on subway trains, or cutting in lines in China, and you will also be shocked to hear people say thank you or excuse me over there.

Therefore, when you go into the stores to ask the clerks directions or any other questions without buying anything, the only answer you will get is “I do not know.” No extra assistance or advice. It will make you feel those clerks are so unhelpful or unfriendly and you just do not feel like going back to the store as customers in the future. While visiting restaurants in China, most greetings sound very superficial and machine-like. The waiters will sit you down and disappear, you usually need to yell at the waiters and tell them you are ready to place orders. Otherwise, you will sit there forever and no one will come to you to take orders. I even encountered waiters who ignored me on purpose when I waved and asked them to come to take my order in many occasions, and if you keep yelling loudly, then you will see the waiters coming to you with very stinky faces.

On the end, you can give those waiters, waitresses or clerks any training you want, if they are not nice people naturally, they will always treat their customers with fake smiles, machine-like greetings, ignorance, or big attitudes. You can build infrastructures in few months but you won’t be able to make people friendly or nice in just one generation. Having top notched service related businesses in China? well, wait for another 20 years.

High-End Residential Designers Deserve More Respect

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Being a high-end residential designer, the hardest part is to be looked down by the commercial designers. It is hard to be hired by commercial design firms as a high-end residential designer. I know most commercial design firms think we high-end residential designers are decorators who do rich people’s draperies, but in fact, we do know more technical and structural stuff than you think. When we worked on projects with different professionals such as architects, structural engineers, AV consultants, GCs, landscape architects, lighting designers, millwork shops and so on, we actually worked very closely with these professionals in much detailed manner.

Most commercial designers worked on large-scale projects with very tight schedules, so they overlooked the details and focused on the overall projects instead, and because commercial projects were usually in large square footage, commercial designers’ tasks were divided in order to focus on certain tasks. For example, some designers will always do CAD drafting but will never write any purchase order. Some designers will always specify FF&E but will never supervise the job sites. Without knowing the full procedure of design, it is not possible to create any well thought through design.

Many commercial designers usually will not consider the small design details such as how the materials should meet or end at joints as carefully as the high-end residential designers. They won’t bother to know how the AV consultants to wire the automatic draperies or how the metal shops to weld or plate the metals, either. I believe they honestly just do not have the time to really care about these things, so they handed these things to other professionals completely and let them take care of the details and moved onto another project. Therefore, it created a situation that you let non-designers handle the design details. That is why many commercial spaces look great from far distance but when you walk closer, you will spot many poorly designed or executed design details.

Sometimes when I read some articles talking about luxury stuff for the hospitality projects, I was like, what?! you are talking about this in 2014?! I have used this stuff way back in the early 2000! That is right! When the high-end/high-tech stuff just came out to the market, they were usually expensive and limited in quantities, so they could not be used in the commercial projects which usually have more restricted budget and require larger quantities of products in stock, whom were those high-end/high-tech products sold to if they were too costly for commercial projects? well, to the high-end residential clients, and after few months or even few years later, cheaper knock-offs came out, and then you started to see these products pop-up in the commercial projects such as hospitality or retail spaces everywhere. So, high-end residential designers always got the chance to experience the cool stuff before anybody else.

One last thing I think most commercial designers never can achieve is having the luxury design taste or the ability to tailor-made very unique designs. The stuff they designed or specified always have, I am sorry to say, the cheap and modular look. I know they try hard to make some of the spaces they designed look luxury and custom designed, but even I stayed in some of the super high-end luxurious presidential suites at 5-star hotels, and when I paid attention to some of the designs such as coves, moldings, base boards, cabinet kicks or drawers, I was always amazed how cheap those details looked and how much the millwork looked like modular furniture.

I am not saying commercial designers are bad. I simply just want to let you know if you are looking for a designer to design your luxury home, please look for the designers who are specialized in high-end residential design or the commercial designers who also have extensive high-end residential project experiences. If you hire a commercial designer who does not have any high-end residential design experience to design your luxury home, I do not care how famous the designer is, he/she might not meet your expectations, and will be very likely to disappoint you throughout the process.

Can Creativity be Learned?

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I have been working with lots of co-workers during my 15 year interior design career, and one thing I find is that most designers can master computer drafting programs better and draw faster, gain more job site or construction experiences, and become more good at running their design businesses throughout the years when the designers keep working in the related fields, but for those non-creative designers, no matter how many years they are in the design business, they are still not creative.

Many people will disagree with me by saying when designers have seen many projects, furniture, or accessories…, they would become more creative because their aesthetic senses are getting better, but let’s be honest, those people are simply acting like a computer hard drive that got lots of information saved in the system, and when they need to design something, their big memory systems started to select the existing ideas from the systems and combine, mix-match and turn into other ideas. They are not becoming more creative but becoming more resourceful.

A real creative designer will show his/her creativity from their very early career, just usually the ideas coming from more junior,  inexperienced designers can’t be executed smoothly due to his/her unfamiliar with the material characteristics, engineering procedures, structural integrity, or the budget and regulation limitations. On the other hand, the design ideas coming from more senior and experienced designers usually are more matured and can be executed better. As of non-creative designers, no matter whether they are junior or senior designers, they just do not have any creative ideas but bunches of copied or tweaked ones.

In my opinion, being creative is a gift, a talent, not a skill that can be learned. However, creativity is not the only factor to be successful in the interior design business. Marketing strategy, personal charisma and credentials also can play important roles. One of my classmates in college who drew so ugly, and her designs were so boring and non creative, our professors always gave her low grades, but she was very talkative and had very excellent presentation & communication skills, she became a carpet sales person after graduated and made huge deals. She made more money than any of us who graduated in the same year, and soon was promoted to the district manager. So, if you find creativity is not one of your strengths, stop wasting time on any of those “ways” to learn how to be more creative. Instead, focus on your strengths and work hard.

Interior Designers vs 3D Renderers & Graphic Designers

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I realize a phenomenon in the interior design job market nowadays. There are a lot of people who are 3D renderers or graphic designers showing up at the interior design firms to interview the interior designer positions, and most of them got hired. Many of these 3D renderers or graphic designers were not interior design majored or licensed interior designers, but they all got very beautiful portfolios.

The software used by many 3D renderers, 3D Studio Max, can render photo realistic perspective drawings, and Adobe Illustrator, the program all graphic designers learned at colleges, can produce extremely beautiful color elevations. With the help of Adobe PhotoShop, another Adobe software learned by most graphic designers at school, can even edit the 3D renderings done by 3D Studio Max and the color elevations done by Adobe Illustrator to become even more beautiful and realistic, and when they used Adobe InDesign, another software learned by many graphic designers at schools, to create the portfolios, the beauty of the portfolios was just incomparable. No wonder those 3D renderers and graphic designers were always hired.

I personally worked with some of those 3D renderers and graphic designers at the same offices before, and when I asked them if they actually designed those projects showing on their portfolios, they all said no. They told me some other more senior interior designers (majored in interior design and licensed) at their previous jobs who came up with the designs done by hand sketches, and what they did was transforming the hand sketched ideas into the forms of 3D Studio Max and Adobe Illustrator renderings or drawings. I was wondering whether these new hired “interior designers” can come up with their own design ideas few years later after they become senior designers?! Well, time will tell.

Faster isn’t always better

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When my wife and I went to buy coffee at coffee shops in Shanghai, my wife usually went to find seats, and I was the only person who ordered the coffee. I told the cashier that I wanted a cup of Cafe Americano and a cup of Latte, but every time, the cashier put Coffee Americano into the machine first, and when I said I also wanted a cup of Latte, the cashier always canceled the Cafe Americano and then put in the Latte. Well….I wanted both Cafe Americano and Latte!

I was always wondering why the cashiers kept doing that in Shanghai?! Finally, I know why. If my wife was with me at the cashier, this kind of situation would not happen, but when I went to order alone, it happened. Because the cashiers always assumed I was alone if I ordered alone, so when I ordered the second item, they automatically thought I changed my mind on my first order and canceled it. The cashiers in China tried to be faster, so they thought by assuming things for me ahead which would shorten the ordering time, but they did not realize when they did that each time, they actually made me angry. They tried to expedite the ordering but lost the quality of service. I also saw similar situations occurred in interior design business over there. Enough said. Faster design is not always better design.

Full Of It!

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I have heard a lot of Chinese designers said they are the best in the world. Well, if you are so great as you said, how come the reference photos or the mood imageries you put on your project presentation PPTs are the projects mostly done by American or European designers? and how come we do not use Chinese designers’ project photos as our mood imageries for project presentations in the US? So, if you say Chinese designers are good at working long hours and fast pace, I agree, but if you say Chinese designers are creative or innovative, I totally disagree.

Interesting Stuff in Interior Design Field in Asia

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Most international students who went to the US to study wish they could stay in the US to live and work after they graduated, but only few of them would ever achieve their goals.

A lot of companies in the US rather hiring American citizens than foreign students because they are not willing to sponsor the H1B work visas unless the foreign workers’ qualifications or capabilities are significantly superior to their American counterparts. Therefore, many those foreign students had to go back to their native countries after graduated and never could make their American dream come true. I was one of the few fortunate ones who stayed and worked in the US for nearly 20 years because of my outstanding performance and talent to my profession. Not only I was hired by American companies many times as a foreign worker but stayed employed throughout the 2 major recessions after the September 11 terrorist attack in 2001 and the housing bubble burst in 2008 while many co-workers of mine who were laid off were American citizens. My superb creativity and work ethic kept me on top of the game and made me an important asset to my previous companies.

However, since I decided to go to Asia to work 2 years ago, tables have started to turn. Every job I worked at in Asia, I had to report to the people who used to study in the US but failed to stay and work in the US. Those people who failed to compete with me in the US job market all became my superiors with higher pay in Asia. If you don’t think it is interesting, then what is?!

Studying Abroad Necessary?

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I heard an educator in China said the other day on TV that he encouraged the Chinese students to go to the US to study because American education encourages entrepreneurship and innovation, and it will be very helpful for the Chinese students who will return to China to work. Yes. I agreed with the first part but I laughed about the second part of his words.

Yes. American education system does encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, but will that be helpful for the Chinese students who decided to return to China after graduate? I doubt it.

First of all, for doing successful business in China, it will not be enough if you only have the skills or knowledge, or so-called entrepreneurship, you also need to know how to use “unconventional” ways to establish good relationship with the local government officials, how to socialize with and please the clients and government officials at the restaurants or clubs outside of regular business hours, and how to cut the corners and game the system in almost every step of the way, and I don’t think these are the entrepreneurship the American education system teaches.

Second, innovation, what an easy word to say but hard to do in China. In that part of the world, everything is done twice or three times faster than in the US. A building in the US that needs 3 years to build can be built in China in 8 months. Speed is above anything. How can you innovate anything high-tech or well thought through in very short period of time?! Moreover, working extra long hours is also the norm in China. How can you innovate when you are always exhausted?! not mentioning disrespect of copy rights and intelligence property will always kill your spirit of innovation.

So, the students do learn the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship in the US, but neither of them will be useful in China.

 

What changed?

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In the States, I designed people’s houses in Carribeans and the local designers developed into detailed construction drawings based on my design concepts. In Asia, I drew construction drawings based on American designers’ design concepts. I am still me. What changed?!

The Definition of Foreign Designer in China

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Many people thought a designer like me, an America educated and trained designer, would have more advantages over the local Chinese designers in China.

Well, I disagree because I was paid like a local designer, and my designs were criticized like a local designer. I was also asked to copy the designs from American design magazines. Meanwhile, a Caucasian person who does not know anything about interior design was hired and paid as an American interior designer, and his responsibility? Going to client meetings and just sitting there doing nothing to give the clients the impression that the design firm is more “international”.

I always heard people said “It is a privilege to be born as a white person” in the US, but I disagreed with it strongly because I was treated and paid no less than any Caucasian designer in the US, but I never expected the same saying would fit in China perfectly.