By Alice Rawsthorn
Monday, October 20, 2008
TIANJIN, China: There's a Chinese saying that's intended to comfort anyone brave - or reckless - enough to set off on a road journey: "Good horns, good brakes, good luck." Given the chaotic Chinese traffic, they'll need all three - with extra dollops of the third.
Some 90,000 people died on China's roads last year. The country is bedeviled by Smeed's Law, which was coined by the British statistician R.J. Smeed and suggests that whenever the number of new cars rises steeply, so does the risk of accidents for the ingénue drivers. China is a classic case. Tens of millions of new cars jostle for space on often-antiquated streets with a motley assortment of rickshaws, bicycles, scooters and electric trikes. Even the road signs look scared. Rather than issuing calm instructions, they appear to be trying to frighten motorists into compliance by depicting overturning trucks and cars crashing while the drivers jabber on cellphones.
The good news is that the number of road deaths fell in 2007 for the first time in years. India now has the dubious honor of trumping China as the world's most dangerous place to drive. One factor is that driving standards have improved. Another is the construction of new roads. There are still huge flaws in the Chinese traffic system, but there is one bright spot, at least on some streets in the coastal city of Tianjin - the traffic lights.
There are plenty of conventional traffic signals with circular red, yellow and green lights, but also a new type consisting of a rectangular strip of energy-efficient light-emitting diodes (or LEDs) that switches between the three colors. The strip is fully illuminated at the start of each signal, then shrinks in size to show how much time is left before the color changes. It shrinks down toward the bottom of the panel on green, and up toward the top on red. This helps color-blind motorists, who often see red, orange and green as gray; and as drivers can guess how long each signal will last, they're less likely to accelerate or brake at the wrong moment.
Tianjin's new traffic lights are great examples of "leapfrogging" design, which solves a problem by skipping the standard solution and inventing a new approach.
Any developing country should "leapfrog" whenever it can, but China is unusually well equipped to do so. Not only does it have the necessary cash and design skills, but as the Italian design theorist Ezio Manzini has argued, the environmental consequences for a country that has industrialized so rapidly are too dire for it to risk gambling on conventional solutions.
One of the most important questions in design today is when China will graduate from being the world's biggest workshop, to becoming an innovation center. It seems determined to achieve this, having opened nearly 1,000 new design schools in the past decade. China also has the benefit of a visually savvy youth culture, as illustrated by the hordes of kids thronging the galleries in the 798 art district of Beijing. Years of poverty created an ingenious society, which is still visible in the bicycles-cum-trucks weaving around the streets. Then there is China's long history of innovation as the inventor of silk, gunpowder, paper and printing. Moreover, the fluid and collaborative nature of its design tradition is better attuned to 21st-century design than the linear, individualistic Western approach, as is the Chinese reluctance to distinguish between art, craft and design.
All of this, combined with China's economic might and the finesse of the country that manufactures such sophisticated objects as Apple's iPhone, suggests that it could become a formidable creative force. So far it has failed to do so. One reason is that much of its manufacturing is contract production for foreign companies, like Apple, that develop their products elsewhere. Another is the dominance of state-controlled companies, which, the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei believes are too conservative to foster innovation.
Yet the clichéd Western view of Chinese designers churning out cheap copies of European ideas isn't entirely true. A distinctive national design language invariably reflects that society's sense of self. This is always problematic for developing economies whose identities are in flux, especially one that has changed as rapidly and dramatically as China under a repressive political system. Typically there are three areas where a singular design sensibility emerges: icons, imagery and infrastructure.
China has got off to a great start with its icons. The Beijing National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, designed by Ai and the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, is one of the most inspiring buildings of our time, as is the torqued arch of the nearby CCTV headquarters, devised by the Dutch architects OMA.
Its imagery is maturing too. Historically, the first area of design to evolve in developing economies has been printed graphics, such as posters, books and magazines, which are cheap to produce and are often commissioned by small, creative organizations. This was what happened in China, when the Shenzhen and Shanghai design scenes took off in the 1980s. The creative focus has since "leapfrogged" to computer graphics for the cellphones and Web sites that are fueling China's consumer boom. Critically, computer graphics tend to be consumed privately, not publicly, and are commissioned by entrepreneurs, rather than state-controlled monoliths, thereby giving the designers more creative freedom. China's computer graphics companies are already among the biggest in the world, notably Crystal Digital Technology, which has 14 offices in five countries.
Progress has been slower in the third and most important field - China's frenziedly constructed infrastructure of transport and utility systems. There are some splashes of innovation, like Tianjin's smart new traffic lights, but why is the automotive industry still clogging the roads with old-fashioned gas-guzzlers rather than fuel-efficient cars and trucks? And why are so many new housing projects, schools and hospitals dependent on unsustainable energy sources, when they could so easily have been designed and built differently? If ever there was a case for "leapfrogging" design convention, it's in China.
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