He Spent Eight Years Training a Computer to Be a Designer. What Role Is Left for the Designer? | 100 People With Ideas

The question Zhang Zhoujie gets asked most often is about how to define him: designer or artist? And if the designer is a computer, what role is left for him?

Many people first came across Zhang Zhoujie in 2009, through his graduation project: a chair.

A chair made of thin triangular plates of stainless steel, its four pointed legs stabbing into the floor like needles — cold, hard, not remotely friendly. Sit down, though, and it turns out more comfortable than it looks: the structure holds firm, and the rippling triangular plates follow the curves of the body almost exactly.

Zhang has made a great many chairs since, but the core method has not changed: a computer algorithm decides the details of the chair, and skilled craftsmen weld the steel plates together by hand to match the computer's drawings.

When we met him four years ago at the China International Furniture Fair, these chairs were already sitting on his booth. By then they had been shown at more than 30 exhibitions around the world, a set of miniature sculptures with a view from the future.

Chinese furniture design at the time still ran on the so-called "New Chinese Style," or on wooden pieces borrowed from Scandinavian and Japanese fashions. Against a hall full of wood, the series called Triangulation looked like an outlier.

"A lot of people don't understand why this thing is so pointed, so artistic, so impractical. What I want to say is that it isn't a chair yet — or at least not a usable one. It is only the statement of a concept, an account of one possibility for what a chair could be. Like a concept car: often a statement about new technology, put in a very pure, even extreme language, without needing to work out the details."

Four years later, Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab appeared at Design Shanghai and launched a design brand at the same time, Endless Form®. What he makes is still niche, but it has shed its old marginal posture.

Beyond the booth inside the hall, Endless Form® drew up a vast formation of nearly a hundred chairs — each different in edge, curve and scale, like a crowd of objects that had grown wild on their own, yet held together by the same materials and a similar structural logic. They filled the whole West Garden of the Shanghai Exhibition Center, the largest furniture display the studio has ever staged.

He says he did not design these chairs. He spent eight years training a computer to design, and the chairs are the machine's work.

Over the years, the question Zhang Zhoujie gets asked most often is about how to define him: designer or artist? And if the designer is a computer, what role is left for him?

His answer: "Whether I am a designer or an artist, whether what I do is art or design — honestly, I don't much care. Identity keeps shifting; it isn't fixed. What matters is whether the direction I want to explore is worth exploring."

He thinks digitalization is inevitable: a new possible mode of production after industrial mass production and after the internet.

In the future he imagines, computers will enter human society as an intermediate class, taking over many manager-like roles, and most people will have no choice but to be managed by them.

He does not want to be among the replaceable, though.

1

Zhang Zhoujie began learning to paint as a child, above all Chinese ink painting, which was his first education in art. After studying industrial design at the China Academy of Art, he started to think about problems the way a designer does. He soon found that designers work under many limits: most of the time a designer has to design to someone's requirements, while an artist has more room to realize himself.

Studying later at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London helped him truly work out how to be himself.

While abroad he once set up a stall on a London street with his ink paintings. Only a scattered few stopped, most of them out of curiosity, and in the end he sold nothing.

That broke some of his confidence, and set him rethinking where his exploration should go next.

Those years coincided with the rise of computational parametric design; the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid was one of parametricism's leading figures.

As a visiting researcher at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Zhang Zhoujie was among the first designers to encounter parametric design, see what digital design could do, and begin exploring it.

He found something Daoist in the way a computer designs — governing by non-action, following the way of nature. After his exposure to Western and contemporary art and its methods, he understood the essence of traditional art better: "Only freedom of the spirit can bring freedom of creation."

Later, as digital design developed, he saw more clearly that a logical algorithm strong enough would let a computer system design things beyond the limits of human imagination — and that is exactly what interests him most.

The Triangulation series was his attempt at that first step of exploration and experiment. He spent a year in London on preliminary design research, and by graduation had shown only some very early models. Back in China he pushed the experiments on — labor and materials cost far less at home than in Britain. Another year later he brought the work back to Britain to exhibit, and only then did the design reach its first real result.

In 2010, Zhang Zhoujie founded his own studio and began working on one question: if a computer were the designer, what would it make? Next to the 3D-printed design then in fashion, digital design plainly asks more of people before they can understand it — without the background, it is hard to imagine a computer designing a chair on its own.

But traditional manufacturing and 3D printing alike happen after the design is done, with the designer playing the decisive part. Digital design has no model to start from; it depends entirely on the computer.

2

Zhang Zhoujie fed the computer only some basic mathematical logic — enough for it to know what a chair is, or what a chair comfortable enough to sit in is — and left the rest to the machine, which works by joining point to point into lines, and lines into surfaces.

He tries to control as little as he can, to respect numbers and the rules of logic, to design without expectation. Much like the title of a book he likes by the biologist Sean B. Carroll, about the mystery of how animal forms are built and evolve: Endless Forms Most Beautiful. That is where the name Endless Form® comes from.

The whole design process takes a few seconds: one surface, four points, a drag of the mouse toward both ends — the leg section pulled down, the back pulled up — and the shape of a chair comes out. The process is simple, but it can hold endless variation. "My work is meant to carry the beauty of the computer itself to its extreme. That is why I no longer define myself as a designer — I don't need to sketch. I let the computer simulate, calculate and explore, and then find some of the most basic forms."

At first they would generate a digital product like this inside the computer, then use a program to take it apart, calculate every angle, cut the pieces with a laser, and weld and polish them into a finished digital object. Left inside the computer the form is easy enough; making it exist is very hard.

From the first attempt in paper on, the hardest part was not knowing how to unfold it, how to calculate its angles, how to weld it together.

He went to many welders over time, and all of them turned him down: none had the patience to weld hundreds of fragments together.

For nearly a year and a half he shut himself in his studio and taught himself welding, cutting, grinding, polishing and production, feeling out every step of the process alone.

In Zhang Zhoujie's own words: "If your knowledge is limited and shaped by other people, there is a lot you cannot break through. We invented an entirely new way of making things. Once we can really produce all our digital products smoothly, our society will enter a brand-new world."

Turning designs into objects, he spent a lot of time studying digital fabrication. The craftsmen at his Shanghai studio were all trained by him personally, and he works at the bench alongside them. OBJECT # SQN7‐T, for instance, took an enormous amount of handwork to produce — three full years to finish by hand.

At first glance, a computer-led way of designing that looks so much like the future is hard to square with a making process this slow and this laborious. As Zhang Zhoujie sees it, "the manufacturing problem is an easy one to solve. Sooner or later, technology will automate the process."

Their studio in Songjiang has now grown into a team of more than a dozen — craftsmen, programmers and designers, all trained by Zhang as he worked it out himself. Solve the manufacturing problem, he believes, and it becomes your barrier, the thing others cannot do. The more barriers you build up, the more original your work is, and the harder it is for anyone to copy.

3

Seen from outside, whether a creative process can run without human intelligence is not what the mass market or most customers care about.

People like to see results: with a chair, most want to know whether it is useful and comfortable. But at this stage Zhang Zhoujie cares more about the process. "I don't start straight from the market, or from clients, or from what people need. I start more from the inside, and make the things I think ought to exist."

In 2010 he took the first chairs he had made to an exhibition held at the Shanghai World Expo. From the morning on, people kept coming over to point at his work and question it; they thought a chair like this was simply not fit to use.

He felt a kind of disrespect. The show opened that morning; by noon he had packed up and left.

He exhibited next at 100% Design in London in 2011. To his surprise, the American collector Xavier Robert bought every chair he had brought on the first morning. Talking with Xavier, Zhang Zhoujie came to see that contemporary design work belongs in top-tier galleries, in limited editions.

He had entered the art market for contemporary design — a whole system of designers, design galleries, collectors, auction houses and exhibitions.

Wang Yu, a collector at the Los Angeles gallery Gallery ALL, which holds a good number of Zhang Zhoujie's works, said in an earlier interview: "We only choose to work with designers and artists who make collector-grade limited editions their career. That alone is hard to find, especially in China. Then there is the designer's talent, and the ability to keep producing newer, more breakthrough work. Zhang Zhoujie meets all of these conditions."

The market is indeed full of mass-produced goods designed and made by instruments of nearly 100 percent precision. Zhang Zhoujie's chairs try to persuade people to see, from a new angle, that beauty lives in accident and imprecision — like a pact between designer and computer, in which the computer carries out the design and the designer can never foresee the result. More than the great potential of design and technology, it is this random, unforeseeable force that many galleries and collectors prize.

Zhang Zhoujie has no fixed direction on whether he is making art or design products. He simply presents the thing, in one particular way, from the angle of exploration.

"In a collector's eyes it is absolutely an artwork. From my own point of view it is only a research prototype, a test sample. To the public in the future it may look more like a chair — they will think of it as a product."

After that, Zhang Zhoujie's work was widely exhibited around the world, sold reasonably well, and entered many museum, gallery and private collections. It also drew coverage from The New York Times, Vogue, CNN and Wallpaper*. In 2014 the American business magazine Fast Company named him one of "China's 100 Most Creative People in Business" for the year.

Recognition in the art market brought his business its own stages of growth. He once divided a creative career into three phases: the first is supporting yourself; the second is building a team and supporting the team; and by the third, the cost of the team is no longer a pressure but an extension of your hands and feet, so you can work freely and easily. Only then is the state a good one.

In March last year they held a solo show, Mesh/State, at hiart Space on Shanghai's West Bund. It was his first solo art exhibition in the real sense.

Zhang Zhoujie said: "Professional art collectors, media and venues accepted us far beyond what we imagined. I suspect it is because not many artists are relatively technical, with a deep understanding of computers, so by comparison my work stands out as one of a kind."

This June, Gallery ALL again took a solo exhibition of Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab's work — Formation in Action: The Sensor Chair and Design Auto-Genesis — to the Design at Large section of Design Miami/Basel. It was also the first exhibition by a Chinese designer to enter the core zone of Design Miami/Basel.

The most striking new piece there was a thoroughly mechanical-looking Sensor Chair.

The Sensor Chair carries 66 sensors, each linked by springs, to read the curves of a sitter's posture — waistline, back and legs. Sitting on it, the springs give enough play for each person to find their most comfortable position, which feeds back as data. From that data the computer instantly generates rich, endless chair forms, shown on a screen in real time.

"I want everyone to feel how the whole digital design system runs," Zhang Zhoujie said.

The idea of a device that reads body data in real time came to him as far back as the founding of the Digital Lab. He approached many professional engineers by various routes at the time, but a creation with no precedent and no clear short-term goal was hard to make attractive to technical specialists. In the end he decided to do it himself, teaching himself sensors, Arduino and a range of related technologies.

From casting a mold of his own body at the start, to building the first Sensor Chair out of wood by hand three or four years ago, he explored and tested for a long time before arriving at this version, more sensitive and more precise in its data. After the exhibition, the Sensor Chair will go through deeper, more mature technical work.

Zhang Zhoujie still does not look much like a designer. The questions entrepreneurial designers care about — how to read market demand, how to grow the business, how to improve management and operations — all rank below creativity for him.

From that angle, it is lucky the art market is there to support him.

Image source: Zhang Zhoujie Digital Lab