An
internship in China
I first came to china on 2011.
I had just started studying product design
in Barcelona and got offered a chance to travel to China to do a summer internship in a
recently started design company.
This
article is about what I got from that internship and what my personal
experience living in China was.
One of the first things I learned was that
the language barrier is massive in China if you don’t speak their language. Few
people can speak English, so it’s really difficult to know what is going on
most of the time.
I was at the design studio for 2 months.
The design studio had just started, and I spent
that time working on real projects with the rest of the team, so I could learn
from them that way. What tools they used, which skills they needed, and how
they organised themselves to work on the projects. I learned about the design
process.
I saw the
design process from start to end.
From sketching Ideas, to arranging
suppliers to manufacture your product.
Design processes are probably different for
everyone. Some work a lot using prototypes, some other need sketching their
Ideas, and some other modelling them on Cad software or on some solid support.
For most of us, the objective is to see it
being manufactured and getting to as much people as possible to make their life
better.
This is the
one thing designing in China is awesome for. You are one hour away from any manufacturing
technique.
I went to all the factories I could during
my internship. I saw many big factories which were in charge of manufacturing
and assembling a whole product once all the parts were ready.
There was a great diversity among these
factories. Some clean, some not so much. Some extremely organized, some driven
by chaos.
I also discovered that smaller workshops
are also part of mass production. Some of them were no more than nine square
meters basements that had a tube bending machine and welding equipment and
their task was to manufacture only a fraction of the product.
Even prototype houses were sometimes used
for manufacturing parts which required a really limited number of units.
Sometimes only one factory was involved in
the manufacturing, sometimes four were.
Designing with the constraints of what a
factory is able to make saves you a great deal of time and effort, but is not
always the right thing to do as it can endanger the aim of the design.
These are only
some of the things I learned, but for those who just skipped to the end, this is what I got from my
internship in China.
I got to see how things are really made in
China.
I discovered what I wanted to do next, and
had people guiding me.
It was fun.
I also got to travel to the other side of
the globe, try different food, live amongst people with a different culture,
and see some of the worst drivers in the world, but I’ll leave this for the
next post.
Ivan came to China and really took the experience for everything he could and had a great attitude that we kept inviting him back and even offered him a job in the end, so as a company it was a great experience.
So if your studying Product Design, Graphic Design, Mechanical Engineering and you think you could benefit from an Internship in China and have something you think you can offer us please get in contact, we would like to hear from you.
Send your information to ian@hachi-asia.com and let us know why you?
