Creeper Studio (later referred to as "Creeper"): Tsinghua School of Architecture has been circulating on the legend of the brother - decathlon.
RUAN Hao(later referred to as "Ruan"): This is not true, is to play basketball, soccer, also do a lot of student work, when the college student council president, and later the school council as vice president, so although I have very good grades, but not in the typical sense of a good student, just more know how to allocate time.
Crawl: We know that you spent a long time in Tsinghua and had dealings with many teachers, as well as being a master's student of Mr. Shan Jun. Looking at it now, how did this experience at Tsinghua School of Architecture influence your design?
Nguyen: My understanding of the influence that the Academy has given me goes beyond design itself. In terms of starting my own business, design is really just one aspect, and there are many derivations of it. Like I just mentioned Mr. Shan Jun, he's a very real person - dealing with real people, you're most efficient when you're learning something, it must be like that, you don't need to filter anymore. I think each teacher had their own characteristics, and they all helped me a lot. At that time, Mr. Shan provided me with a space that was very hard to imagine. At that time, Mr. Shan Jun, Dean Zhu Wenyi, and now Dean Zhuang Weimin, were all very good to our group of young people. I was the first in the history of the college to go to the U.S. for an internship, and at that time I took an offer to Dean Zhu for approval. Later, I went to Harvard as a visiting scholar for two years during my graduate studies. Every teacher at Tsinghua has one thing in particular, that is, they are willing to let us young people have the opportunity to express ourselves. For example, Ms. Wang Lifang was the chairman of our graduate thesis committee. Once I went to her house to discuss a thesis with her, and she told me: "You are not suitable to be a designer, you should go into politics or business." She thought that would give me more possibilities. I was half listening to her, so now we are doing design not just a simple design, there are a lot of things behind it. Then she told me something. She said, "Do you know why there are so many students with excellent qualifications who start out from a very high base but in the end they don't reach the heights they should have reached? She thought that those elite or outstanding people were basically faced with a situation: they had a lot of possibilities to choose from, but they did not have the means to cut themselves off, so they could not stick to one path. I found this very reasonable. At that time, I had already graduated and left Tsinghua, so if you cut off a lot of back roads, you will find that what is left in the end will basically converge on one point, and this point is actually similar no matter what kind of road you take, so I think what she said is very reasonable. These teachers at Tsinghua have had a great influence on me, including Mr. Zhang Yue and Mr. Li Xiaodong.
Crawl: Apart from the time you studied at Tsinghua, you also worked as an assistant for Prof. Cohen and Wang Shu. Which of them do you think had the most profound influence on you during your study or career?
Ruan: The teachers I just spoke about were very far-reaching, and Scott Cohen was also a big influence on me, and I was very connected to him. When I went to see him, I actually went to see Bowie, who is a big brother. Bowie said Scott was doing a project in China, so I knocked on the door and rushed in, saying I know you are doing a project in China, I can help you, and I don't need money. Scott Cohen taught me a lot of things, and he taught me a few things: the first one is what perfection is. The second thing he taught me was that anxiety is a good thing. There are very few people who are as optimistic about anxiety as I am. Why am I like that? Because I was anxious a lot back then, but in the end things came out fine. I was willing to think in the opposite direction, and I thought if I didn't have anxiety, I might not be able to do this thing. Mr. Wang Shu also had a great influence on me. Although Mr. Wang Shu's design philosophy is not the same as other teachers, there is a lot of common ground in their perception of space. The impression that Mr. Wang Shu gave me is hard to explain in the way that I described Scott Cohen just now, because I teach in the School of Architecture of China Academy of Art, where he is the leader, so I can't jump out to describe accurately when I am close to him. In fact, when you have contact with various people, you will feel that many things are interconnected. That's why I say it's more important that you see the light slowly rising in front of you in what direction and don't go in the opposite direction. Other than that, what you need to do is to be very open-minded to all kinds of people and all kinds of new technologies. Don't get hung up on things like "I'm 25 years old, what kind of style do I like, what kind of stuff do I want to do", there will be a lot of possibilities in the future.
Crawl: just don't find your future direction all at once.
Ruan: Don't find it all at once, the sooner you find it, the more problematic it is. This thing is very naturally formed, it's what you want to go after for the rest of your life, but in my opinion I haven't fully comprehended that point yet. We are slowly narrowing the scope of this point, while slowly expanding the influence, I believe that one day you will also reach such a node. Nowadays, there are many young people who like to jump around, which is good, but whenever you find a platform where you can show your ability and talent, make sure to stick to it. You will find that most of the problems you encounter in your work come from yourself, not from the environment.
Crawler: In March 2016, you were named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs.
Nguyen: I really don't think we're a traditional industry. Design is a process and a way to realize a goal. For example, the iphone is very experiential, and its purpose is not just to make a good design professionally, but there are a lot of humanized things in it. Steve Jobs put it very simply, he felt that the relationship between all electronic products and human beings was lacking in emotion. Around 2000, we couldn't have any emotional interaction with our cell phones at that time. The realization and iteration of technology is very fast, but when you stand in the spotlight you will find more humanistic things to pay attention to: what is human emotion? How to evoke human emotions? And then go to do the design, the ultimate realization of the humanities and science and technology focus, to evoke people's emotions. Instead of making a good product, design is a way to realize something. So I prefer to call myself a designer rather than an architect. Being called an architect carries a lot of social and historical responsibility, because this profession has been around for a long time. On the other hand, design is a product of the 20th century, so it's not as heavy and you feel more relaxed. When we started Catable, we didn't know what furniture design was, and then we got through it, and now we're even getting through game design. I think what Forbes values most is whether we can change the definition of design in our own way. I remember someone said there are two types of designers: the first type is the secular designer, that is, he will follow what's good in this market. Tracking may not be wrong, but you can't be the best. The second type of designer is the designer you should not learn from, the narcissistic designer, the very narcissistic designer. The narcissistic designer, the designer who is in a small circle, who only admires each other, who comments on each other, who exhibits each other, who brags about each other. And you have to make yourself the third kind of designer, you have to believe that the power of innovation is to create more user needs. And this kind of user needs will become very beautiful and interesting. For example, in the "Tiantai No.2 Primary School" project we did, I never thought about how influential we needed to make it, but we just thought about one thing - children need to run. Kids are users, and they are not happy if they don't run!
Crawl: It actually evokes emotions.
Ruan: The happiest moment for me is not when I got a reputation or recognition from a master, but two moments that I remember most, one is when the "Tiantai No. 2 Primary School" was built and put into use and children were moving around on the rooftop track and screaming happily; and the other is when Catablewas exhibited at Milan Design Week and a father was squatting down next to the children and said, "Look at this table where the cat can get into. A father squatted next to the child and said, "Look at this table where the cat can get into." The child then understood and put his hand in to play. These moments are profound to me! Your gaze has to break out of established circles in order to go step by step profoundly and make yourself more open.
Crawl: So the acquisition is an experience, an experience?
Nguyen: We want to make the design have a longer-term and more influential value, and this value can change the society. If I had to define it, it would be to change people's lives in the city. Because I still like cities, I grew up in cities. I have feelings for the countryside, but they are hazy feelings, after all, I have not lived there.
Crawl: We have seen some of your interviews before, and you have talked about being the most powerful innovator in China's cities, so most of your projects are located in some of the more central areas of the city. If you want to be the most powerful innovator in China's cities, what do you think are the issues that need to be innovated in China's cities?
Ruan: I think the biggest problem is that many of our cities are not yet able to bring people happiness. Sensually, we live a two-point life every day, and rarely have a feeling that when you turn a corner, you suddenly feel very interesting and want to go in and have a look, it's fun.
Crawl: I used to think it was always about the individual, not just the city.
Ruan: There's no way to look at it in isolation. What he ends up with is the phenomenon that cities don't bring us joy. What we can do is to start from our own expertise, with very small changes, to surprise people. Maybe I can't change the city, but I hope I can change some people's lives, this is doable.
Crawl: I'm curious if you've been to any city who fits your description of a city with surprises in mind.
Nguyen: A lot of them actually, New York, Berlin, etc. I've always had a point of view, I don't think a city should be neat and very orderly, a city with order is a fake face, it's a fake face that you can't even move after you've put on makeup. The truest cities have a clash of cultures, something brought about by the clash of time and space. Most cities have different kinds of misfortunes, and these misfortunes must be known, and in fact they can be said not to be misfortunes, and after looking at these things positively, they can be seen as opportunities.
Crawl: Do you think that as architects in the city we should create these conflicts or mitigate them? Because our education is all about us creating order.
Ruan: For me, I always think it's enough for people who are inside a house to make the people who use it feel happy. Instead of having a big ideal, it's better to have some small ideal and then make it come true. Because in my opinion, small ideals are very big. Now the greatest power is not the big power itself, but the gathering of countless small powers. All the disruptions, all the revolutions, the vast majority of the successes - are bottom-up. Of course we are not talking about a revolution in political system reform, a revolution in general terms. We do things the same way, we probably don't try to create conflict or resolve conflict, I just think it's important to make this person a little bit happier, and maybe there are new modalities to do that, so that's fine.
Crawl: You just mentioned the design concept based on real human emotions and the bottom-up innovation model. I think you have also put a lot of thought into the corporate culture of LYCS Architecture, how do you combine this design concept with the corporate management model?
Ruan: Design is a process, a bridge. I now realize that all design is connected. Architecture, furniture, and even designing a game are all connected. We say that Tsinghua cultivates people's designers, but there are also many capital designers in the market. I think they should become the designers of users. The user is not the customer, the user is the mass audience, you have to understand the user's behavior, to know what he wants the most smooth and closest to his emotions of those spaces is what, so we are doing is such a design. I often talk with people in the company, the atmosphere of our company is not like a design company, more like an Internet company. And everything we do is bottom-up, just like our design and innovation logic. I think a large part of our design is not my idea, but it is a system. How complex is the organization of this system - so complex that you have no way to trace the root of who came up with it. Just like a soccer team, it may change coaches, the stars will change, but it must have its own culture, its own soccer literacy, its own tactical system in place, its own history and cultural lineage.
Crawl: This feels very different from companies in the traditional construction industry.
Ruan: I now find a particularly special phenomenon. There are two people who left the company and went out to start their own business. They both said something very strange, they said, if they leave and then go to any design company, they might as well stay here. Either go start a business or work in another industry. This shows that actually this culture of ours is still a very friendly culture for everyone. In the company, everyone works hard, but with a relaxed mindset.
Crawl: What experience do you think you have in designing business operations?
Ruan: I'm a very direct person. For example, who did a very bullish thing, I think it is very bullish; who did a very stupid thing, in the handling of this matter, he is very unintelligent well. I never say what is right and wrong, this is a very young state, the best point is that the efficiency is very high, the cost of communication is very low. The cost of communication is actually an important part of any mechanism that can work well. Our corporate culture is also naturally formed, we will have sharing sessions, for example, late people are responsible for sharing.
Crawl: What do you share, reasons for being late? (laughs)
Nguyen: Share the fun stuff you design. It doesn't matter if you're late, it's kind of nice to bring more information to the table. We have a lot of fun stuff. For example, what if we have people who make stupid mistakes a lot of times, girls do squats, boys do push-ups, it's good exercise; or today we're going to build an A380 in rhino for an hour, we're going to put on some really upbeat music, and everyone's going to participate. You have to build it accurately, and I'm not going to give you a model or a picture beforehand, we're just going to tell you that we're going to build an A380, and from this moment on, whether you're good at searching for information or not, whether you're good at modeling or not, it's all going to be exposed in this one hour. We also have elevation levels, good people sit in good chairs, we're very good at that.
Crawl: Do you do the same with your own students?
Ruan: It's not really the same with students, I think what I want to teach them is a design thinking. The so-called design thinking is something that can accompany you in school, including out of school. You should know that one quarter of the top 100 technology companies in the U.S. are founded by designers: pinterest, airbnb, etc. Why? Because design thinking is a user-oriented thinking, and it is very keen. I will give students the example of designing a house and developing an Internet product, their design thinking and logic is very similar. Then they would understand that design thinking can do a lot of things, and that's where it's very useful.
Crawl: This is the equivalent of training the student's to bring design thinking to examine what's around them to develop a perspective.
RW: Yeah, it's very important. So with students it might be one way, but not in the company.
Crawl; what is your general role in the company?
Nguyen: Motivate, encourage people, or argue, and I keep perennially will delve into drawing myself, and not sketching, but really doing design, drawing.
Crawl: Originally, I thought the creators of the firm were all about socializing.
Nguyen: I saw a particularly good quote the other day, so I left it behind. I rarely read chicken soup for the soul - do not go chasing a horse, use the time spent chasing horses to plant grass, and when the spring flowers bloom there will be a group of stallions for you to choose from. Do not go to deliberately befriend a person, with no friends for the time being time to enhance their own ability, when the time is ripe there will be a large number of friends to go with you. Friends made out of favors are temporary, friends attracted by personality are long-lasting, so enriching yourself is more powerful than pleasing others. I know those good friends like me, we in no way deliberately to maintain some relationships. The charisma of personality must be a personality with many flaws. You can say that this person is really naive, really funny, really stupid, but you will find that these people are very persistent. This is one of our strengths, we are young and people are willing to accept young people more and more. Now we are in an era where everyone wants to disrupt and reshuffle, you have to sincerely think about your users, not customers but users. Do not abandon the times, it is more important for us to embrace the times.
Crawl: Do you have any particular struggles in this process?
Ruan: Rarely, quite naturally, I think it has a lot to do with the times. After I came back to China, the people I met were not designers, but entrepreneurs. I have a lot of good friends, and after I met them, I talked about fun things. These entrepreneurs are all like-minded people when they get together. This kind of like-mindedness does not mean that they share the same design style as you, or that they like the same designers as you. Rather, we all feel that there are still many problems in this city and what I can do to make it better. That to me is a great love and a real common goal. Although we are all in our own fields or roles, the process of doing this is a very loving process, a very joyful process. There is a lot of pain in it, but we never feel it.
Fat: What are your long-term goals now?
Nguyen: I think this information age now is no longer the age of Newtonian mechanics, but the age of quantum mechanics, the so-called age of quantum mechanics, that is, with a lot of unmeasured uncertainty. So what's the benefit of uncertainty? Your team with your buddies, they have their own genes, and this genes will allow you to reach this other side, as to which point it reaches, I think as long as it reaches is success. That's what I think the most important goal is, it should be a relatively hazy goal or a relatively macroscopic goal, not a very concrete goal. What's important to me is that the design should capture the long-term value. How for us to keep ourselves from getting lost is that we know where we're steering this ship. But when we come across different opportunities we can make a U-turn, it doesn't matter, I just don't look back, I'm still going in that direction, and that's what this era is all about. Because the information and opportunities in this era are so diverse, you can have so many different possibilities. This goes back to what Ms. Wang Lifang told me, that you have to persevere, and perseverance doesn't mean that you have to be very "axial" in perseverance, but that you have to keep going in that direction.
Crawl: It feels like gradually you can relate what you said before to what you're saying now.
Ruan: My thinking is like this. When I was at Tsinghua, my thinking was relatively point-like; after I went to princeton I could connect it into a circle. Now my thinking pattern is a net, and what I can gradually do now is that I can pick a few points in it at random and make a ring between them. This ring is no longer a separate ring, but can grab many different points and let them connect with each other. There are many different possibilities from a business model perspective or other more perspectives, and it is a process of making connections. Princeton is the repository of ideas for American architecture, and he shows you how to think about it and how to make your own sense of it.
Crawl: Princeton brings you more theoretical things, do you think our architecture students still need to study the theoretical brief of architecture?
Ruan: I read a lot of books during my two years at Princeton, some of which were wonderful and some of which were drowsy. I would read more sociology and philosophy books, while architecture books are actually basically not read because I think it is something that is presented at the end, not a root cause. You need to build a system, not pure theory, but to build your own system. For example, you think you have designed a very bullish cell phone, but you can't tell where it is good; or you have designed a particularly bad cell phone, but its advocates all think it is good, compared to the two, the latter is more bullish.
Crawl: In fact, I discussed this point of view with my brother Li Jiutai some time ago, and he is also a college doing entrepreneurship particularly well. He mentioned that the design only needs to find the right point, other places to find the best in the market now to go to Tsinghua architecture on the line, to do that point to the extreme and then find its most reasonable user, I was also quite shocked, and your idea is very close.
Ruan: It's right to design a single point of breakthrough. Because we are now standing on the shoulders of others, what you have to do is to break through a certain point and do the best. I think he is not talking about copying in a derogatory sense, he is talking about copying as a process of standing on the shoulders of giants to learn from existing experience, I agree. The so-called progressive innovation is the kind you just mentioned, just like you want to chisel a hole, definitely a hammer chisel a little deeper, the next hammer chisel a little deeper, keep going down, this is the progressive. There is also a technical innovation, a pile driver, "bam" to the bottom of the smash. These two are completely different, incremental innovation can lead to technical innovation.
Crawl: There are many new technologies emerging, including 3d printing, which we all thought could bring about a change in the construction industry; and augmented reality some time ago. Are there any technologies that you are optimistic about that can bring about an inflection point in the construction industry?
Ruan: The technology in the construction industry is presented relatively late. By the time a technology can be used for people to stay in the house every day, the technology has to be very mature. So what are the latest technologies presented in most places? It is easier to break through in the medical and military fields. But it can be completely transformed into architecture, like Frank Gehry do things, are very test materials. You just talked about 3d printing technology, I always have a theory, this theory is called the underwear theory. All these technologies, it's like you wear a piece of underwear, you can wear it, but don't always take it off for people to see. It should make you feel more comfortable, make you feel warm, have its functionality. For example, " Catable", Catableis 3d printed out. Or the model of Catableis 3d printed, we think that is the drawing, take a real 2d drawing to the carpenter to do, he can't do it. What is the "drawing", 3d printed model is, that is, in the end you will find the novelty of the new technology recede, you can not see the traces of 3d printing in the, you will not feel that this thing is 3d printed out. This is the technology can bring you a realization of the process, which is why I think the technology is more critical.
Crawl: Very interesting theory. Finally, I would like to ask you, looking back now, what are your thoughts on student entrepreneurship, especially for students with architecture backgrounds, and universal entrepreneurship?
Ruan: Entrepreneurship must be self-breaking, full commitment, if not full commitment there is no way to burst out more passion. After coming back from abroad, I was lucky enough to be selected for the Thousand Talents Program. I know that after 100 years or 200 years, I will come back to see that this will be a very big thing, before going out to such a large number of people, and invest especially large human and material resources to go out and bring back new things from abroad, just like a kind of thinking. The return of many people certainly brings a lot of opportunities and possibilities, you (visitors) are quite happy. The more open you are in this era, the more calm people are, the more successful they can be, and the easier it is to realize their self-worth, just like a whirlpool, the point in the center of the storm is the most immobile. Many people are anxious, the center of the storm is never anxious, he will certainly be very calm. Must let themselves not be surprised by the world, but also to have a corresponding sense of crisis. This industry is relatively more traditional, but I have not introduced capital, a lot of capital has approached me, we did not introduce, will not be laid out so quickly, the growth in this area will be relatively stable. Many people want to invest, I said I do not want money. Why so many enterprises fall down every year, after the introduction of capital your growth rate expands ten times, at the same time your contradiction also grows ten times, if you do not think clearly, blindly introduce capital then the enterprise will be like this. In the design industry, capital is a tool, and frankly speaking, it is a tool for turbocharging, if the direction is not well grasped, it will not work. Your generation will be more thoughtful, but will be a little more afraid, there will be more loneliness, information transparency is this reason. I know that for our future era, it is important to filter out redundant information.
