From ‘take-ism’ to pursuit of newness and originality: design professionals and models of creativity in contemporary China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chinese innovative workers are often discussed in terms of their exploitation and empowerment within the current intellectual property systems, but little attention is given to their creative processes. Meanwhile, design practitioners are viewed solely as an innovation resource in the field of design thinking. Based on interviews with Chinese interior designers and secondary data, this article provides an analysis that situates their practices and experiences within the intersection of these fields, emphasising practitioners’ accounts of creativity and production of innovative, cultural, and aesthetic forms. Drawing on theories of practice, genre, and post-Bourdieuian analysis of cultural production, this article argues that the valorisation of creativity needs to be understood in relation to the practices in which they engage, within particular contexts of history, organisation, and genre cultures that provide opportunities for the transformation of genre boundaries. Operating within a milieu that saw copying as part of creative process, the practitioners had no agreement on how the work should be understood within the rubric of creativity. Despite this, they aimed for slight differentiation in design, appropriating and rediscovering multi-cultural forms to resist ‘take-ism’ – the imitative culture of copying of foreign decorative elements and styles, while establishing themselves in the commercial world.