One of Mao Zedong’s most famous aphorisms is that “revolution is not a dinner party.” And yet, in the years I’ve lived in China, I’ve attended a few dinner parties that cast doubt on that assertion.
One of them was just last night at a Japanese restaurant atop The Edition, Ian Schrager’s achingly glam new hotel on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, where Fortune had assembled nearly 70 stars from China’s design scene. The occasion for the gathering was to help set the agenda for Fortune’s second Brainstorm Design conference, to be held in Singapore next March.
We invited guests from a broad spectrum of design backgrounds, including industrial design, user experience, retail, hospitality, and education. That diversity notwithstanding, a common theme emerged: China, the world’s second largest economy, is in the throes of a design revolution, and it is one that could shake the world.
In China’s tech scene, designers don’t yet enjoy a seat at the top table the way they do in Silicon Valley. But Shanying Leung, the director for design and user experience at Alibaba Group mobile payment affiliate Ant Financial, told Fortune’s dinner guests that’s changing fast. Leung has seen this first hand. When Leung signed on with Ant Financial in 2014 the group had only a few hundred designers. Today their numbers are approaching 2,000.
China is home to scores of world-class manufacturers, across both private and state-owned sectors: think DJI, Huawei, Guangzhou Auto, NIO, or Haier. The world doesn’t consider those companies design leaders in the same league as Apple, Tesla, BMW, or Dyson—yet.
Charles Hayes, the Asia-Pacific executive director for IDEO, the path-breaking Silicon Valley design consultancy, also noted a sharp increase in design interest from China’s C-suite executives not just from privately-owned tech startups like Ant Financial but also from lumbering state-owned enterprises in manufacturing, financial services, and health care.
Hayes and Leung both argued that China was rapidly gaining on design, just as it has been closing the gap on the West in technology—and that, precisely because China is ‘the world’s factory’ its companies are already thinking about design in a sophisticated global way.
Chinese firms are hoovering up customer data at a rate unparalleled in the West, gaining insights that will help shape the design of future products, potentially setting new global standards. We might yet see the emergence of design with Chinese characteristics, as the old “Made in China” label slowly cedes to one that reads “Created in China” instead.
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Shanghai was the last of four extraordinary Brainstorm Design dinners convened by Fortune this year. At every stop, I’ve learned something new about design’s strategic power and at last night’s event, we announced our first wave of confirmed speakers for Brainstorm Design 2019, which will convene March 5-7, 2019 in Singapore.
Our fantastic lineup includes Google Ventures design partner Kate Aronowitz, IDEO CEO Tim Brown, Amazon’s Miriam Daniel, IBM’s Doug Powell and many, many more. For the full roster, check out the Brainstorm Design conference page here.
| Clay Chandler | |
| @claychandler | |
| clay.chandler@timeinc.com |
NEWSWORTHY
Wining the popularity contest: Glassdoor's annual Employees Choice awards saw Facebook toppled from top spot as the top tech company to work for. That honor went to conference service Zoom with the social network falling to #6, right ahead of Google and right behind LinkedIn.
Losing the popularity contest: Mighty Apple is doing what would have recently been unthinkable: resorting to grubby discount gimmicks to boost soft sales of the iPhone XS and XR. "When has Apple ever before advertised an iPhone at $300 less than it actually costs by using an asterisk?" asks Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Learning to share: Once the epitome of a proprietary, control-freak culture, Microsoft is embracing open-source like never before. The company this week announced it will make public key elements of its Azure Machine Learning software. It will also do the same with three of its popular Windows frameworks.
What you can do for your country: Jon Callas, who founded the companies Blackphone and Silent Circle, is a legend in privacy circles. He just quit a well-paid gig as a security tester at Apple to work as a technology fellow at the ACLU.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Lest you doubt that the U.S. and China are engaged in a tech arms race, just look what's happening in the field of quantum computing. This technology has the potential to defeat the existing encryption that currently protects our banks and computers, which has prompted China to invest heavily in a quantum version of defense.
It is a race with national security implications, and while building quantum computers is still anyone’s game, China has a clear lead in quantum encryption. As it has with other cutting-edge technologies, like artificial intelligence, the Chinese government has made different kinds of quantum research a priority.[...]
With communications sent by traditional means, eavesdroppers can intercept the data stream at every point along a fiber-optic line. A government could tap that line just about anywhere. Quantum encryption cut the number of vulnerable spots in the Beijing-Shanghai line to just a few dozen across 1,200 miles, Professor Lu said.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
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Why Cuba Is at the Start of a Cell Phone Revolution By Lucas Laursen
New York Makes Uber and Lyft Pay a $17.22 an Hour Minimum Plus Expenses to Their Drivers By Glenn Fleishman
Fortnite Creator Becomes Game Retailer With Digital Storefront By Chris Morris
Google's 'Filter Bubble' Can Manipulate Your Search Results, Study Suggests By Natasha Bach
BEFORE YOU GO
In the spirit of the holidays, enlightened people everywhere should recognize Die Hard as a Christmas movie right up there with It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol. Alas, a new poll shows only 25% of U.S. adults give the Bruce Willis action flick its Yuletide due.
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Jeff John Roberts. Find past issues, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters.
