A Land of Lost Girls

I was invited by Minnie Tsui to join her and several of her 3Kou colleagues, along with creative directors from DDB China’s Shanghai office, to speak to student audiences at both Eastern China Normal and Shanghai Universities.  She informed me that the students were primarily girls, culled from advertising, marketing, graphic design and filmmaking majors, and were at various stages in their college education. 

The forums are arranged by 3Kou Branding as an outreach to groups of soon-to-be newly minted creative professionals.  In a general sense, they provide an opportunity to hear directly from working representatives of the fields they aspire to be a part of upon graduation.  More specifically, they offer the students what may be the first chance for many of them to directly interact with experts from the industry.

Since creative industry internships can be difficult or even impossible to arrange, these forums give them a chance to see samples of creative work, learn about the process of design, branding and marketing from case studies and anecdotes, and test their skills at dialog through question and answer sessions in front of their peers.  It’s as close to practical experience as most of them will come to, before leaving the campus setting and marching their resumes around the country in search of their first job.

Many of the students, and especially the girls, I was told, would eventually find work as elementary school teachers.  Though the need for trained creative professionals in China is growing, jobs in design, marketing and advertising remain relatively limited and competition for those placements is steep.

Our forum topic would be on developing creative thinking and ideation skills as a preferable focus in studies to the rote learning of software, production tools and current techniques.  As is increasingly the case with American schools, the emphasis in Chinese education has traditionally focused on the memorization of facts and technologies over deeper understanding and creative expression.

As China proceeds in making the enormous leap in the World’s eye from a “made in China,” to a “created in China” resource, the need for an evolution in its education system will be paramount.  There is no concept of “branding” in traditional Chinese culture but the word “brand” has become the rallying cry of corporations and government run industries across the country.  Creative endeavors will continue to augment and strengthen this output and the need for strong thought leadership will prevail.  These presentations at key universities help give students their first small taste of what future colleagues, clients and peers from around the world will expect from them.

I had not been given much time to prepare and chose to show a few samples of commercial, product launch and brand marketing projects I’d worked on.  The video samples were shown with a brief translated description of the creative and production teams involved and a summary of the various tasks each preformed.  This, I hoped, would provide some context for the students who were still grappling with where and how to approach the industry and what exactly their place might be in it.

After the presentation, there were few questions other than requests for clarification on techniques and specifics on the various roles of the production team.  Once the first assembly was dismissed, however, several dozen students approached me.

Questions were rapidly fired at my translator and less rapidly aimed at me.  In the most earnest and genuine  manner, they wanted to know what the secret was to finding new ideas.  How can you learn to have them?  I was taken aback by their directness – their determination to understand what, in their estimation, was the specific coursework that would help form the basis for new ideas in art and design.

There is, of course, no answer to this question.  I recommended instead that they emphasize the courses and topics that they love and that they find subjects that they can be passionate about so that they could bring that unique perspective to design.  This was perhaps taken as a ruse – a deflection to protect trade secrets.

Discussing this later with Minnie, I was told that many students pass through the system without direction.  For the first time in their lives, they’re expected to have an opinion – a sense of their own direction – and a portfolio of original concepts at the same time.  “We are a land of lost girls,” she said, referring to the group.

This gave the presentation new meaning for me.  As we drove back to the office I thought about how this wave of new thinkers would eventually find their creative stride.  Based on the determination displayed in every aspect of this vibrant city, it is an inevitability that portends amazing things to come.

© Markus Horak, 2009.