(DESIGN FOCUS)
(OLYMPIC SUMMER GAMES BEIJING 2008)
(DESIGN CHALLENGE - UNIFY A LARGE AND DIVERSE COUNTRY
(BEHIND A SINGLE DESIGN PROGRAMME)
(KNOWN FOR - CALLIGRAPHY-INSPIRED PICTOGRAMS
(AND THE FUSION OF PRECIOUS STONE INTO OLYMPIC MEDALS)
(DESIGN FOCUS)
The Olympics is the largest, most complex design project.
You are branding a city,
you are branding a country.
I cannot describe the feeling.
It was a wonderful experience.
Working for something for so long...
Finally, you see people come from all over the world.
So that three weeks was really exciting.
But at the same time, I was still working,
fixing things -
things like the cameras changed position.
We needed to change the design.
Design for Olympics
includes so many different pieces
and cannot be done by one person
and it cannot be done simply by one studio.
So whether the pictogram
or the torch design
or the medal,
every project needed to go through public competition.
(ONE WORLD, ONE DREAM)
Starting from the beginning, one of the questions is,
how can we come up with an Olympic look
that combines traditional Chinese art
with contemporary need?
For the Beijing medal,
at the beginning it was a crazy idea.
I thought we could put some new element from China,
and jade first came to my mind.
Jade was a symbolic material to the Chinese in the past.
From the Han dynasty, jade became decoration,
as a symbol of bringing good luck.
And today everybody has mobile phones
but at that time jade was very important.
The chair of the delegation looked at the concept.
He liked it, and he said, "Good, very good."
But then he raised the question -
that the jade is very fragile, very easy to break.
When the athletes could bite it
or share the jade with other friends,
it could possibly fall down.
And then he said, "If you cannot solve that problem,
"we cannot accept the concept."
So we did a test,
with our industrial design professor,
Wang Yipeng.
Wang Yipeng -
he spent a month, sleepless, to try to solve the problem.
He visited many experts
to find the best way to protect the jade.
In the testing, there was a lot of failure.
46 times' failure.
but I think, "We have to do it,"
because nobody wants to have a broken medal made in China.
By the end, there's a layer of silicone gel
around the jade,
and then between the jade and the metal
there's a silicone cushion.
And then there's a glue in the back of the jade
connecting to the metal.
So there's a full layer of protection.
And then we made a video.
We dropped the medal from two metres high
and it dropped it onto a concrete floor.
And the jade remained intact.
It's perfect.
So we later presented this to the IOC.
After 13 months, the design of the jade was approved.
That is the first time that secondary materials
have been used in Olympic medals.
During the Olympics, one of the athletes
threw his bronze medal to the ground
because he thought he could get the gold one.
So that was proof that the medal was very safe.
We met many of the Olympic winners.
It's a great honour to have the chance to design for them.