Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Clay Shirky
A couple of years ago, while I was doing some work at NYUs Shanghai
campus, I got lost on the subway. As a New Yorker, it takes a lot to make me
feel like a country mouse, but at triple the population of my hometown,
Shanghai does it. Even though the Shanghai subway system is amazingly
well-provisioned with directions in English, I got out at the wrong stop. I didnt
figure this out right away, because the subway exited into a mall, just like at my
stop, and Shanghai has so many malls36 million square feet of retail space
will be built this yearit can be hard to tell one from another.
Walking in a daze through a vast collection of hallways and shops, I did the
very thing people who build confusing malls wanted me to do: I slowed down
and started looking around, whereupon I noticed a booth selling mobile
phones, a thing I happened to need at the time. I saw a particularly nice one,
all black, rounded sides, quite stylish, whose logo read Mi3. I decided that a
Mi3 would be as good a phone as any, so the vendor and I did that curious
pointing and gesturing thing people do when transacting with no common
language except money, and ten minutes later, I had my phone.
There is not much a middle-aged guy can do to seem au courant to eighteenyear-olds, but that phone did it. For the next several days on campus,
whenever I needed to do anything on my phone, one of the Chinese students
would ask, Where did you get that?Not,What kind of phone is that?they
all recognized it. The Mi3 was a huge hit for Xiaomi, the startup that made it,
selling faster than the company could produce them. I had managed to get my
hands on a phone so popular, the company couldnt always keep up with
demand, making me briefly the envy of teenagers (not a familiar feeling,
before or since).
Xiaomi (pronounced like the show in shower, plus me) is the thing that
many people in the West dont think exists: a company that can create
products that arent only made in China, but designed in China, and beautifully
so. For decades, the rap on Chinese manufacturing has been, Oh sure, they
can make lots of copies cheaply, but they cant design new products. Over the
forty years that China has been open for business, the countrys
manufacturers have mastered increasingly complex sourcing and assembly for
increasingly complex products, especially electronics. (The iPhone box may
say Designed in California, but it is built in Shenzhen.)
For anyone watching this rising mastery of quality, the question has
become,When will Chinese design rival its counterparts in the rest of the
world? Owning a Mi3 made it clear that, at least for electronics, the answer
was 2013. It was of high quality and moderately pricedmore expensive
than most smartphones, but at 2000 yuan (about $330), it was cheaper than a
similar Samsung, at around $400, and much cheaper than an iPhone, at over
$500but those virtues are virtues of purchasing and assembly. The Mi3 is
also beautiful.
All smartphones are a slab of black glass with three or four buttons on the
case, so phone design tends toward rearranging these minimal elements. The
Mi3s minimalism was to make a thin phone seem even thinner by making the
screen look as if it ran from one edge of the phone to the other. On many of
Xiaomis early phones, and most strikingly on the Mi3, the edges of the phone
case curve away so sharply from the screen that the eye discounts them as
part of the same surface. This was a trick, of courseyou cant make a cheap
phone if the case doesnt stick out past the screenbut it was a good trick,
and more importantly, it was a trick that meant that people inside Xiaomi were
thinking, very carefully, about what a good phone would look like.
The mobile phone is a member of a small class of human inventions, a tool so
essential it has become all but invisible, and life without it unimaginable. The
Then there are the phones designed for East Asian sensibilities. The same
region that brought us the selfie stick also brought us Oppo, a company
whose phones principal selling points include a high-quality camera and
custom software that automatically airbrushes photos with faces in them. The
ad campaigns emphasize a particularly performative form of femininity, since,
in a nice touch, the software makes a guess about the gender of the subject
everyone gets smoother skin, but only the ladies get their lips reddened.
Despite successful rollouts in Thailand and Korea, Oppo has not made much
of a dent in markets outside East Asia. Their U.S. launch was a bust.
Mobile phones, in other words, have mostly been just another Chinese export
the cheap products for poorer markets are thrown together at minimum cost,
while expensive products for the increasingly global group of well-heeled
customers are designed elsewhere, whether in Seoul or San Jose, the pattern
that led Apple to add the phrase Designed in California to its packaging in
the first place. This pattern of designers elsewhere, manufacturers here has
been the norm since the British turned southern China into their workshop in
the 1800s, but it is starting to shift. A number of Chinese companies are
moving to do everything at home, working to create mobile phones where
Designed in China means quality, not justshanzhai. (This is the same path
famously trod by Sony in the 1970s, when its founder was determined to retire
Made in Japan as an insult.) The most successful of these new designoriented companies, and therefore one of the most important mobile phone
manufacturers in the world right now, is Xiaomi. Xiaomi is the first Chinese
phone manufacturer to compete, globally and successfully, not just on price
but on innovation in design and service.