Two Young Chinese Designers Opened a Studio in Berlin. They Say Sincere Design Is Good Design

"If we're going to design something, we have to offer something new. Does it solve a problem, or does it offer a new aesthetic, a new way of using the thing? There has to be something in it."

Weng Xinyu is 29 this year. Before 2010 his life looked like most young people's: classes, internships, and a lot of worrying about whether he was ready for the working world and what job actually suited him.

He was studying German at the Communication University of China then, picking up work on the side as an escort interpreter. On an exchange program in Germany he quietly kept a personal homepage where he stored the things he had "played around and made" in Photoshop and 3ds Max, set to Miserable Faith's song "Anyang" — a small gesture of homesickness. In his senior year, when everyone else was interning, he went out to Wangjing, past Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road, and tried them all: PR, graphic design and 3D modeling jobs at Microsoft and Siemens.

"But I felt translation wasn't my calling, and working for a big company didn't suit my character either," he said. In the end he applied to Bauhaus-University Weimar in Germany and started over as an undergraduate, studying product design.

Tao Haiyue is 28 this year. Before 2010 she was still at Shanghai Normal University, studying sculpture under Xiang Jing and Qu Guangci. On the side she and a few friends put out a magazine called Xiaoming (《小明》), which introduced the fun things the designers around them were making. They called it Xiaoming because the name is the stock character in every Chinese joke — "it can be anyone" — which gave it a kind of "young sense of humor."

"But then everyone had their own things to get busy with and drifted away one by one, so it slowly became my thing alone," Tao Haiyue said. She went on to Bauhaus-University Weimar for a master's in public art.

All of that was six years ago. In March 2015 the two of them founded the independent design studio Yuue Design in Berlin. In a year and a half they were invited to eight large trade fairs in a row, took on twenty or thirty projects, collected awards of various kinds, and saw their work turn up more and more often in the press and in the product catalogs of companies large and small.

Tao Haiyue's Xiaoming changed too. It became a free digital magazine, and then "Xiaoming TheShop," a store that introduces foreign designers' work to Chinese buyers. It has five or six retail partners in China and currently handles more than a dozen brands.

"They're products you use every day, but they give you an emotional exchange. They're very funny," Liang Lele said of Yuue Design's work.

Liang Lele founded the home brand Mamamu. She saw their work at last year's Design Shanghai and signed them on the spot; she is now mass-producing a lamp called "Oops! Lamp". It is made for playing a prank on a friend and warming up a room: pull the cord and the bulb or tube lights up and gets yanked out at the same time, so it looks as though you have just broken the thing.

"I've always been looking for that feeling. I want to take a fairly ordinary product and give it some playfulness, some reflection, a bit of depth. It's not about making a product prettier or easier to use, but about coming at it another way and giving people some constructive ideas. Take a photo frame — it usually displays photos, so what if you put something else in it?" Weng Xinyu told QDaily.

That photo frame became one of the five pieces in his graduation project, the "Good Medicine Tastes Bitter" series: "TANGIBLE MEMORY," a poetic photo frame whose picture appears only when a hand touches it, and blurs if it is left alone too long.

Liang Lele was not the first client drawn in by Yuue's interactive work. In November 2015, six months after Yuue Design was founded, Thomas Dariel — the French interior designer who founded the Shanghai home brand Maison Dada — saw their work in AD China and called their Berlin studio directly, arranging to meet in Shanghai to talk about developing products.

The Angry Lamp he picked also belongs to the "Good Medicine Tastes Bitter" series. The studio's website describes it this way: "The Angry Lamp is a lamp shaped like a person, with a personality of its own. It watches how people use energy. If the room is too bright, or if another lamp is already on, it turns itself off. If people forget about it, it turns itself off as well."

This year two more well-known European home brands came to Yuue Design and signed contracts. The names can't be disclosed yet, but for two young people a year and a half into the business, "it counts as a milestone."

The idea of starting a studio in Berlin, though, was not there from the beginning.

"We'd already decided to live in Germany, but I thought that after graduating I should take the conventional route and find a job," Tao Haiyue said. In the summer of 2014, close to graduation, she moved from Weimar to Berlin and found a gallery that took her on part-time as a curator. Weng Xinyu started an internship at a design studio there. The two cities are only two or three hours apart by car, so they could work and still finish the theory and the hands-on design for their theses, and get back to Weimar quickly whenever a professor wanted to meet.

Over those months in Berlin they fell for the city's startup atmosphere, thick but unhurried. Weng Xinyu even thinks that coming to this city settled, to some degree, what kind of life the two of them would lead and whether they would start a studio at all.

"It's a big international city, but its internationalism isn't as rushed as London's, Paris's or New York's. It's very open — people from every country, every industry — and there are a great many startup parks and co-working spaces, but the pace of life is slower. Everyone here is a founder or an artist, and every kind of idea, every kind of startup atmosphere gathers here. The soil is unusual too: a lot of the new companies and founders don't carry a heavy financial load, and there's plenty of room to talk to each other."

While interning that summer of 2014, Weng Xinyu was also finishing off his graduation series, "Good Medicine Tastes Bitter" — shooting photos and video of the pieces and applying under his own name to one trade fair after another. He calls that stretch of frantic applications "pretty hard going." "My thinking was that my graduation project had to be a big move. It had to make a splash."

He still remembers something from his sophomore year, 2011. That spring he took part in a group show at Ambiente, the Frankfurt spring consumer-goods fair, with some classmates. A boss from Fujian who exported electronics walked up, looked at the flat-pack bookshelf he had made, "Shelf-system," and said straight out: "Let's work together. Design me a weather clock." Weng Xinyu drew four or five proposals and collected the first design fee of his life.

"Exhibiting is interesting. Talking to the other designers showing at the same time, I found that most of them, more than 90 percent, either ran their own studio or worked as freelance designers. They made me envious. I felt I wanted to do this too. I'd always been cautious, thinking I should find a job first, but after talking to them I started wondering whether I'd regret taking a job — whether, if it could be done, I ought to try. At the same time I worried about whether I could actually pull it off alone, whether I could feed myself."

He was lucky. The Cologne International Furniture Fair's Pure Talents Contest and Ambiente's Ambiente Talents, held in January and February 2015, both accepted his applications.

Beyond the reach these fairs give you, what makes European ones attractive is how hard they push young designers. Take the Cologne International Furniture Fair, the first professional fair Weng Xinyu attended after graduating. It runs a competition called "Talents," open only to designers who graduated within the past three years. The organizers invite the 20 shortlisted designers to show in Cologne with lodging, flights and shipping all paid, bring in a curator to lay out the whole hall, and assemble a professional jury to vote for the top three. Weng Xinyu made the shortlist with his first entry.

"Exhibitions tend to push you along. You say you want to stop for two or three months and think about whether to get a job or do something else, but there's no way — the next show is already waiting for you. Then Design Shanghai came calling and we thought, all right, let's at least go under some kind of name for now. And gradually we realized we were already a studio."

Design Shanghai in March 2015 was the first fair Yuue Design attended under the studio's name, and its first appearance in China. It brought them clients like Liang Lele, and press coverage in magazines such as AD China that in turn brought more clients, Thomas Dariel among them.

Set against what they had seen abroad, though, Tao Haiyue thinks China is still in a different state, with far fewer openings like the Cologne fair. Design Shanghai does set aside an area for young designers' work, for instance, but the designers have to pay every cost of showing themselves, at prices close to Milan's or Paris's. On the other hand, "it screens people well, and it's more professional overall." Still, "China should have more design fairs like this."

On which fairs are worth the money, Weng Xinyu has his own rules.

"We've made mistakes, actually. Sometimes we've gone to sales fairs, where everyone is there to place orders and buy in bulk. Take the Maison et Objet fair in Paris we did this September — in the end it mostly pulled in some sales orders for the home companies we work with. But as a studio, what we'd rather attend are design fairs like Cologne or Stockholm, where a lot of companies are looking for designers. That's how design collaborations happen."

Of the projects Yuue Design has taken on so far, commissioned design and licensed design each account for about 50 percent. The "oops lamp" made with Mamamu is the first kind: the designer develops a new product to a home brand's brief and charges a design fee. "Balancer" and "One Piece," made with well-known European companies, are the second: the designer sells an idea he has already developed to the company and takes royalties.

Weng Xinyu would still rather build up the licensing side. "Because that often lands you a bigger platform, and the creative work is freer, more focused. You don't have to worry about production, operations and everything else downstream."

The model has been around in Europe for a long time, but the Chinese market is still unfamiliar with it. "China used to run mostly on contract manufacturing, so there wasn't much need for design — and when there was, a company would just hire a few designers and do it in-house." Many Chinese brands that contact Yuue Design also misread what it does, asking about sales or supply chains.

Tao Haiyue doesn't think the studio will start its own retail brand any time soon, but showing at Design Shanghai did lead straight to "Xiaoming TheShop." The first time she saw what her Chinese peers were making, the products struck her as all alike: Chinese-style wooden pieces, or ceramics. "I thought, isn't this a design fair? Shouldn't a hundred flowers be blooming? Why only these two mainstream aesthetics? We just felt it wasn't much fun."

By introducing foreign design brands, Tao Haiyue wants two things. One is a richer local design vocabulary — "bringing in styles that are exploratory, experimental, and the design thinking behind them." The other is a different atmosphere. "Some European design shops and furniture stores make you feel comfortable. No excess advertising copy, no irrational buying. I thought at the time that if I could bring that in one day, it couldn't stop at bringing it in — it would have to be a real shop."

Looking at where they are now, Weng Xinyu doesn't think the studio has been through any really hard moments. The hardest thing has been his own impatience. "That's my biggest pain. I always want it to move faster. Maybe it's a Chinese mindset — however fast things go it never feels fast enough, and you keep asking why the product still isn't out."

Both founders feel that, next to their surroundings, they are still a little too hungry for quick results. At one design fair they queued 20 minutes at a french-fry stand by the entrance and thought a shop like this would go under in China: "how can it be so slow?" Then they got to the counter and saw why. The owner fried each customer's portion fresh. "You can ask him for anything you like. You don't have to worry about him rushing five orders at once to clear the line."

Then they went to see a design studio that "moves forward at a speed that would be unbelievably slow in China," yet its things are very good, with one classic product being adjusted and updated all the time. "Back home that looks like a very outdated way of working, but once you've seen their things, as someone in the trade you admire what they do. More than sales or fame, that may be what we'd rather be after."

Experiences like these have made Weng Xinyu and Tao Haiyue want to hold back a pace of growth that keeps accelerating. "We don't want to become a large studio turning out design proposals for other people. We'd rather guarantee the quality of each piece and avoid making bad designs."

So what makes a good design? "I don't think style is the issue. The issue is how much sincerity went into the product, and that matters most. Whether every detail, every treatment, every function is sincere, or was stuck on deliberately. If a product is sincere, it can be French and romantic, German and rigorous, Chinese and plain, or Nordic and minimal. They all have something in common, really. It's just set under different countries, different brands."

"I don't know how to put it, but it's a work — something made for people to use, something created, not a cheap basic model. If we're going to design something, we have to offer something new. Why do you need this new thing? Does it solve a problem, or does it offer some new aesthetic, a new way of using the thing? There has to be something in it. It's not that I add an element because it happens to be popular or cool."

As for Yuue Design's future, Weng Xinyu said, half joking, that "the biggest problem is that we don't make money." "Product designers sit at the very bottom of the creative industry. The big money goes to the companies, or to the retailers."

"But we've earned other things. We're keen on doing this and we find pleasure in it, so I've earned something too."

Cover image and photos from the Yuue Design website