Design and Translation
Elucidating perceptions of Australian and Chinese industrial design from the next generation of industrial designers
Blair Kuys, Wenwen Zhang
Swinburne University of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology
bkuys@swin.edu.au
Keywords: Industrial design, China, Australia, stereotypes
Abstract
China is passing through a challenging transition: the labour-force expansion and surging investment that propelled three decades of growth are now weakening. Australia is experiencing similar issues. In Australia the economy over this same period has survived on mainly mining of natural resources mostly exported to China. This cannot be sustained and a push from a resource economy to a knowledge economy needs to start. This study goes into detail about perceived issues associated with industrial design programs at a university level in both China and Australia. It then consists of a pilot survey targeted at Chinese and Australian industrial design students and recent graduates. This has been done to better understand the mindsets and opinion of the next generation of industrial designers, with an aim to better address issues that arise for government, universities and industry.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
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Cite this paper: Kuys, B and Zhang, W. (2016). Elucidating perceptions of Australian and Chinese industrial design from the next generation of industrial designers. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme