Author: Jason Li

Jason Li is an independent designer, artist and educator. Once upon a time, he studied engineering and ran a news site about fan translations of video games.

How a bookstore evolved into becoming a banned books center in Hong Kong

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From the Atlantic, In Hong Kong, a Sanctuary for Banned Books:

Later that year we began to get mainland visitors from cities like Beijing and Tianjin who were traveling on their own. Our sign said “People’s Commune” in Chinese, and our logo was Mao Zedong’s face, so maybe that caught their eye. Sometimes, customers would ask…

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Swipe typing, China edition

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Above: TouchPal (触宝)’s promo video for their smartphone swipe-typing technology. Note the (probably unauthorized) Lady Gaga soundtrack.

Francis Pisani over at Winch5 has a feature on TouchPal Cootek, a China born-and-bred smartphone swipe-typing technology. Pisani claims that their keyboard works much better than the Swype that’s offered on Samsung phones. Amongst Cootek’s many features are predictive text…

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Typography Design

Featured design: Cover

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Update: It seems that magCulture is no longer selling this from its online store, and the originally linked-to review has gone missing.

Presenting Cover, a new magazine coming out of China by Mazzybox. (Anyone have more information about him/her? magCulture says that Mazzybox works at a studio called Deadline.)

The magazine’s second edition, pictured…

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Starting Up in Shenzhen

The Hardware Fairyland of Huaqiangbei Road, Shenzhen

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Photos by Windell H. Oksay, from an Evil Mad Scientist post in 2009. From the hours I spent there last year, it hasn’t changed since then. Note the heavy advertising expenditure from Samsung, who were out there back in 2009 already. 

The electronics markets around Huaqiangbei Road (华强北路) in Shenzhen…

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Ethnography of Tech

The Free Lunch case for inefficient, redundant design

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In her talk for The Conference 2012, Designing for Trust: How China’s Free Lunch avoided The Curse of Kelvin (embedded above), Tricia Wang makes the case that the inefficient data entry and publishing sequence pictured below is the culturally appropriate and only effective solution available.

The case study she gives is of journalist Deng Fei’s Free Lunch project, which…

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Ethnography of Tech

Trust, social networks, and how the guy who threw his shoe at the Father of the Great Firewall got away

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Tricia Wang’s delightful talk at LIFT 12 touches upon a variety of subjects:

  • The full back story and epilogue of the person who threw his shoe at the Father of the Great Firewall. Fun fact she mentions: Because the scandal was censored within China and not a big deal, the shoe thrower was only chastised lightly by local…

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