Storytelling has been a primal human method of communication for millennia. Each and everyone one of us is a storyteller whether it’s about our past, our future or just our daily activities. The enjoyment we get from simply telling someone a story, especially when it’s around ourselves, is a deep desire of expression that we all share. Who hasn’t felt inspired by a friends expression of joy at finding a new place of interest or sharing in the pictures of a trip far away to different country? Hyper-connectivity and the ability to keep in touch with friends at a click of a mouse button is evolving the way we tell stories to each other, leading to more abstract forms of expression by everyday people more akin to that of artists. The Internet, as medium, is not just changing the way we communicate, it’s changing the way we express ourselves.

Everybody and their dog has a Facebook account, and those that don’t are seen, these days, as being on the same social level as a Buddhist monk living on the roof of the world in Tibet. Facebooks success can be attributed to two things; firstly, luck. It came around just as the MySpace generation was growing up and going to University. Facebook originally only allowed university student to join, a fear maybe that MySpace culture of trying to create the most visually incomprehensible collection of pages on the internet was going to spread to it’s service. Secondly, it’s simply functionality and structured system of networks and pages meant people had a easy, quick way to express themselves. Obviously Facebook abstracts the process of storytelling but the feeling of excitement and inspiration from seeing someone you know enjoying themselves resonates with something deep inside us. It doesn’t stop there however, like the Impressionists, we are revolutionizing the way we express moments of impression.

The Internet has opened up a world of information and opportunity to interact with each other. We are bombarded by media from around the world; organized, referenced, and served to our doorstep (or desktop?) thanks to services like the RSS feed and social tools such as Twitter. A movement under the young generation of people, who have grown up around this, is manifesting itself on websites like Youtube and Flickr. User generated content is growing fast out from the Internet underworld and being launched at our desktops thanks to rise of blogs and the insatiable need for original content in the blogosphere. People are remixing, re-finding and sharing content to express themselves. Widely available media editing software, some opensource, is making it easy for a young teenage boy in Shenzhen, China to mix his favourite song together with his favourite anime show, or for a young portrait artist to share his anatomical studies and get advice from a much wider community of artists than that living in his native village in the middle of Mexican countryside. Instructables is good example of a community developing around the love of one way of expressing yourself. The community posts interesting, step by step do-it-yourself craft projects ranging from the realistic (A modular recycled water jug storage system) to the down right crazy (Building a time machine anyone? How about Fire Shaving….). This method of storytelling is driving forward the DIY movement documented no where better than at the Maker Faire, held every year, it brings together a community of people from all over the world. This is the power of user generated content, the power of the community thinking, not just the individual.

More traditional methods of storytelling are also finding their ways onto the Internet through websites like Hitotoki which provides “narrative maps” of different cities. Each post is a short story or experience “describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between”. Each narrative is a small window into someone elses life where for a brief moment we are exposed to the persons likes, dislikes, opinions and desires. Each story is even accompanied by a GPS location and map, as if we were a God looking down on our creation. With access to hundreds of thousands of blogs expressing the same stories and emotions on a daily basis the power of the internet is harnessed by Jonathan Harris in his art work, We Feel Fine. Scanning thousands of blogs daily for the words ‘I feel’, we are presented with a visual representation of human consciousness and emotion. The detached nature of viewing the emotions presented by the program is akin to that of a photographer or a writer, except these are real stories, created by real people. The artist here is not just the creator of the website, it is every single entity presented within it.

The true beauty is that through the general anonymity of the Internet it has evolved to be the carrier of our emotions, our desires, our past and our future. Like the cave paintings that showed the daily life and ancient stories of our ancestors, the Internet is our cave and we are recording our stories, as a community, for the generations to come.

Based on Philip K. Dick’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Blade Runner takes us into a world where humans have created sentient beings almost identical to humans. The film, just like the book, asks the age old question of what it is to be human. If our own emotional responses and feelings can be replicated to an identical accuracy to ourselves, what is really left to separate us from our creations? Almost lavishly the film throws out many answers towards the apparent humanity or inhumanity of the replicants and the portrayed humans, however many are unsubstantial and should be treated more as an attempt by the narrative of the film and indeed the book to probe around the problem space. It is, however, this probing that makes it possible for us to understand the questions, even if the answers are unobtainable.

The quest for life by the replicants is centred mainly on the problem of longevity. In the logical minds of Roy, Pris and the other replicants running from the Blade Runners out to “retire” them, the four year life span engrained into their bodies is the only obstacle. The superhuman qualities of the replicants highlight their superiority, after all, “…‘More human, Than Human’ is our motto…” (Blade Runner, 1982) says Tyrell after Rachel’s Voight-Kampff test. This is discussed by Nietzsche in his book Thus Spook Zarathustra (1885), where he describes the goal of the Superman or Overman to transcend man, to become stronger, to overcome. The perfection of the replicants, however, alienates the viewer instead of reinforcing their right to be human. Ridley Scott describes: “A replicant is essentially a human being, an all-flesh culture, that is very advanced and highly perfected. That’s the odd dichotomy of the whole story.” (Sammon, 1999) This is again seen in the seeming inhumanity towards Sebastian by Roy and Pris. The alienation of Sebastian and the calculated deception of the replicants doubts their so called perfection and questions their ‘humanity’. Philip. K. Dick writes, “Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator. Rick liked to think of them like that; it made his job palatable” (1968, p. 28) . The portrayal of the replicants as independent, selfish, sentient beings is discussed by Dick; “Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community….”, going on to say, “ ….the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct…” (1968, p. 28). However, throughout the film, the replicants show a stronger sense of community than the humans. Deckard is a solitary man; disillusioned and anti-social. The encounters of other humans by Deckard are all brash and cold which reinforces the dystopian environment, arcing back to film genre, ‘film noir’ and its comment on the present society of 1950s urban America. When looking at this theme, specifically, violence plays an important role in Blade Runner, as it is mainly perpetrated against ‘non-human’ characters, that of the replicants. The dilemma here is the apparent suffering of those who are incapable of suffering and lacking the human status that would make violence inflicted upon them a moral crime. This is exemplified by Roy and Pris; “We’re not computers Sebastian, we’re physical”(Blade Runner, 1982). We gain sympathy for the replicants due to the violence inflicted upon them as in most cases it matches a human response. Again, however, the pendulum swings the other way. Deckard’s second shot at Pris is, obviously, to put her out of her ‘misery’, which in itself is exaggerated to the point of disbelief. Here Deckard shows an empathic reaction, even for someone who has been “retiring” replicants for so long.

A strong theme running throughout the book, and to a degree in the film, is that of the contrast between the way that the humanity portrayed within the story treats animals created by themselves and how humanity treats replicants, machines created in the image of man to do the lesser tasks for human progression. The stigma surrounding the world of animals and the apparent obsession of Deckard on the matter, portrayed mainly in Dick’s book, directly contrasts that of mans inhumanity towards the replicants. “Nothing would be more impolite. To say ‘Is your sheep genuine?’ would be a worse breach of manners than to inquire whether a citizen’s teeth, hair or internal organs would test out authentic” (1968, p. 11). Comparisons can be made to the social environment birthed after the Second World War and still relevant to todays society. Man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man was experienced in societal form with the rise of the Nazi Party and their policies and judgements on who had the right to humanity. Due simply to religious and philosophical belief and historical stigma, entire populations where exterminated on an industrial scale. Deckard and the rest of the Blade Runners use a unsubstantiated and controversial test, the Voight-Kampff test to prove whether or not the subject is a replicant. How is this test accurate when Inspector Byrant himself mentions the fact that Dr. Kampff was well aware of a small minority of human beings incapable to passing the Voight-Kampff test? Are they now not just making decisions based on human judgement which we know is inaccurate and troublesome due to our nature? This is seen in Tyrell’s pursuit for perfection in his replicants and Sebastian’s frailty in succumbing to the power of the replicants. Dick’s book, The Man in the High Castle (1962) deals with this issue directly, and in response to my comparison with Nazi Germany, literally. The book takes place in a world where the Axis powers have won the Second World War. Dick makes comparisons and satirizes the actual climate after the war, but most interesting is his look at the fundamental change in the ideals of humanity. Ethnic prejudice is demonstrated by Dick to be pointless through referencing his book within the context of the story. The character of Tagomi, a successful Japanese businessman, journeys into a world, through the fictional novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, where the Allies have won the war, a world where the Japanese people are the victims of prejudice. This shows that the only difference between races is who is in power at the time. In the book Tagomi rebels against judgement based on reputation and buys jewelry made buy a Native American. This is similar to the rebellion of the replicants, and specifically Roy, in Blade Runner. The power is religiously personified by Tyrell, playing the ‘creator’. “It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker” (Blade Runner, 1982) is whispered by Roy as he draws closer. The frustration of the realisation that Roy is unable to extend his life allows Roy to break from his forced conformity and accept his full potential of what his reality is to him.This is in contrast to Deckard’s journey in the film and book, which sees his reality crumble away in front of his own eyes. His own perception of the prejudice inflicted on the replicants is changed with the near fatal encounters with Zora and Leon and having his own life saved by Rachel leading to him falling in love with her, however he continues to hunt down and kill the remaining replicants, only at the end realising the power and ‘humanity’ of the Nexus-6 replicant, Roy in the final scene. “..all those… moments, will be lost, in time, like tears… in… rain. Time… to die.” (Blade Runner, 1982) Roy teaches Deckard that even though it’s manufactured, it is a life that has lived, that has experienced, a life that has every right to be classed human.

To conclude, the journey of the characters within the book and the film is ultimately similar whether they are human or not. Speculation aside as to whether or not Deckard is a replicant, the search for identity in this man made dystopia is what links Deckard and Roy and the other replicants. If prejudice because of social indoctrination is the reason for the inhumanity towards the replicants, then control is the goal of society. Control over the lower class of people due to a greed for self justification and dominance. This is justified by the weakness of the Voight-Kampff test as an accurate indicator of whether or not a sentient being is human or not. A trivial physical defect is simply not enough to justify the classification of someone (something) as ‘non-human’. It’s no wonder Ridley Scott pushed to portray Deckard as a replicant instead of a human; simply put, there is practically no difference between the two.

Since I work above one of the biggest shopping malls in Hong Kong it is inevitable that I need to walk through it every morning, lunchtime and evening. Most of the shopping done is fashion related with about 90% of the shops catering to the fashion/brand aware. One casual lunchtime I walked past a shop proudly displaying the slogan, “The brand for brands”, and it got me thinking about the evolving retail phenomenon that is the brand within a brand.

I’ve come to realise more and more the sheer amount of ‘names’ within the fashion industry and that each ones brand success is based more and more upon the quality of their goods and not so much the personal image that a particular brand evokes, as used so blatantly by the likes of Nike, D&G, Louis Vuitton or any of the other large fashion retailers in the past. I mean there’s a reason you’d buy a pair of Levi’s over a pair of H&M or Primark jeans right? And if you don’t know it, one word: Longevity.

Department stores have been around for a while and their success has always been based on capitalising on the success of the brands sold within their walls. However, brands were always given their own space, allowed to breath and given the chance to advertise within the store itself, some examples being John Lewis in the UK or Sogo in Japan and Hong Kong. A new slant on this has taken shape as a store which sells brand clothes at discount rates. Often selling last years clothes or slightly damaged items. The popularity of these stores as based on the ‘treasure hunting’ model, where if you spend a long amount of time looking for the right brand within the hundreds of others jumbled together, another just as good or better will pop out at a better price, longevity isn’t a factor here. The next logical step is the brand name department store selling collections of brands, merged together as a superbrand becoming all controlling in showing people which Diesel jeans to wear with which D&G t-shirt. The emphasis on longevity is apparent because it’s already established by the superbrand, the only question now is: “Does this shirt match this dress?”.

Is this superbrand a brand or it just a different access point or approach for a wider diversity of people to buy what they want? And does a multi-layered superbrand diffuse the emphasis on the quality of the goods more, by giving the consumer more brand to wade through, or less by stripping the original ‘over-branding’ of a retailer as seen on the high street?

Interesting questions, even if it is Ramble-ville 2007.

Skills. Designers have a lot of them. Designers need a lot of them. Some of us are swept up in our endeavor to be better designers and deliberately choose to improve our sketching, learn some new piece of software, read up on that latest ‘design trend’. However, I put it to you that there is one thing above all these which determines a good designer.

Point of view.

I’m not saying that those other things are not important, they are, they’re vital. But after talking with one of the tutors of the Design Academy Eindhoven about what they encourage there. It was this: Point of view. They want to know what each student’s point of view on design is, whatever that may be. Maybe it’s bringing new life to old things (Baas) or striving to express the un-thought known (Fukasawa) or needlessly detailing a vacuum cleaner to look like a Ghostbuster Machine (Dyson).

Baas may not be the best sketcher, Fukasawa may not be the best trend spotter nor Dyson competent with the latest 3D software, But what they do have is point of view, and a lot of it. Everything they do, they do with their particular point of view in mind.

If you have point of view and not the skills required, you can do something about it. Train, collaborate, outsource.

If you have the skills and not the point of view then you can easily become a tool for someone else’s point of view.

So next time you decide to work on some of those design skills, consider this, work on your point of view. Define it. Test it. Contradict it. Change it. Perhaps you will discover the holy grail of design. Success.

What is your point of view?

Take the topography for example. Utterly flat. Oh yes, perfect for bicycles and short walks perhaps but quietly psychologically altering. After only 4 months here the sight of hills fills me with gushing sentimentality. I dream of vantage points and rolling vistas, but alas I am forever looking up.

Take too their Design culture. Utterly proud. Upon meeting one of my new house-mates it was proclaimed flatly ‘Oh yes, you’ve come to the right place, Dutch design is the best in the world.’ Would I ever hear this of an English designer? I think not. Let us not mistake this for arrogance, it’s pride, it’s confidence in their abilities as a culture, and I think this is in large part linked to their liberal mentality. New ideas seem to be easily absorbed into a culture such as Holland’s and embraced fully and confidently to boot.

Where I’m living, Eindhoven, it seems the entire place is built on ‘Design’. Philips practically created the town with its explosive growth at the turn of the 19^th century, and seems to have integrated itself into every facet, nugget and nodule of ‘Eindhoven culture’. The football team is named after them. The famous Design Academy is located in an old Philips building. Even the train station was moved so as to be more convenient for Philips employees to travel to work, redesigning the appearance to pay homage to a Philips radio. The town centre is littered with ‘design’ shops selling knick knacks of mostly exuberant Dutch pieces, even the street bins were designed by Philippe Starck. A new shopping mall being built looks like amorphic worm crawling out of the ground, but did anyone protest “no this is not true dutch architecture!”? No, because they are prepared to accept the new, and adapt to it.

Somewhere that can produce such successes as Marcel Wanders (Moooi), Richard Hutten, Droog, and most recently Maarten Baas has a lesson worth learning, and I believe that lesson is cultivate. Whether it is on a national, local or business level, the real challenge lies in building a culture which is ready to innovate, implement, and accept new ideas. My hats off to the Dutch! They’ve got balls!

This was posted by new contributor Nick living and interning in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Maybe the laws on graffiti are especially strict or the people of this great city just get too much visual stimulation anyway in the form of advertisement particularly in areas like Mong Kok and Hong Kong Island but recently, on one of many explorations into the streets and back alleys of Hong Kong, I came across what was like a shrine to graffiti located in the hip shopping district of Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon. Austin Avenue is special because of it’s incredible concentration and density of street art along a short stretch of alley, maybe only just 100 metres long, which would lead me to believe it was the result of an organized event aimed at encouraging the freedom and opportunity to create art on a decent level instead of overflowing as a exercise in vandalism around the city. Look out for an article soon on street art and it’s effect and influence on the urban environment.

Head on over to the Flickr set for more.

Coming from a student background and being thrust into your first real job in a collaborative design office is kind of like being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool, but then tossed a life jacket by your work colleagues and reeled back in. The contrast between the solo work life of a student and that of the real life is massive. As a student you can understand the thinking in promoting solo achievement. Working on your own projects and ideas is always going to be beneficial because it means you can create your own identity around your portfolio by putting your own work in it, showing solely your skills and abilities. You could argue that it would just be confusing for a design firm looking at your portfolio to distinguish between your work and the work of others.

Working in a design office, however, must be a collaborative effort. Recently I was reading Behance, which is a wonderful collection of articles and tips on improving productivity in creativity and design, and came across a great tip aimed at the design professional. The problems observed are specifically aimed at those in a design management role but apply across the board from the very ‘top’ to the very ‘bottom’ of a design team. Personally I’ve found it difficult to banish my selfish attitude towards my work or claiming ownership over an idea, all products of an education encouraging me to work alone. Why is this the case? Are design firms not looking for precisely the type of person who is effective within a team, who can show they have experience working on ideas collaboratively? As students looking for an entry position we should treat the team collaboration and the dynamic that comes with it as a skill to be advertised to potential employers and, in my opinion, treated just as important as the ability to sketch well or use any number of software packages.

“What does it do?” she said, lifting her eyes off the thick wad of dog-eared sketches in front of her.
“Umm, well you put the toy in here and it shoots it out of it……I tried to get the feeling of the environment the toy is set in accurate enough so that it looks nice and the kid can feel emersed in the experience” I said pointing out pieces of the design I like the most, scribbles of bright colour, some good shading, nice forms.
“Is that all it does?” she was looking straight in the face of the sketch, analysing it, sneering at it’s pretention. I slowly realise that I’d missed her intention and ashamedly explain it’s limited play value for a kid.
She lifts her head slowly and looks me straight in the eyes.
“The kid doesn’t care if it looks like the correct environment, if it doesn’t have a story you can forget it”.

Form exploration is great but at the end of the day can only achieve so much in making an emotional connection with someone. An object with no story (experience may be a better word) is a static artifact that may please the eye but can never go further to becoming part of our lives. Now don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean story is all ‘Once upon a time….’ and “Beginning, Middle and End’. Story is, like a mentioned, more akin to experience, just with the added bonus of a direction. Instead of looking at experience as an abstract effect, washing over us all at once, I prefer to think of a story, encompassing multiple experiences in a linear direction ending with an overall experience. The example I’ll give you is a film. As a teenager I watched Blade Runner and fell in love with an experience. Of course I fell in love with the film, but that’s not what I mean when I say experience. I fell in love with light, more specifically artificial light, light in the night if you will. A street lamp washing a dark alley way in yellow light, the glow of the neon street lights, a rainy night in the red light district of any city. This is an experience I fell in love with because of a series of linear experiences (a story of experiences?) from the film Blade Runner.

What the hell has this got to do with design, I hear you cry. Well for a start it was design that created these experiences and their effect on me in the first place. Take a look at Syd Mead’s work and more work on the Blade Runner film. The same example of story can be seen in design, just look at the iPod (and now the iPhone). It’s a story that you go through to get your music on and playing in your ears. A series of experiences from the moment you lay eyes on the that advert, read a product review, listen to a friends suggestion or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, adding features and loads of steps to using something isn’t going to increase story or experience. With a simple well constructed and considered story, and if that story plays out well (and yes you get good and bad stories, but I’ll leave that for a different post), you’ll come away with an emotional attachment to that product, service, public space, building or whatever.

Is anyone else imagining an iPod as the main character in a Pixar movie?

Recently I had the opportunity to visit a injection mould production factory located on the ourskirts of the up and coming “Whatever Hong Kong can do, we can do better” city, Shenzhen. Located just over the border into China’s Guangdong Province. A simple 30 minute train ride from Kowloon to the edge of Hong Kong and then a quick walk over the bridge from the heavily fortified Hong Kong side of the river (probably left over from British rule) to the less fortified but more built up Chinese side is all it takes to find yourself standing in a city that’s a stark contrast to Hong Kong. With emphasis on shopping, the city is a favourite among Hong Kong residents as a good place to shop for fake designer goods and apparently a hot spot for the art of Massage. The city is cheaper to live in and travel is cheap enough for people to commute, everyday, over the border to Hong Kong to work. In fact the side of immigration that lets you into China stays open until 11pm while immigration into Hong Kong only stays open till 7pm.

Once through immigration I was led by my colleague through a maze of lifts and corridors until we emerged out into a parking lot where a black Audi was waiting to take us to our destination. The driver dodged in and out of traffic, occasionally talking hastily on his mobile phone. Flanked by container trucks and taxi motorcycles we sped along the unmarked motorway, buildings getting lower and lower, wider and wider until we arrived in what looked like a warehouse/factory district, crisscrossed by dirt roads streaming with people. Small groups of people, each group dressed in a different outfit passed by with the driver using the horn like a musical instrument, trying to clear a path for the car. Soon we drove through a clean gate into the courtyard of medium sized building. My colleague signaled to me that it was time to get out. As I walked towards the entrance of the building I could see down the side of the building a small crane lifting huge steel die cast moulds into the back of a humble Ford pick up truck, the weight of each mould making the back of the truck sag until it more accurately resembled a ‘pimped out’ low rider.

We were led inside where we first obliged to attend a meeting where we would discuss the accuracy of the first mould compared to the approved model, made by a model maker. Read my post, Getting stuff done in China, for an accurate description of what it’s like to sit through such a meeting. Accuracy is paramount, cost is always on the brain. After the ‘brief’ meeting we were escorted on a tour of the factory where I was immediately shown a room full of very busy model makers. I stared at admiration through the glass, mesmerized by their speed. My escort, who was one of the heads of engineering at Mattel, leaned over, “All these guys need is a drawing of the product and a few dimensions and in a week you’ll have a fully working model”. Needless to say it was hard for me to continue walking, but soon we were heading downstairs to the first floor where I was greeted warmly by the familiar sound of heavy machines working at speeds exceeding maximum capacity and the sweet smell of coolant. Walking through the milling machines and spark erosion machines we stopped a young woman, probably not much older than myself, spark eroding a cavity for a new injection mould, having to do it bit by bit so as to not overheat the mould. “We could easily do this by just dunking the whole mould in coolant and putting it on auto, but it’s cheaper for us to hire someone to stand here and do it for us. The workmanship and chance of error is still lower”. I found this incredible, it’s still cheaper to employ someone to do a job that automated machines could do in a shorter time frame. “How long does she work?” I asked trying to evert my eyes from the sparks of the erosion. “Long” came back the answer. I left it at that.

We walked down to the ground floor where I was led into a room filled with computers, each one occupied with a head staring at a screen. “They find it a big honour to be asked to work on these computers” said my guide as he greeted two people who he obviously knew. A screen caught my eye, filled with a particularly complicated shape, it’s author tending a CAM machine on the other side of the glass. My guide saw me looking at the screen, “We could take these computers away from them at any time and they could still make that by hand by the end of the day” I took that as a slight exaggeration, it was getting obvious that he was enjoying impressing me. Still, walking around and observing everything going on, I couldn’t help but believe him. Here, right in front of my eyes, was a good example of why we should hope China never gets greedy.

Photography by: Micheal Wolf (first), Ed Burtynsky (second, third)

“Can you carry this? I want to take you with me to a meeting with one of our vendors” she said as she handed me the large, rough working model of a current design idea. Still clutching the work I thought I was going to be presenting my boss for final approval I realized this was going to be something totally different. “We’re going through this project with our vendors and changing it quite substantially because of cost” Sounds about normal, makes sense. I walked into the small meeting room, greeted by two Chinese gentlemen looking fresh over the border but still all smiles and enthusiasm. Almost immediately the conversation exploded into Cantonese and moved at what seemed like military precision and accuracy. The guy in the blue shirt does all the talking, the other one just sits and listens intently. At one point I thought he was an intern too, but then I wondered if he wasn’t the boss, overseeing the meeting, choosing the right moment to interrupt and impart a piece of wisdom on my already strained ears. From the tone of their voices and the various pointing and playing with the prototype it was possible to follow the general topic of each section, but obviously details and specifics where utterly lost.

Before long, or what seemed like short, we had finished with the model I brought in and moved on the prototype they had brought with them, the first production model from the initial tooling, and we were thrown right into the details, comparing the original model from the model maker with the production model, scrutinizing every detail. When I say we I mean my boss obviously, I didn’t know what she was looking for or at until she quietly told me while inspecting the bottom of a tiny detachable panel. Decisions were made, problems were marked, materials were discussed. Something that summed up the relationship between the designer and manufacturer brilliantly for me was when a tiny detail piece was incorrectly molded. Instead of the whole part coming off from the prototype, only the small top half of it did. An easy mistake to make if you look at the piece in context as to what it represents in terms of a toy, but a problem when it comes to safety. The area was identified as a choking hazard and marked for retooling. Getting everyone to understand what’s going on psychologically and physically with a toy is something that happens over an evolving relationship built up through excellent contact. Done, hands shaken, greetings made, see you in three days and before I knew it I was back to the office, awkward model and incorrect sketch work in hand. This is how you get stuff done in China, you just do it.