Most People Think Design Runs on Experience and Inspiration. He Wants to Sell Designers Data | 100 People With Ideas

There are already 600 coffee pots on the market — if you're going to make one more, how exactly do you do it? That is the kind of problem Hai Jun's startup wants to solve for people.

Hai Jun has done a lot of different jobs.

He is a designer — he designed the bicycle he rides, and he has designed air conditioners. He has done design consulting, working on design-innovation projects for Siemens, Samsung, and other brands.

For more than ten years he was also a media professional. As editor-in-chief he built the design magazines Frame, Mark, and Design Management《设计管理》 from nothing, helped found the lifestyle magazine Monocle, and worked on publishing the industrial-design magazine Wallpaper.

For a long time Hai Jun thought of himself as a specialist. He studied at Tsinghua University, then the Central Academy of Fine Arts, then Hong Kong Polytechnic University, doing design research the whole way, and he did interdisciplinary research at the University of Hong Kong, MIT, and UCLA.

Now Hai Jun has joined the startup rush too.

He has founded a company called Shuju Gongyuan — Data Park — and he can no longer refuse to be seen the way he could inside the academic system. "I'm still not used to being talked about," he says. But now he constantly has to come out and explain to investors, partners, users, and reporters exactly what he is doing.

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He drinks five or six cups of coffee a day now, either in his office in Beijing's 798 art district or at a café in the complex. "The minute I meet someone, coffee. I have to meet people whether it's useful or not. I used to be able to say no, because I had no time. Now I can't."

In Hai Jun's words, in China, "no company is doing what we're doing."

He started Shuju Gongyuan last year to do trend analysis for design and innovation, and data research for business decisions. He had spent years on design R&D and on brand strategy, and in his view "those problems are all concrete." Now he wants to do something more abstract, and answer the needs he ran into himself doing the concrete work.

After all these years in design, what Hai Jun has concluded is that "creative innovation isn't a matter of talent — it takes access to all kinds of good, usable information in your field." In practice, the outside knowledge available to him while he designed was thin. "You end up leaning on your own inspiration and experience, your judgment and your thinking. Work that way and the result tends toward art, toward the personal."

"Inside a large social and commercial system, design innovation probably still needs a great deal of other, related knowledge." That was why he wanted to build a database in the first place — he is a user of it himself. "I found that when we're doing a design, there are questions you can't answer. Design or innovation, how can you say this is right? Good experience doesn't make you right, which is why we see so many things that turn out wrong."

He noticed that the design industry had no database, and that the gap was worth a great deal of money. He also wanted to put nearly 20 years of research, consulting, editing, and professional analysis to use, and do something hard. "My life used to be too comfortable. This counts as a challenge."

In an interview with QDaily, Hai Jun brought up WGSN, a leading global fashion trend forecaster and the best-known trend-analysis site in fashion today.

You can subscribe to WGSN's content on design and inspiration, product categories, and market intelligence. When you start designing for a new season, WGSN gives you guidance on trends, silhouettes, materials, and colors for your particular market, so your team can reach every design-inspiration resource and build products that sell into real demand. Drawing on everything from trade shows and retail to magazine features, it analyzes the key inspirations, colors, and items shaping the market, and turns apparel trends into design guidance you can act on. Besides the subscription, WGSN also sells consulting and data analysis.

Unlike WGSN, Shuju Gongyuan does not treat individual clients as a main market. Its users are corporate design and R&D centers, professional design firms, and university research and teaching institutes. They log in with an account from Shuju Gongyuan and read research reports that are updated daily. The reports run from research and insight into professional design and innovation trends, to design-innovation reports built on big-data analysis, to technology, materials, advertising, and commercial-creative databases for people working in design and innovation.

Fashion database

Architecture database

Brand database

What these databases do not offer, though, is a method that solves your problem directly. In Hai Jun's words: "What it shows you is a large web of different nodes, which gives you and your team a broad sense of innovation and a broad capacity for it. Your specific project — that's the territory of consulting."

In other words, Shuju Gongyuan helps users define more possibilities and directions, not one clear answer. "I want Shuju Gongyuan's users to be people who can analyze things on their own, and who build the habit of using this database. They only need half an hour a day to go through what was updated yesterday — not one visit every three months. Over time that gradually gives their professional thinking something of value. Our mission is to help all of innovation and R&D widen its capacity to think in new ways."

The research firm Outsell estimated in 2011 that the global trend-forecasting market could be worth as much as US$36 billion. Hai Jun believes that in China alone, in design alone, the market is already large. He counts it out: 1,500 to 2,000 Chinese universities have a design school or a design major; Beijing alone has close to 100,000 design firms working in architecture, product, interior, brand consulting, fashion, interaction, and games; and at least 150,000 companies in China have a design R&D department.

The hottest startups right now all face consumers — food delivery, manicures, group buying, mobile-internet services for eating, drinking, and going out — and founders tend to start wherever it is easiest. What Hai Jun wants to do faces businesses instead. "We don't need that many customers. A thousand corporate users would be great, plus a thousand professional users, plus some schools and educational institutions, and that market is already big. Because the bigger the database gets, the more expensive it gets later — the more specialized, the more expensive — and you'll find its competitiveness is very strong."

But a specialized database for design has a high barrier to entry, which is why few people are willing to open up the field. By Hai Jun's account, a database usually takes at least five years to build, so "you need the passion for it, and you need to be able to sit it out." The early stage is the hardest. "It's hard at the start because it's so specialized," he told us. "You have to build the whole system."

To build that system, Hai Jun broke the data analysis into four dimensions: user positioning, market positioning, product positioning, and design positioning. It is not traditional survey research; the questions are smaller and more specific. What exactly, in vivid detail, do users like? There are already 600 coffee pots on the market — if you're going to make one more, how exactly do you do it? If you want to make a logo people recognize, where are its color, typeface, and graphics heading?

That takes more than data; it takes professional analysis. The database can be improved by mining and modeling big data, but the analysis — color, materials, and so on — needs specialists. The researchers Hai Jun has hired all hold master's or doctoral degrees from well-known universities and institutions in Britain, the United States, Hong Kong, and mainland China, and they are Shuju Gongyuan's core team.

"My ideal is to turn all the research models into a system. That's the ideal, because it would be more objective and depend less on researchers. But we'll definitely keep a fairly good team as well, who will produce their own observations and analysis independently," Hai Jun says.

Hard as this is, it happens to match what Hai Jun needs himself. He has worked in the design industry and knows what designers need: beyond the information problem a database solves, the industry needs a way to work together.

"Go into a design company and look at what they use: email, Word, and Excel spreadsheets. Back when I was in Hong Kong, when we discussed a project with colleagues in London or somewhere else, we used email and video calls." Hai Jun wants to change that. His team is building an online tool for collaborative innovation and project management, one that lets "teams in Beijing, Shanghai, and London working on the same creative proposal work together" — a tool he thinks "would be worth a great deal to the larger innovation companies out there right now."

Running a startup this hard, one that will not pay well any time soon, I wanted to know what worries Hai Jun most. His answer was the feeling of being hemmed in. "Of course I worry, about all sorts of things" — from how each colleague is growing, to what the company has to do over the next year or two. Sometimes he even wavers on whether to keep going, and thinks back to why he started.

"The problem Shuju Gongyuan is trying to solve does have a little idealism in it. But if idealism can be combined with a workable business plan, that's the finest thing there is." At least as Hai Jun sees it, "this is what I most want to be doing right now."

QDaily: Compared with companies offering similar services, where do you think Shuju Gongyuan can't be replaced?

Hai Jun: No company right now is doing what we're doing. Design companies won't do this; they provide solutions. The other databases are public-level things, transportation and the like, with nothing to do with innovation. So-called big data is used most in public services. But in public services today, big-data companies almost never make money, because nobody knows how to. Ours is in a professional field instead — it's just that this field turns out to be much bigger than we imagined, and touches far too many things. It reaches into different industries. So the core of it is still our professional statistics, and that matters enormously. I haven't seen anyone else doing it. Basically this market is ours. We can do 500 of them, or 1,000 — our capability actually runs ahead of our product's.

QDaily: What Shuju Gongyuan does now — is it guidance at a more macro level?

Hai Jun: We supply all kinds of data. Once we have it we see more possibilities, and we hand those possibilities and those moving trends to design companies and to R&D teams inside enterprises, on the client side and the agency side both.

A design company has to turn out that many projects in a day — where are the proposals supposed to come from? We want to make them fast, effective, and accurate in the design work they do for their clients. If a company asks you to design a cup, how do you quickly get hold of the 1,000 most important cups of the past year? That's what we want the big-data side to do next: show you the objective picture. I don't even have to analyze it for you. I set the data up and you look at it yourself, and it becomes clear. We do some analysis of our own too, some comparisons, and then you match it against your client's needs and put proposals together fast.

QDaily: What are your plans for the near term? In the next year or two, what do you hope Shuju Gongyuan will become?

Hai Jun: I hope that within a year or two, my users will all be reviewing it — as the saying goes, universal praise.

QDaily: Are your users mainly at universities right now — Tsinghua, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Communication University of China?

Hai Jun: Yes, and next we'll certainly move into enterprises, products, professionals. So what I hope for in a year or two is that the database can help most of the R&D and creative institutions that genuinely need it, and that they really do come back with good feedback, saying it's valuable. The rest of the commercial value should follow without trouble, if we can manage that.

QDaily: If this company turns out very successful, what parts of people's lives do you think it could affect, or what could it bring to the industry?

Hai Jun: First, it would affect the outcome of innovation as a whole. So many design companies are doing design, and a lot of that design doesn't bring companies opportunity — it creates risk. Design isn't a miracle. When we talk about design now, we assume design can do everything. It can't. Look at our cities: they have been designed into this much congestion. A great many design outcomes end up bad. Why bad? Because they are subjective, imagined, self-centered.

Innovation has two sides, opportunity and risk. What we want our database to do is help people find the opportunity better, lower the risk, and raise the efficiency of innovation. Then I hope the outcome carries something of ours in it — more accurate, better. All of this depends on each individual team, but if more teams use it, it will improve the innovation problem as a whole. That's the change I think it can make.

QDaily: Academia, magazines, designer, and now CEO — which stage have you enjoyed most?

Hai Jun: This one. I enjoy this state the most.

QDaily: Sounds like you're in a good place.

Hai Jun: The way I feel now, it's tiring, but it's still pretty good. I enjoy it. I want to challenge myself, torture myself, and enjoy myself. That's the feeling, and it's genuinely interesting. Don't treat it as something painful. I learned long ago that drawing an apple is exactly as hard as drawing a person — running a magazine and doing this are equally hard and equally enjoyable — so you stop thinking of it as something complicated. Besides, if I weren't doing this, what would I be doing?

Cover image from infinitdatum.com