Yubei Gong is a design researcher and educator, currently finishing her PhD at the Tongji College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University. She was a strategy consultant at ReD from 2011-14.   

What are you currently working on? 

In my professional life I have moved between academia and business. I studied as a college teacher, then I became a consultant at ReD and up until now I’ve been working as a teacher, researcher, and consultant. At the moment, I’m the PhD candidate at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University.  Right now, I’m going through final changes on my dissertation. I use the anthropological approach to do my research at the design school. I’m trying to understand what I call “new design”, in other words, social innovation design.  It’s how design intersects with social innovation. Perhaps in the West it’s familiar to many people, but in China design is still very traditional. My PhD work focuses on a particular school – a new school launched by us. The school is an educational innovation project in partnership with the local education bureau. Our project aims to explore ways to cultivate innovative talents within the system. In China like other countries, there are public schools and private schools. “Within the system” refers specifically to public schools; they constitute over 80% of the schools in China with regional variations taken into consideration. To be more specific, we are going to transform a public high school, including its architecture, curriculum, organisation system, and so on through design.  

“My ultimate goal is that we can contribute, to provide an alternative to our current education setup within the system, not to entirely change it, but to provide individuals with an additional choice.”

What inspired you to pursue a PhD within design and innovation?  

At ReD, I helped clients to innovate, by capturing social signals and making sense of them through the lens of social sciences. It’s magical how everyday life can be turned into insights for driving innovation. Theory plays a key role in this; they can often cut through the fog. After years of work, I decided to take some time off to read – to immerse myself in theories. Why design school and not business school? As an ethnographer, I’ve spent a lot of time observing and reporting, letting others to do the actual work, so I wanted to understand that change part better – from insight to actually implementing the change – and I think design is a good starting point to understand that.

What do you hope to achieve through your PhD?  

What I really hope is that there will be an alternative approach to education in China. That there’s not just top-down policy making, that it could be more bottom-up from teachers, from students, from parents– where they dictate the kind of education they would like to have. Achieving this goal is challenging due to the influence of tradition and social structures. However, in practical terms, my ultimate goal is that we can contribute, to provide an alternative to our current education setup within the system, not to entirely change it, but to provide individuals with an additional choice.  

What is your approach to research at a design school, and how has your work at ReD prepared you for this?  

The Tongji Design school where I am doing my research is an extension of the school of Urban Planning and Architecture – they understand what anthropology is and why we teach human-centred design thinking to the design students. My tutor is a big fan of anthropology, he encourages me to conduct my research in an ethnographic way. This includes spending multiple years at the high school, talking to teachers, students, and parents, attending the parents’ meetings and being part of the teacher’s professional training program – to get a holistic understanding of the system. It’s a luxury to have such an opportunity to do so. Of course, the design school is not like studying the social sciences, humanities, or anthropology. Their understanding and application of anthropology and ethnography is very much in line with design thinking. It’s very interesting – more and more students at the design school come to me and want to learn more about ethnography, and many of the design students have a passion for it. At many design schools, they lead with the high-tech path. But the human path has gained considerable attention in design circles in recent years in China, primarily because of the growing recognition that technology alone is insufficient for problem-solving. Consequently, people are increasingly turning to the social and human sciences for solutions. Scholars such as Xiang Biao, a Chinese anthropologist who presently heads one department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, have gained celebrity status for their insightful contributions. Many designers have been inspired by these insights and are working on social innovation projects based on them.

What tools and analytic frameworks did you take with you from ReD into your academic work? 

On my first project at ReD, the client was a toy company. The client joined us in the field, and we visited a couple of cities including Shanghai. We spent three days with each family at their homes, visiting their schools, and taking part in their activities. That experience taught me the importance of openness, both from my ReD colleagues and the client. There are no right or wrong answers, only different perspectives resulting from different standing points. As I mentioned, my PhD research is about transforming a public high school. It’s about understanding the past, present, and shift towards the future. It’s very easy to fall into the mindset that we as assistant designers and policy makers know better than the teachers. If we led with this mindset, this project would turn into another top-down execution. With openness, by truly listening to teachers, to parents, to understand, to interpret their thinking and behaviour, this project can be a bottom-up innovation that can be embraced by many more public schools. I think openness as a mindset, how to really be open in the field is easier said than done – that’s what I learned most from ReD.  

“There are no right or wrong answers, only different perspectives resulting from different standing points.”

How have those tools and analytic frameworks been relevant in a Chinese market?  

Generally speaking, we’ve become more transparent digitally, but we’ve become less open with each other in our physical world. The ethnographic way of seeing the world and communicating with people is crucial and precious. China is very technologically savvy, and the application of technology is in every corner of our daily life, including our personal lives. On the one hand, it makes our lives much more efficient and convenient, however, it shrinks our world view in a sense. Being open is what we need most right now in China. Secondly, if we are speaking of ethnography and anthropology, it’s very close-knitted academically, with little interaction with the public. The reason why these disciplines have remained confined to academia can be traced back to historical and political factors, but that’s why I also chose design rather than anthropology for my PhD because I really want to make changes in society. The tools and the methodologies are used by other disciplines like design or business or the market rather than being limited to anthropology or to academia. This relates to my third point, that many people that have studied abroad like me then come back to China to apply anthropology and ethnography in the actual world.  

Interview by Doa Meatham Hasan Al-Tewaj