Didu Hui, a Design Account on WeChat, Tries to Ease the "Sense of Losing Control" in the Big City | Great Little Studios

What they believe is that the more people understand, the more this feeling of losing control, of being pushed around by enormous forces, eases.

Most people know Didu Hui by its signature long scrolls. Open one of their posts and the first thing you usually see is an instruction: "Please lock your screen and turn your phone sideways to view."

Packing a mass of information into one unbroken image suddenly became a fashion over the past two years. Before Didu Hui, another account, Local Climate Investigation Team, had already been telling stories this way.

The Didu Hui team is built around Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang, both graduates of Tsinghua University's architecture department, plus a loose group of architecture students. Only Song Zhuangzhuang and one other member work full time. By their own count, each post takes an average of 100 working hours, about three weeks.

"A spectacularly unsuccessful business model," Li Mingyang said, laughing.

To most people, Didu Hui is an official account. But the account is really just a way of reaching readers; the team works more like a design studio, taking on design and planning jobs for all sorts of clients. Several of their books will come out this year. Besides advertising the business, the account is a place to practice, and short projects with deadlines keep them excited.

Their use of long images was an accident, too. The account grew out of a popular book about the city called 《京城绘 1——人来车往》 (Drawing the Capital 1: People and Traffic). To promote it, the two authors started an official account together and called it Didu Hui, a name they could not have put on a formal publication.

Look-alike accounts have put pressure on them. They also found that readers have less patience for long images than they assumed: many said they could not make it to the end, or swiped through in a rush and missed most of the design detail.

At first they expected their readers to be architects, design professionals or students in the field. The account spread further than they imagined, picking up plenty of attention from people "outside the industry." Faced with a data graphic, many readers said they did not know where to start looking, or which part mattered.

"Most Chinese people can't read images, because they have never had any basic training in it," Li Mingyang said. "That's why so many bosses like to say they want a European-style renovation. It's a classic case of thinking in words, of reading pictures the way you read text." So they adjusted: fewer long images, more written explanation, more attention to how one section leads to the next, or images broken into smaller pieces.

Although the account has been running for nearly three years, Didu Hui has not published much — often one update a month. For Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang, that is close to full speed.

QDaily interviewed Didu Hui once before, after they "counted the styles of 332 high school uniforms in Beijing". They have also made "The 100 People Living in Beijing," about who the city's population actually is; taken "the longest subway ride in the capital"; pulled the lettering off the shop signs of eight streets; and hand-drawn the 1,159 things people have dropped while packed into subway cars.

At the start, Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang set a few rules for what the account would publish, and so far none of them has changed.

The first is something like a persona: the subject has to be Beijing, and has to stay Beijing. In their latest issue they finally "left the city," but even then they started at Beijing West Railway Station and followed a railway line all the way to Lhasa. The second is that the point is to teach: "after you read one of our posts, whatever attitude you came in with, you should be able to state a few facts." The third is an interesting angle, not a repeat of what someone else has done. And last, "ideally it should be of some practical use."

The sources listed at the end of every piece show that most of Didu Hui's data comes from public material, some of it from companies or organizations they work with.

They have a certain street smarts about finding it. "Say the subway is under construction. The floor plan for each station is only posted outside the site — you can't find it anywhere else. So you snap a photo and use that, because it's public information, it just never goes online."

Another time they wanted to know exactly which animals live in the Beijing Zoo. "No keyword search gets you that. But on some animal forum, somebody suddenly posts a link — the login page for the Beijing Zoo's management system — and there it is. That takes reading widely, all the time."

They have also begun gathering more "first-hand material," data they collect and check themselves. To find out where the ingredients on a Beijing hot pot table come from, they went to the Xinfadi wholesale market and struck up conversations with vegetable growers. They walked shop to shop recording the fonts on street signs. They used WeChat article view counts to rank Beijing's "internet-famous buildings." And of course they sat in traffic on the Second Ring Road themselves, and rode every subway line in the city.

Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang are both fascinated by the city, and examples come to them without effort. "Look at Galeries Lafayette, the mall. It used to be one of Beijing's most famous abandoned building sites. Why did we pick this place to talk? Because we'd never been here, and we were curious."

At the team's regular meetings, every member has to raise one question about Beijing, or one survival tip they have picked up somewhere in the city. "Like, same place, and one person notices the women's toilet is always empty while someone else finds it packed." Out of that watching and guessing, story ideas appear on their own.

Both co-founders were born and raised in Beijing. "This one, right, lives inside the Second Ring Road," Li Mingyang said, pointing at Song Zhuangzhuang and laughing. "He uses the word 'remote' for Guomao."

Their feeling for the city is part of what drives the account. Alongside the data analysis are pieces built on sentiment, and those often turn into the hits, with the most comments and the highest readership. The survey of school uniforms last year, one Song Zhuangzhuang is particularly fond of, passed 100,000 views and drew a flood of readers' memories of their own childhoods.

At the same time, "our blind spot is that we really cannot imagine Beijing from an outsider's point of view." They dislike the very category of "outsider," and hope anyone who grows up or lives in Beijing can call themselves a Beijinger.

Reality is less tidy; some barriers are simply there. Li Mingyang said they have always been drawn to housing prices and school catchment districts as subjects, but found their own feelings about them faint, and could not fully grasp the confusion of the people who actually face them.

"What is a Beijinger? How should that be defined?" The question preoccupies them. "The 100 People Living in Beijing" was one attempt at an answer. It turned up blind spots readers might not have known they had: out of every 100 people, seven have a disability, "even though you rarely see them"; 22 do not use the internet; nearly half hold a passport, but only 21 own a car.

As second- and third-generation Beijingers who "don't drink douzhir," the fermented mung bean brew, they have come to see that so-called old Beijing culture has come loose from the present, and that nothing new has taken its place.

Didu Hui has an ambition of its own: to build a cultural circle for the new Beijinger through this work, and with it a sense of belonging. "Beijing badly needs cultural markers that stand for how the city actually lives now, instead of reheating tradition." Meaning that when people think of Beijing, it should not only be distant sights like the Forbidden City or the Temple of Heaven, but traces of culture they can find on their own doorstep, in the streets where they live.

So they have set about taking the city apart, element by element: things as large as modes of transport, subway lines and the run of the streets, and as small as shop-sign fonts, hot pot ingredients and candied hawthorn skewers.

Pulling things apart this way does two things. It lets you look closely at what usually flickers past unnoticed. And it tries to answer the questions people keep asking about why the city is the way it is. Why are the streets so ugly? Why is the subway so crowded? Why do enormously expensive abandoned buildings still rot in the middle of town?

Nearly every Didu Hui chart works this way — explaining why, rather than simply stating and listing. Song Zhuangzhuang gave a talk on Yixi, a Chinese talk series, called "Understanding a City," and the title covers most of what Didu Hui does. He offered an example there. In one post the team measured the transfer distance at every interchange station on the Beijing subway and found that Dongzhimen has the longest, 520 meters.

Before renovation, though, the transfers at both Dongzhimen and Xizhimen ran more than 600 meters. The piece explained that Line 13, which meets other lines at both stations, used to be an intercity railway rather than a subway. The two crossing lines belonged to different systems, so when the stations were joined, the passage between them came out longer than a normal subway transfer.

A big city is full of things that make no sense, and many of them look like deliberate obstruction, as if the forces at work could never be reconciled. "What we want to get across is that a subway transfer isn't just a distance. There are a lot of complicated things behind it."

Sometimes, of course, this can look like endorsing the government's decisions. Li Mingyang's answer: "You have to understand the whole chain of cause and effect behind a decision before you can judge it fairly. Then you start asking whether it would be better if one step were changed, instead of counting the obstacles and giving up."

After Tsinghua's school of architecture, Song Zhuangzhuang studied urban design at Harvard. He noticed how much weight grassroots NGOs carry in the United States: the High Line, for one, was built and saved entirely by citizens' efforts.

He believes building civic awareness matters most of all, and that the first step toward that "grand goal" is to let people know what a city is, get them interested in it, and give them a sense that they have some say.

At an offline talk about city life, he said Didu Hui's format also borrowed from a New York public education organization, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, which uses drawings to explain New York's city rules — everything from zoning across the city down to how a street vendor can legally set up a stall.

As an undergraduate he started an elective course, 《我们聊建筑》 (Let's Talk About Architecture), at Beijing No. 4 High School, where he had been a student, teaching teenagers about architecture and cities and having them draw maps. That project is where Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang met and began working together. Besides the account, they still run offline events to help people understand Beijing.

"At the very least, if everyone thinks a place is a garbage dump, don't keep throwing your garbage there."

They have spent years on questions of daily life, but in these arguments Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang see themselves as a third party, standing outside both the public and the government. Ideally they would like to break the wall between the two and let voices pass through.

Inside Didu Hui there is an unwritten rule: because the work is meant to inform, they will not push any values or opinions on readers, only offer facts. Partly this protects them on contentious public issues — "some things, said in full, don't get published." Partly they leave room for interpretation on purpose, hoping readers will reach their own verdicts.

The image has its conveniences. A block of text that simply lists one thing after another loses most readers fast. An image is by nature more neutral, its point less pointed.

Over these few years of running the account, the two partners trained as architects have grown familiar with rules and ways of working they had barely touched before, and they find it genuinely interesting. Li Mingyang, for instance, found that China's whole system for assessing urban management runs on targets: "how much area was cleared and planted, how much building volume was cut. The look of the city is red walls and gray tiles." Administrators, meanwhile, care more about whether something falls inside their own authority, and whether the reasoning holds together.

Much of what Didu Hui does amounts to translation: taking raw material that is dry, full of technical language, public in theory but unfindable in practice, and turning it into images that are plain and interesting. And often a single fact means little on its own; only when it is set beside other things you know does the logic behind it surface. Teaching people, whether you call it popular science or public education, is slow work. What they believe is that the more people understand, the more this feeling of losing control, of being pushed around by enormous forces, eases.

The cover image shows Beijing's provincial liaison offices, "a bit ugly," but each stocked with the food of its home province. The illustrations and long images in this article all come from Didu Hui.