We look to China as a totalitarian police-state undergoing hyper-capitalism.

We know that China’s internet is filtered by the Great Firewall of China, an intricate, secretive and semi-effective internet censorship system.

As a guest-professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, I was offered VIP overseas access on the campus network, which offered, maybe, 80% of the web — everything but Wikipedia, BBC, and who knows what else. Without this extremely special login, however, the web was a stark list of accessible domain names: google.com.cn, microsoft.com.cn, yahoo.com.cn, the university intranet, and a set of Chinese web properties that require Mandarin literacy to discuss here.

I was advised that every site, email and instant message that I exchanged while on the campus network was being logged, databased, and perhaps, even monitored by a human resource, in real-time. In China, as a visitor, you are always impressed by a society the size of ours, quadrupled. A workforce of unimaginable quantity is assigned to each and every micro-task that occupies the Middle Kingdom, Earth’s most ancient society.¹ It is not unimaginable that a team of internet surveillance specialists could have been assigned to monitor my activities, especially since I was an American professor invited to teach design for the web on state turf. Certainly, I would be in a position to discuss controversial topics in front of impressionable minds, movements of web-based democracy. In jargon, we call it Web 2.0, user-generated content, crowd-sourcing, social networks. These tendencies may reflect American group dynamics, the result of open, free expressions. In other ways, web communities resonate with China’s state-centric qualities, group over individual, country over citizen, a bastion of anonymous, de-humanized, technocratic interactions. Really, it’s the hyper-individualism of web democracy that characterizes what’s new and exciting about the net, today. Possessive pronouns and terms of individuality exclaim the brands of blazing net properties. MySpace. YouTube. Facebook.

Not only do Tsinghua students experience a Great Firewall internet, they don’t even benefit from networked classroom computers. Viruses are blamed as the reason, but you won’t even find Ethernet cables connecting PCs in campus classrooms and laboratories. Naturally, it was a challenge to check my email, let alone teach a course in web design. I’ve already written more generally about this teaching exchange on these pages. My point here is that I can confirm from personal experience, the Great Firewall of China is omnipresent, a truth, not an an exaggeration.

We would never imagine that our own internet at home, in the US, was limited² or monitored by our central government. We readily accept that it is monitored and data-mined for profit by the corporations that run these services. But we cherish a different sort of firewall, a Great Firewall of America, a constitutional separation between commerce and government when it comes to surveillance of citizens. In the US, it’s a national ambition to profit from consumer surveillance,³ but it’s a crime for the government to perform unauthorized surveillance of citizens.⁴ Or is it?

Total Information Awareness is the supposed internal name for the Bush Administration’s NSA data-mining operation on the American open internet. We learn today of Attorneys General, past and present, and their secretive exchanges over hospital beds, ordered by the highest powers, to quash concerns of its legality and active use. Surprisingly, Congress scrambles to rewrite laws to make these crimes legal. According to the PBS Frontline “Spying on the Homefront” special reports, we are only beginning to discover how the Great Firewall of America, that sacred separation between Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue is secretly breached. In a confusing twist of metaphor, if you believe Mark Klein’s account of the NSA ‘splitter rooms’ at AT&T backbone facilities where the aortas of the internet in major cities are essentially tapped with NSA equipment, Big Brother channels our collective electronic thoughts.

We can only assume that data-mining endeavors of unimaginable scale are taking place on these servers and switches, all paid for by fellow citizens. We can only assume that AT&T and other telecom executives crumbled or gladly accepted the NSA’s requests to install these electronic surveillance centers and install the Great Firewall of America 2.0, the core tool of TIA. Indeed, we can only assume that since installation, every web site, visitor history, email, IM, and file transferred has been logged and data-mined by the NSA. We can only assume that algorithms beyond the scope and scale of Google’s crawlers are trawling and flagging content and IP addresses. The exact identities of each consumer/citizen is obtainable through a court-order to the appropriate ISP. Real-time dossiers are being compiled by software agents, associating net, consumer and governmental identities.

We are told that this is for fighting terrorism, it is patriotic to believe that the government could never erroneously apply justice, that data mining software connects the dots perfectly, and that it is our civic duty to forsake civil rights in the name of security.

We may be able to visit any site we want, post any language or image we desire, and communicate in any manner we see fit, as Americans. Our Chinese counterparts, however, may need to circumvent serious oppressions in order to enjoy similarly unfettered electronic freedoms. Indeed, incarceration and execution remain ever-present risks of destabilization and disruption to social order through expressions of taboo topics.⁵ But we both share in the inevitable shame in knowing that our governments employ the highest of technologies to apply Panoptic surveillance on its citizens. At least in China, you’re easily reminded that this is true. In the US, we are fooled into thinking this is false. The US was a nation designed to be great through its checks and balances. Do we need regimes like China’s to remind us of what we will become if we recklessly abandon our core national values?

So in stating all of this, why would I “feed the dragon” and offer my criticisms here, where the AT&T NSA TIA servers might spider, filter, identify, sort, tag, cross-reference, and save for later, just in case any red flags come up? Red Flags. Imagine that.⁶

Footnotes

1. A direct translation of 中国 (zhong guo), the name for China, in Chinese, is “middle kingdom.” Indeed, the language and consistent culture of China has lasted longer than any other civilization, thousands of recorded years.
2. Although, see Net Neutrality
3. See Google, ChoicePoint, the credit companies, bureaus and banks, retailers, market researchers, and so forth. Even this website uses Google agent technologies to analyze the content of this page to serve advertising and provide the owner with in-depth, but anonymous, site usage and tracking information.
4. See FISA.
5. The Three Ts: Taiwan, Tian’anmen, and Tibet are well known taboo topics. In addition, Democracy, Falun Gong and the resilient cult of Mao remain profoundly censored topics in China.
6. If you’re a federal employee reading this, I just wanted to say “Hi.” Otherwise, you’re a computer program and you’ve probably already red-flagged this data.

As a professor of media design at Parsons The New School for Design, I was invited on Chinese grant funds to teach a month-long intensive design workshop at the Art and Design Academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing as part of China’s recent national initiative to embrace Western modes of thinking and educational approaches. Tsinghua is one of China’s most prestigious and perhaps well-funded institutions, often compared to MIT as a bastion of brainy, competitive, but brilliant national minds. Judging by the newly opened art academy building designed by American architectural firm, 70 million RMB (US$ 9.3 million) is a small price to pay for a world-class design education facility. Indeed, compared to our cramped quarters at Parsons, somewhat scattered throughout real-estate challenged Greenwich Village, I was afflicted with space lust as I wandered, upon arrival, through a dizzying maze of studios, workspaces, classrooms, offices, galleries, art supply and book stores. The academy even sports a Starbucks-style coffee shop where baristas pull lattes for a fraction of the cost of our all-too-familiar daily grandé. The more I discovered about the Tsinghua Art and Design academy, the more I appreciated how the university, and by-proxy, the Chinese government, invests heavily in the importance of a Westernized (or maybe Globalized) higher learning design education. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder if America’s investment in our own creative capital could measure up. The last time I checked back home, primary and secondary art education was being eviscerated in favor of test prep education, art college enrollments were flat and the national mood was generally complacent and decadent. Clearly, being here, it is understood that China’s globalizing ambitions imagine itself someday becoming the world’s creative agency, and not just its factory.

This idea is underscored when considering the process of designing many of the identity systems for China’s current national obsession: preparing for the 2008 Olympiad, as it extends its unique culture, language and hospitality to the rest of the world. Typically in the West, design products, such as a visual identity system, are outsourced to a private design agency, through an arduous and competitive design bid process. Rather than become the mother client for its homegrown but nascent design firm industry, China tapped its own universities, in keeping with its deeply historical respect for scholars. Instead of farming out the work to lowest bidding, but hottest design and branding firm, the Beijing Olympic Committee ‘hired’ its own university design professors to create for the Olympics 2008. In particular, the official mascots of Beijing 2008 were conceived and born in these shiny new halls of the Art and Design Academy under the direction of Professor Wu, a high-ranking member of the Party. Although, somewhat insipidly and overly cute by Western standards, the set of five mascots cleverly epitomize cultural memes of China, symbolize aspects of the Olympic spirit, the elements of nature, and even form a language pun in Mandarin, when their names are properly sequenced. They are unmistakably an inside job. Until the court of public opinion meets next summer along with merchandising sales and media ratings, the verdict is out on Fuwa, the Five Friendlies.
During my workshop with a group of 23 second-year Tsinghua Art Academy undergraduates, I easily encountered their reputation to be hard working, competitive, and brilliant. However, I also confirmed some of the stereotypes originating from preconceived notions about Chinese students. These students lacked some of the core conceptual capabilities notable in their Parsons counterparts, especially the ability to think critically and innovate rather than absorb and merely emulate. They also seemed to suffer from an obsession with cute character culture, an influential import from neighbors Japan and Korea.

I knew that I was brought here to broaden their perspectives, and export not only my practical experience working in the New York City interactive design industry, but also to engender an appreciation for original thinking, true creativity, and help them discover more sophisticated design frameworks that extend beyond character artwork. At the same time, I knew that it would be senseless to attempt re-education in my own Maoist ‘Cute Cultural Revolution’ and repress their love for all that is cuddly in favor of an American style hyper-pragmatism as I critiqued their design forms and motifs. Instead, I would need to devise a means to hybridize the decidedly modern but Eastern compulsion to express profound concepts through a cartoon character, with our decidedly post-modern Western fixation with design models that valorize a purity of form in a luxuriously ironic package. Perhaps, the Beijing Olympics offered the ideal opportunity to combine these two perspectives as subject matter for a design project well suited to nurture the advancement of both my Tsinghua students and my own at Parsons. My statistically insignificant dent in the trade deficit with China during this month of export — the precious resource of American ingenuity — would need to return another kind of investment. This exchange had to reinforce my understanding of what needed to be imported back to Parsons in hope of contributing towards preserving, if not reinvigorating, our own national endeavor to lead the world in idea creation.

There’s a giant generation of Chinese artists and designers starting to emerge into the global creative economy. Former Red Guards and victims of the Cultural Revolution, alike, raised these young minds. They possess a passion to succeed where their parents did not, perhaps could not. The US must acknowledge this newly emerging Red Studio in the anticipation of a marketplace of ideas and economies that will only become more intertwined with Chinese-American interests and competition. After the closing ceremonies of Beijing 2008 conclude, and the torch extinguishes, incalculable tons of unpurchased Five Friendlies Olympic junk will probably be land-filled or ‘donated’ to Africa. It may seem a colossal waste of resources on cuteness, but China’s Red Studio will enjoy having penned history’s greatest Olympic mascot, and perhaps most merchandised state sponsored character design.

See Also

Project: Olympic Mobile Visitors Guide ↑

The Origins of Interactive Media.

交互式多媒体的起源

A brief examination of two influential American scientists who pioneered the idea of interactive information systems and graphics. Dr. Vannevar Bush, The Memex↑ and Dr. Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad↑. Their research accomplishments resonate through every aspect of modern computing. A lecture given on Thursday, June 21, 2007, 13:30, Room B413 at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University.Sponsored by Information Art & Design in collaboration with Communication Design & Technology, Parsons The New School for Design.

Lecture downloads available below.

Lecture Images

Lecture Downloads

» Download Lecture PDF↓ (6.5 MB)

» Download Lecture PowerPoint with QuickTime video ZIP ↓ (135 MB)

» Download Lecture Poster PDF ↓ (780 KB)

» View Lecture SWF in a Popup Flash Player → (20 MB)

See Also

• Memex, The Dawn of Informatics↑
• Sketchpad, The World’s First↑

A collaboration between the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, Beijing and Communication Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design

Objective

Develop a design prototype to present to the Art and Design Academy and BOCOG proposing an interactive Mobile Visitors Guide for the 2008 Beijing Olympiad. Comprising of a desktop web product and a downloadable mobile media component, the Mobile Visitors Guide will offer travelers to Beijing helpful information about Olympic events, venues, the visual identity system, transportation, language assistance, and the unique and vibrant culture of China. In particular, the mobile component offers visitors a useful electronic assistant to navigate the city and manage culture shock and language barriers.

Goals

The workshop students (RedStudio) will present prototypes and design documents suggesting and demonstrating how this product might be further defined and developed. The short timeframe (three weeks) will not allow the creation of a fully functional product, but we hope that it inspires further study and development.

Solution

Adobe Flash technology offers the best platform to rapidly design and prototype the Beijing Olympics Mobile Visitors Guide. Using Flash Player to deploy the desktop web feature prototype and Flash Lite to deploy the mobile media prototype on Nokia Series 60 handsets, the students will easily integrate design and content across delivery mechanisms for a unified and integrated user experience.

Mobile Media Enabling World Class Hospitality

Everyone knows that the Chinese are famous for great hospitality, and preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics is no exception. However, the rapid pace of development and the intricacy of the Chinese language and culture creates
barriers for visitors to enjoy their experience in Beijing. Now that most people carry a mobile phone or laptop when they travel, the Mobile Visitors Guide solves common problems for foreigners to help them communicate across languages, discover the delights of the city, manage its challenges, and more easily find their way around.

An Essential Companion

In the New China, driven by high technology and media innovations, visitors to the Olympics Beijing 2008 should enjoy digital services to help them make the most of their time here, whether on their laptop or mobile phone. Consider these modules:

• Find your way. Visually link event schedules to venue locations and find your way by subway, taxi, bicycle or walking.
• Keep score. Follow sports events by medal counts, in real-time, as winners are announced.
• Communicate. Blaze through the language barrier with common translations for useful phrases and situations on your mobile. Get pinyin transliterations, hanzi characters and audio pronunciations. Point your way out of a tricky situation using Chinese characters on your mobile’s screen. Hand over your mobile and let the Beijinger listen to your needs.
• Participate in China’s Cultural Olympics at the National Art Museum of China and use a mobile phone in an experimental large-scale group interaction within the gallery spaces.
• Explore and discover the Old Beijing and take a guided tour through the famous hutongs, an intricate maze of traditional culture and cuisine.
• Meet the Five Friendlies. The Fuwa have a great life story and getting acquainted with them will help you better enjoy their intricate symbolism which elegantly evokes the many layers of Chinese language and culture, not to mention the universal spirit of the Olympics.

Conclusion

This project prototype was presented to the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University on June 20, 2007. Relevant industry critics from Nokia and Microsoft R&D laboratories in Beijing attended the presentation.

Presentation Photos

See also

Red Studio: Teaching Design at Tsinghua↑