Culture-influenced design of Beijing’s urban facade
On a recent trip to Beijing during the Lunar New Year, I spent a lot of time in transit — on foot, by subway, in the backseat of cars — and something about this familiar city struck me as puzzling. Why does everything here, from television media, to brick and mortar storefronts, to the labyrinthine subway system, feel so over the top?
Growing up first generation and Asian-American, I’ve been comfortable with the clash of my two cultures, accepting traditions and mannerisms as is, and learning to embrace that which is different. It’s a sentiment I often share with immigrants and their descendants. Once upon a time, the societal pressure to fit in at the lunch table while eating homemade smelly chives dumplings seemingly defined our worth. Only later did we understand that those things we found hard to reconcile at a young age are larger than ourselves.
With acceptance and repeated exposure, we also stop questioning.
After close to a dozen trips, what used to feel “new” or “different” about being in China has faded over time — The smog-filled sunrises, the gate guards in uniform, the convoluted subway map system reminiscent of a Pac-Man maze (but with plenty more tunnels to conquer).
Some subtly “designed” aspects of Beijing stood out this time. Textured sidewalk tiles for the visually impaired. Escalators that pick up the pace only after people step on. QR codes acting as digital portals on what seemed like every print and digital advertisement.
Moreover, it was the subtle, seemingly “undesigned” aspects of the everyday that frustrated me, such as watching my mother re-learn where to press for the 18th floor every day after encountering three different button configurations in the same pair of elevators. A billboard in the hospital flooded with minuscule text that could only be legible within a few feet. A map plastered on the subway window that required leaning over a stranger’s head to discern.
I was conditioned to view “simple” and “minimal” as something to strive for in information displays, and I questioned why Beijing looked so different from the views I was used to in the States.
With the cities themselves aside, there’s a variance between the design aesthetic of the U.S. and China — One trends toward flat, simple, and clean, and the other is vividly stimulating, crowded, and seemingly brutalist to the eyes of foreigners (me).
To my knowledge, there is no grand movement towards flat design in China nor are there rally cries from Chinese consumers to overturn the crowded interfaces of today. If human needs — such as navigating a subway system — are symmetrical across cultural boundaries, then how come the design trends between China and the U.S. seemed to be diverging?
Tracing back, there are some fundamental aspects of Chinese culture, mainly 1) typography & written language, 2) color, and 3) shape that prevent Chinese design from gravitating towards the “clean and simple” designs revered in the States. In other words, the “crowdedness” is an organic result of some of the core values and long-standing systems in place in China.
Influence is scalable. While the design of a product can be strongly influenced by an individual (or team of) designer’s style, the summation of products and services that make up the macro-level “look and feel” of a city can be traced back to some fundamental elements of culture. The latter is what I’m exploring here.
Note: The following is based on personal observations of China and the U.S. and reflect my own thoughts on the cultural influences on design. Feel free to leave a response with your own. I’d love to hear them!
In the English language, almost everything can be communicated via 26 letters, 10 numerical characters, and a finite set of symbols. They are morphed and molded accordingly by designers into typefaces, carefully optimized to accommodate a variety of contexts — Print, web, mobile, long-form, short-form, data visualizations, billboards, paper packaging, etc. Variable and parametric fonts take this a step further by enabling technology to easily morph and scale type within a single file.
In contrast, the Chinese written language has over 50,000 unique characters. They can be broken down into 214 building blocks called “radicals,” which can be further deconstructed down to 8 basic strokes at the atomic level.
Just eight atoms to scale? Not quite. The strokes themselves are compounded and used in multiple variations based on the character — so it’s not enough to simply adjust the stroke’s height and width, but also the relative placement within the radical. One stroke could intersect three others in one context, or fall below another in a different context. In many cases, the same radical appearing in different characters may need different stroke weights, angles, and shapes to achieve a balance. This process is well-summarized by Nikhil Sonnad here.
In a cheesy metaphor, your bougie self decides to tweak your outfit a bit each time you attend an outing with different company. Multiply this for a party of 214 meeting up 50,000 times in various permutations, and you’ve got an idea of the grandeur of creating a custom Chinese typeface. Something like that.
The fascinating thing is, Chinese characters have a way of communicating a lot in very little. A four character idiom can evoke a multifaceted story or lesson passed down from generations. However, when it comes to communicating practical information such as navigation, it’s still necessary to use long phrases or sentences.
Since characters are difficult to scale and the context varies vastly on city streets, the result is sometimes sub-optimal for the context. Sign postings may appear large and overpowering at times, while long-form text may suffer from poor legibility.
But wait, there’s more! Written Chinese includes a secondary system called “Pinyin,” a phonetic variant often taught as a pre-requisite to written Chinese. Pinyin is often shown in tandem with Chinese characters to accommodate more readers, expanding comprehension to a wider audience. Adding a line of pinyin per pronoun adds a significant amount of perceived content, especially in condensed views such as the subway map.
In Chinese culture, red is a symbol of prosperity, patriotism, and happiness. Brides wear red on their wedding day, red envelopes are gifted during the Lunar New Year, and traditional celebrations, both big and small, will usually be lathered in red.
Not surprisingly, red is also a primary hue seen throughout the city. Storefronts and building entrances are marked by red name placards, subway ads are dressed in red backgrounds, dry foods and snacks are packaged in red boxes, and apartment buildings are dressed in a red-orange facade.
We see this in the digital world too. The current stop on a subway line is indicated by a flashing red light, and matching search terms in the Chinese search engine Baidu is highlighted in red. In stock tickers and trending search stats, red means a good uptrend, while green means a negative downtrend.
In color psychology, red is one of the most emotionally intense colors that has been said to raise blood pressure and respiration rates. The reds I saw were vibrant, and vibrancy dictates the emotion of design. An urban jungle that has a lot of red raises our baseline level of awareness and the threshold for what catches our attention in the wild.
Although the appearances of this red hue is subtle in the context of a large metropolitan, it sometimes did feel like each banner display was trying to scream louder than the next. The aggregated scene is a hodge-podge of vivid reds, greens, yellows that is frequently seen in subway cars and on Beijing streets.
In what seemed to me like a world of contradictories, green is often used to indicate emergency exits.
East Asian countries tend to hold a collectivist and holistic mindset, rather than the individualistic society of the West. Many sociologist studies on the East-West dichotomy anchor on this observation. The East has several traditions that focus on the concept of unity, valuing the interconnectedness of group (entity or country) over the individual, and it’s not a surprise that these ideas have influenced psychological processes.
I saw this collectivism manifested at the dinner table and on city streets. The dining experience for large parties can place in a private room, and always at a circular table that’s scaled up to accommodate the number of guests. An oversized Lazy Susan with an elaborate centerpiece makes this somewhat more functional. In contrast to a rectangular tables, round tables have no clear head of the table, which aligns with the collectivists’ principle to consider (and even physically draw) peers as equals.
I consider the siheyuan a residence-sized microcosm of the larger city. It’s a type of traditional housing complex with an enclosed courtyard and rooms that wrap around the perimeter. These have largely disappeared due to gentrification and overall modernization of the city, and many of the ones left have been declared as official cultural relics.
A common theme in both the round tables and siheyuans is design that promotes and enables human gathering, whether that’s in the context of a family, household, or the larger community.
More symbolically, I saw the “unity” themed manifested in roundness and ringed features of the city. Anyone who’s seen a birds’ eye view of Beijing will notice the ringed highway system centered around Tiananmen Square. The subway map also shows two major lines are that are continuous loops around the city center.
This design doesn’t always lend itself to the most efficient route, especially when you are trying to get to the diagonal corner of town. I suspect part of it is due to the massive size of the city, but coupled with the ringed subway lines, it wasn’t uncommon to make 2 or 3 transfers in one journey, then walk 10 to 15 minutes to your final destination.
In contrast, the New York MTA system seemed to be designed with more route efficiency in mind. Uptown to downtown, crosstown, in-town or out, it seems to mimic the majority of daily commutes to take people directly from point A to B. There are even express lines heralded for doing this even faster. (Whether it’s done effectively is a discussion reserved for another time, New Yorkers.)
Culture-influenced design of Beijing’s urban facade
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