He Says He's a Carpenter, Not a Performance Artist of Design | 100 People With Ideas

Sweden has IKEA, Japan has MUJI. Gao Yiqiang wants China to have its own "Way of Everyday Use."

In early 2014, the designer Gao Yiqiang launched a WeChat official account called "The Way of Everyday Use", where he set out his own view of how to design the plainest, most ordinary household objects — chairs, brooms, bamboo baskets, tea bowls. Recently a furniture line carrying the same name, "The Way of Everyday Use," has been readied for release.

From words to physical objects, what Gao has been testing all along is a body of knowledge "found in daily life and proved again and again through years of use" — what he calls the Way of Everyday Use.

The experiment began in 2007. His friend Zhu E was then translating Designing Design, by the Japanese design master Kenya Hara, and one word kept coming up in it: Affordance.

QDaily once devoted a piece in its "Design Dictionary" column to Affordance, but material on the idea was still scarce in China. Gao found it "fascinating," so he pulled more than 40 papers off foreign websites and read them — only then realizing that "a lot of people in Europe and Japan use Affordance to do design."

To understand Affordance completely, Gao, years out of school by then, went back to the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University for a graduate degree. Following the framework, he tracked down more than 100 books and photocopied every page at three cents a sheet, spending two and a half years on the research. His master's thesis was on Affordance too.

Put plainly, designing by the logic of Affordance means cutting to a minimum the time and distance a consumer needs to recognize a product — giving people a sense of safety, familiarity, or déjà vu. Gao arrived at this only after repeated experiment.

Last year he curated the exhibitions "Design is Respect" and "Systems Exhibition" in Beijing; the Braun products Dieter Rams designed, shown there, are Gao's model of good design. "Dieter Rams is my idol. What he does best is solve for the shortest distance between a product and its consumer. He's been doing that all along."

That is what Gao wants to do too: "Can this product make you like it within ten seconds?"

"A lot of designers want their work to express something. So what do you want to express?"

"I don't need to express anything," Gao said. "I'm only thinking about how many consumers actually accept a product. If ten people like it, the design is a complete failure. If one person likes it, I was making it for myself, for fun. If ten thousand people like it, that's already a lot for a designer. And if a hundred thousand people buy it, I'd be overjoyed."

He is against turning design into art, and never dwells on form when he designs. Whatever shape a product ends up with has to be "derived through Affordance," and should feel to the user as ordinary as sunlight, air, and water.

He went into design in the first place because he was fascinated by products — "I just felt they were a kind of small invention, a small act of creation." His father, a graduate of the Academy of Armored Forces Engineering, wanted him to be a tank soldier, but in high school Gao switched from science to humanities and applied for industrial design in the college entrance exam. The internet was not yet widespread then; students spent their time copying foreign design albums, and everyone was locked in the same puzzle of how to come up with a novel shape. The whole design education system had serious problems.

So for a long stretch after graduating, Gao felt he was "blundering about" in his work — insisting, for instance, on making wood look like marble. "Later I realized that was wrong."

Affordance was what finally put him on the right track. "Once you really see that a designer is not a performance artist, you start to feel what design is fundamentally about. The fundamental thing about design is solving problems — not art, and not the product."

In his first two years of experimenting, Gao took plenty of wrong turns. What he made looked like great fun: a colorful, freely reconfigurable furniture set shaped like a Rubik's Cube, a slide-chair, the A&E chair, the Little Rabbit chair, the ing chair, KROS furniture — all of it lively, bright, playful. He and his wife also ran their own furniture brand, Beimu Yinuo, but they made too little of the after-sales problem, and the brand did not last.

Only once he had developed the Way of Everyday Use did his grasp of Affordance mature, and the objects he designed return to a plain character.

Usually he does nothing at all before designing. He spends a month at the factory, walking the workshops again and again until he has absorbed the materials, the equipment and the production steps; only then does he dare start on a design. The key to design, he says, is finding the right combination of collective memory — the sum of the images, forms and even habits of thought that collective memory holds. In a post on his WeChat account titled "The Way of Everyday Use — Finding That Bit of Familiarity" (《日用之道－找到熟悉的那么一点》), he wrote: "What makes a product appealing is often the connections that come out of relationships between people in daily life. Designer, manufacturer, salesperson, user — in the process of searching, waiting, meeting and coming to know one another, their interaction creates connections, and those add up to the collective memory of a product."

Take designing a chair. The prototype might come from the folding stools older women sit on in Beijing's hutongs. Work out how to turn that element everyone knows into a chair that also supports and fits the lower back, and the chair is done; what the user finds in it is the safety and familiarity of sitting down.

To find the angle where the seat best fits the hips, he might cast 30 different men's and women's hip shapes in plaster and sample the pressure points. To get the lacquering right, he might spend a month in the lacquer room with the workers, breathing the fumes.

So a chair might take three or four months, testing over and over how the lower back, the hips and the bent legs feel. For Gao this process is the design — not the shaping that so many designers stress. "This is what a designer should be thinking about. You have to make your customer as comfortable as possible. When you design, you have to imagine you're making something for your wife or your mother, not for a consumer. Only then do you realize what real comfort is."

Or the stool he shaped like a tanghulu, a candied hawthorn skewer — really just the small wooden stool every household had when he was a child, given a tanghulu's form. What it is meant to call up is a memory: "grandfather sitting on it, reading the paper at his leisure, the scent of jasmine tea and sunlight filling the room."

Two things have really helped Gao over the years: Affordance, and mind maps.

He keeps a sketchbook. The product system for the Way of Everyday Use, the interior design and layout of a furniture showroom, a marketing plan — each is laid out as a mind map, simple and clear, a direct picture of what is in his head. Even during our interview he kept writing and drawing in it, explaining things that words alone might not carry.

Take the showroom for the Way of Everyday Use furniture line opening in Zhengzhou next month. Pointing at his sketchbook, he said, "Look, the reasoning here is completely clear. The picture forms in my head at once."

Talk to Gao about products and he rarely mentions a flash of inspiration or where a shape came from. If he wants to make something that looks simple and elegant and feels sunny, he will already have broken it down — in his head or on the page — into a mind map of form, color, material and ornament.

"Looking at your mind maps, the road to designing a single product seems very long."

"Right. I think the longer the road, the safer it is — the chance of going wrong drops."

"It's a matter of reasoning it through, not of a snap decision," Gao said. "My wife says I'm a technician, not a designer at all. That's exactly how I work a design out."

He is happy to call himself "stubborn": he likes to trace everything back to its source. Bring up Nordic or Japanese design, and he starts with the origins of the Shakers and their influence on Japanese design. Bring up mortise-and-tenon joints or wood wax oil, the terms every designer loves to use, and he starts with the saws our ancestors used. The "New Chinese style" furniture now in fashion is, in his view, a false proposition.

Designing with an engineer's mind, he has stripped off the sentimental, artistic layer most designers carry, and would rather call himself a carpenter. He is fond of a line from the Japanese haiku master Matsuo Bashō: "State the facts objectively, and leave the lyricism to the reader."

In 2012 Gao worked for a while with MUJI's Institute for Everyday Living Research, wanting to "build a Chinese MUJI." He pulled out later over funding.

The idea did not end there. The Way of Everyday Use brand, now developed with Huari Home, is his next attempt at it.

In the product system Gao has built, the Way of Everyday Use divides into five categories: storage, seating and reclining furniture, sleep, household goods, and clothing. His first move into clothing will be a few dozen all-white pieces — tops in white leather, white cotton, white linen and other materials. "I want designers to go back to the root, to stop thinking about fabric and color and just work this one thing over and over."

Saying he "wants to build a Chinese MUJI," he explained, is shorthand to make it easier for other people to understand. "What I actually mean is that Chinese people should have their own everyday goods — not MUJI, not furniture from Italy or Germany."

MUJI, Uniqlo, IKEA: these lifestyle brands from Japan and Europe have grown far too fast in China in recent years, and all of them are transplants of a foreign culture. Chinese people have no clear idea of their own about how to live, which is why young consumers are so eager to chase MUJI or IKEA. But Gao believes, "China will have one. It may come slowly, but Chinese people need their own furniture, their own everyday goods, their own way of living."

That "Chinese people's own way of living" is the Way of Everyday Use. "When you truly find what you need from the heart, you naturally come to love things that are plain, honest, simple, and useful."