CRTKL’s Lily Wei Joins 2021 REARD Young Design Star Selection Jury

Announcement | December 28, 2021

SHANGHAI, China — December 28, 2021 — Lily Wei, Principal in CRTKL’s Shanghai office was invited to act as the rotating judge of the 2021 REARD Young Design Star Selection — which aims to commend young designers who have devoted themselves to special design field. Moreover, as one representative of the four judges, she also conducted a round-table dialogue of “predecessors (forerunners) VS youngsters” and expressed her opinions on the relationship between corporate brands and personal brands and how designers define their professional roles and positioning during the period of industry transformation.

Lily Wei believes that corporate brands and employees are mutually beneficial and that they are a community.

A design company has a strong humanistic quality. As the soul of a company, designers shape the overall values of the company from different dimensions — take CRTKL as an example. Over the past 70 years, its generations of designers have been dedicated to designing and have built countless successful urban areas and communities across the globe, gradually shaping the company’s brands and culture. Each generation of designers is inheriting the spirit of the previous generation of designers, working hard and striving to surpass their predecessors. It is the generation after generation of design efforts that have helped keep the CRTKL brand innovative and dynamic even after 75 years since its establishment.

Lily Wei said that if a design company is compared to a network system, each leading designer, or design leader, is the node of the network. The more such nodes, the more stable and adaptable the company is. So how should a company help young designers grow up? We need to help them find their own styles, tap their potential and become the nodes.

Talking about how designers should define their professional roles and positioning during the period of industry transformation, Lily Wei said that currently, China needs to vigorously protect the environment on the one hand and conduct industrial transformation to reduce overcapacity on the other hand. The transformation from large-scale incremental development to smart growth has increased the complexity and comprehensiveness of our projects. This requires designers to have a broader knowledge of know:  form overall strategies to good physical design to business operation and sustainable practice experiences. They should also seek partnerships with different specialties and have the ability to integrate them all.

At a macro level, a company should build a longer value chain covering the design, the front-end strategies, and R&D innovation.

At an individual level, designers not only are competing with peers, but also will compete with AI in the future. How to make use of machines as our tools, instead of our competitors, is the biggest challenge for young designers in the future. This requires designers not only to have the ability to comprehensively control the overall situation, but also to have empathy and sensitivity to common human emotions.