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​WEN Xiaojing: Mind into Matter, A Brief History of Chinese Design Thought

​WEN Xiaojing, Associate Professor from School of Design recently published her new book on A Brief History of Design Ideas in Ancient China under the sponsorship of the National Social Science Translation Programme.

This book was first published in Mandarin under the title  ‘Zhōngguó gǔdài shèjì sīxiǎng shǐ lüè’.  This would translate literally into English as ‘A Brief History of Design Ideas in Ancient China.’  A broader western-style title for the volume would be Mind into Matter: An Illustrated History of Design Thinking in Pre-Modern China.  The two principal authors of the original Mandarin publication (with their names given in Chinese style, family name first) were Shao Qi (a Professor at Shanghai Normal University) and Wen Xiaojing (now an Associate Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University). In 2019 the book, which has gone into a number of revisions in China, was entered into a competition that resulted in the winning of an award from the National Social Science Translation Programme for a version to appear in English. The authors are very grateful for that award and to Springer Verlag for agreeing to publish the result.

They offer this book to a new readership in the hope that it will stimulate further interest in the design history of pre-modern China, and particularly in the ways in which design was associated with the development of philosophical thought. Chinese civilization has run in a particular course for nearly three thousand years, with particular meanings attributed to certain types of objects, and with a continuous history of cultural inheritance from one period to the next. In seeking to demonstrate these elements of continuity within changing external circumstances they acknowledge that any errors of fact or interpretation are the responsibility of the authors.