Voices of Design Leadership. Ken Sanders
more emotional expression; to be trusted in Brazil, you do wear your heart on your sleeve. That is one reason why the best language translation cannot be achieved through one-to-one vocabulary mapping. Sorry Google! To learn a language well is to learn a culture well, and vice versa.
As design leaders, we need to extend our thinking about diversity beyond the traits most often associated with employment discrimination: race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, or disability. Those are important markers. But diversity is also about life experience. About culture. About economic status. About family background. Biography matters.
In general, life experiences that introduce design leaders to different geographies, languages, and social contexts broaden their understanding of cultural preferences and helps them challenge conventional wisdom. Such experiences also help them recognize that the needs of diverse clients cannot be addressed in a homogenous manner, and that innovative design solutions are often discovered along unconventional paths.
In Chapter 12, you will hear from Rafael Viñoly, a remarkable design leader who was born in Uruguay, built a successful design practice in Argentina, and immigrated with his family to the US after the 1976 military coup d’état overthrew President Isabel Perón. As Rafael points out, “Immigration is probably the only university that can teach you how much you don’t know.”
For those who did not enjoy a particularly diverse life experience prior to beginning their professional career, it is never too late to start. First steps might include overseas graduate school or short-term exchange programs within or between firms. Enlightened organizations with global footprints offer cross-border opportunities to their talent for that very reason. The intention: enhancing the creative output of collaborative teams through diversity of biography and life experience.
Look Far and Wide
As you search for new design talent, make sure to look far and wide. You may be surprised what you find! Two stories illustrate this principle.
The first begins in April 2012. Readers may be familiar with Google Earth, a software application that allows users to navigate a 3D representation of our planet using satellite imagery. In 2012 (alas, no longer) users of the software could contribute their own 3D building models to the public version of Google Earth. While Gensler’s Shanghai Tower was under construction, I learned that someone had inserted into Google Earth an impressive 3D model of the building.
The model did not represent the completed design, but instead its current construction progress. At that point, the twisting steel and concrete frame had reached about two-thirds of its eventual 600-meter height, while curtain wall wrapped the lower one-third. The digital model was remarkably detailed and even included the four construction cranes extending above the top of the tower.
Shanghai Tower construction model as shown in Google Earth, April 2012. Image Credit: Duyi Han, © Google, © Maxar Technologies
Because of the model’s accuracy and detail, it seemed likely that its author had access to the building’s construction documents. Did the person work in Gensler’s Shanghai office? I reached out to my colleagues there to find out. However, they had already made their own inquiries and no one working in the office had built it.
I turned to the Internet sleuths on Gensler’s IT team to see what they could learn. After following multiple digital breadcrumb trails, they discovered an email address of the person believed to have built the model. The individual’s name, roughly translated from Mandarin, appeared to be “Duee Haan.” Their IP address indicated a location in the Shanghai vicinity.
I reached out via email with an invitation:
From: Ken Sanders
Date: Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:06 a.m. Subject: Hello!
To: @gmail.com
Cc: Xiaomei Lee, Robert Plummer, Dorian Chau
Hello Duee Haan,
My name is Ken Sanders. I work at Gensler in San Francisco, and I am very impressed with your work! In particular, many of us at Gensler have enjoyed seeing your construction model of the Shanghai Tower published in the Google 3D Warehouse, as well as your photography in Panoramio…
If you are interested, I would like to invite you to visit our office in Shanghai. I have copied Xiaomei Lee on this e-mail – she is a Principal in our Shanghai office and would be a good person to talk to about visiting our office. Please let me know if you would like to do this!
Thank you!
Ken
Ken Sanders, FAIA
Principal/Managing Director
+1 (415) 836.
Gensler
2 Harrison Street
Suite 400
San Francisco CA 94105
And the reply:
From: Duyi Han
Date: Thu, May 3, 2012 at 12:22 p.m.
Subject: Re: Hello!
To: Ken Sanders
Hello Ken Sanders,
Thank you for your appreciation! I will be very glad to visit your office. It’s a great opportunity for me.
I will be free on this Sunday and the following weekends.
———————–
Duyi Han | No.2 High School Attached to ECNU’ 13
Shanghai, China
As it turned out, the mystery builder of the Shanghai Tower model was Duyi Han, a seventeen-year-old high school student in Shanghai. Luckily, both Xiaomei Lee1 and Michael Peng, a senior designer on the Shanghai Tower project team, were planning to be in the office the next Sunday, so Xiaomei invited Duyi to visit. They took him on a tour and showed him detailed models and renderings of the tower. We each received a gracious thank-you e-mail the following day.
My outreach to Duyi in 2012 marked the beginning of a special friendship that continues to this day. He joined Gensler’s Shanghai office later that summer for a one-month paid internship. After graduating high school and completing a second Gensler internship in Shanghai the following summer, he moved to Houston, Texas, to attend Rice University.
I met Duyi in person for the first time in December 2014 when he visited San Francisco. I invited him to join a Gensler holiday party in the San Francisco office, where he met my wife Regina and many of my Gensler friends and colleagues. He returned to San Francisco the following summer for his third Gensler internship. After transferring to Cornell University and taking a year off to work at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, Duyi graduated with a five-year B. Arch. degree from Cornell in 2019 and started his own practice in Shanghai: Atelier Duyi Han.
Over the past year, Duyi has undertaken the interior design of a luxury apartment, designed a furniture collection for Adorno, and completed an exhibition design for an art museum in Nanjing. He has appeared in Forbes, The New York Times, CNN, Vice, Adobe, Issues in Science and Technology (American National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine), Marie Claire, Vogue (Spain), Elle, MSN (Brazil), Architectural Digest, ArchDaily, Dezeen, Designboom, Bienal São Paulo, Art Tribune (Italy), and many other global publications. In 2021, Duyi began his pursuit of a graduate degree in contextual design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands.