His Accidental Detours Taught Him How to Tell a Good Story With Design | 100 People With Ideas

This Singaporean designer is fascinated by Chinese culture — and doubtful about a Chinese market that barely understands what design is worth.

“Of everything you've done in the past year or two, which project excited you most?”

“Right now, Baida Jiufang, because it's the most complete one.”

My conversation with the Singaporean designer Lin Wei began with that particular project.

Two weeks ago we wrote about the latest work from United Design Practice, the studio Lin Wei runs with his partner Junhao (click here for the Baida Jiufang case study). Tucked into Sanlitun SOHO, where young trendsetters gather, Baida Jiufang has a clean, arresting front that makes you want to step inside and look around.

The “completeness” that founder Lin Wei stresses means delivering the whole design solution, from the interior to the brand. “It's unified, the whole thing flows, and that covers everything in the shop, big and small — the cups, the trays. It all comes out of one overall idea, right down to the smallest details. That's what makes it easy to make the place shine,” Lin Wei says.

“Crossing boundaries” is the keyword for United Design Practice. “We don't believe our design needs a scope or a boundary.” As Lin Wei sees it, behind every design sits a business problem waiting to be solved — retail, interiors, branding, architecture, marketing communications, landscape planning — and whatever solution the work finally delivers has to “cross over to the best point of contact between brand and consumer.”

As the saying goes, every trade has its own specialty, so United Design Practice's all-purpose, cross-disciplinary theory draws its share of doubt. Lin Wei told QDaily: “Right, a lot of people ask how we can possibly work across such a wide range. Are we just a shell company? Plenty of people don't get it, and they don't value the way we work.”

Talk to the designer for a while and you find that “crossing boundaries” is a thread running through his own life. The cross-disciplinary character of United Design Practice today comes out of Lin Wei's varied past.

He is Singaporean, and he settled on being a designer very young. By primary school he could already draw plans and elevations for all sorts of castles and secret chambers. “I was just happy in my own little world,” he says.

During his secondary-school years Lin Wei spent a stretch in the military, and while he was serving he read his way through the whole history of architecture, from the Renaissance to the modern era.

In his second year of architecture at the National University of Singapore, Lin Wei ran into something that left him badly frustrated. The assignment was two concept-design projects: an orphanage and a private club. He set the orphanage inside a London church, a U-shaped building meant to suggest that divine light could pass through the structure to protect the children and light up their hearts — thick stone outside, glass within. For the private club, he put a swimming pool on the top floor with an all-glass bottom, so light could sink through the water into the space below and turn almost magical. The entire layout followed how far that light could reach.

What baffled Lin Wei was that the club design, the one he called “a work I was really proud of,” was criticized for having little function, while the orphanage, which he thought was ordinary, was a hit.

That failure nearly rewrote the course of his life. His attention moved from design to film, and for about three years he threw everything into making movies. He wrote scripts, directed, built websites, designed every poster and piece of promotional material — all of it, to him, a form of brand packaging. “At that point I wanted to go the film route,” Lin Wei told me.

But film has its barriers too. Making a living at it meant professional training, and the cost of studying directing in the United States finally made him back off.

After graduating from the National University of Singapore, Lin Wei went into advertising. “Advertising felt more dependable for me — I could use my head, and I could also use my artistic side.”

He put in time at Landor, Tengmai and Saatchi & Saatchi, among others, and then the boy who had always meant to be a designer grew tired of all that “extreme consumerist stuff” and went back to design. “My mom told me, ‘You should just do architecture.’”

From architecture to film, from advertising back to architecture: it looks like a long detour before returning to the right road, but everything he stumbled into became nourishment for running his own studio — a business mind, and a sense of how to tell a good story.

In 2013, United Design took on the landscape plan for Taiyuan Huantou Tianli, and Lin Wei tried working some advertising thinking into it. The site was a stretch of mountains. The team used an elevated walkway to string together five feature landscapes drawn from Taiyuan's local culture and history, and split the project into two thematic zones. The lower zone held low-rise apartment blocks and high-density townhouses; the higher zone held low-density villas and detached houses. The rising and falling ground beneath the walkway let people watch different plant species from different levels.

Because Lin Wei has long been fascinated by Chinese culture, the project also gave him a chance to show off Taiyuan's heritage as a city. “I just wanted to bring some cultural material in. Why should this thing sell for so much? What's your selling point? Usually that starts from brand positioning, which is why we went digging for cultural attributes — this was a place with cultural depth to begin with.”

In 2014, United Design entered Fairy Tales, the first architecture competition run by the American online platform Blankspace. Lin Wei and his teammates argued that architecture had lost the power to tell a story through space, when it ought to create meaningful places and reach people emotionally. So they went back to the Taiyuan landscape plan, returned to the local folk tales that had inspired it, and told a fairy tale about a “Taiyuan Renaissance,” using the force of story to “reignite appreciation for local heritage and culture.”

“Our aim, really, was to explain to foreigners that folk tales can light up a local culture, give it its own character, spark landmark buildings and set off a renaissance. That's the idea behind it.”

Years in advertising, plus his fascination with Chinese culture, gave Lin Wei a storytelling approach to design; he is always digging for cultural elements that suit a particular place, and Baida Jiufang is the clearest example. “With this design we also started from the idea of digging into Chinese culture. What we wanted to say is: don't get so hung up on what's Chinese and what's Western. Beyond the architecture and the interior, we made the graphic design read as modern and traditional at once.”

Its unusual positioning and its collision of Eastern and Western elements leave the bar in the memory of anyone who has seen it. But even though Lin Wei admires and loves Chinese culture in his bones, working here as a foreigner still doesn't sit easily with him, and he has doubts about the Chinese market.

In his words: “The design market here is too chaotic. It's hard for your design to show its added value.” In the three years since the studio opened, United Design's clients have come mostly through friends. There are two reasons. First, Lin Wei picks his clients: he won't take on people who don't understand the value of design, whose expectations don't match their budget, and that has quietly cost the studio some jobs. Second, he cares about trust in a working relationship, and a client who comes through a friend carries more of it.

For a small studio like United Design, what matters most is cash flow and how fast the money arrives. So although Lin Wei comes out of advertising, he rarely works with ad agencies. “Agencies pay slowly, especially the Fortune 500 companies, whose procedures and paperwork take forever. So we basically don't take that kind of job now. It isn't that we think we're above it; it's a practical problem.”

Given all that, United Design has done some large projects in the past — the Taiyuan Huantou Tianli landscape plan mentioned above, the architecture for Chengdu Xilian Maternity Hospital, the interior for Lejian Health Checkup Center — but it has gradually moved toward small spaces. Lin Wei explains: “With a small space we can control quality better, and it's easy to make an idea stand out. What matters most is that the turnaround is faster.”

This year, United Design Practice finished renovating Na'er Café in Xincheng International, an upscale residential complex in Beijing. Before that it had done branding and interiors for the dessert brands Xianyu Xinyu and Hengji Desserts, and the interior for Mailuo Concept Restaurant, a dining brand from Taiwan.

In the three years since opening, Lin Wei has spent a lot of time experimenting in different fields. “So the truth is, we haven't made money.” Describing his own team, he reaches for words like “brave” and “wholehearted.” Facing a domestic market with little awareness of design, and asked what comes next, he has started thinking about changing how the studio earns. “We're fairly good in a few areas now, so we'll try to stay in those areas and stop charging into unfamiliar territory. It's exhausting.”

Images courtesy of United Design Practice