Interview with Jun Ding

I am working in HKS In. HKS was founded in 1939. HKS is a team of more than 1,400 architects, interior designers, urban designers, scientists, artists, structural engineers, anthropologists and other professionals working together across industries and across the globe to create places that delight, heal and stimulate peak performance. HKS is ranking third place out of 156 architecture firms on Building Design+Construction’s 2020 Giants 400 Report. HKS also garnered top spots in several specific categories, ranking second in Healthcare, Sports Facilities and Hospitality.

“design” represents “creativity”, “responsibility” and “evolution”, that each design piece is create a unique object either in virtual world or real world that influence the way people think and behave to promote a healthy community and innovative thinking.

A project that encourages “new” thinking and strategy

I want to mention a sculpture that is close to where I live. It is a 30-foot-tall eyeball in the middle of downtown Dallas. The eye is the work of Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset. He made it by fiberglass back in 2007. Although there is no special meanings when he made it, once it is placed in middle of the busy street, it is given a meaning by the environment around it. It represents the city attitude and give every person who visit the city an interesting way to think and interact with the place.

It was a casino renovation project. I remember we redesign the restaurant area, open the old stone façade to be more transparency and create a nice patio seating area.

My favorite material or technology is 3d printing.

Normally at the beginning of design, when communicate with clients and other designers to figure out the best strategy for the specific design.

Connectivity with environment and surrounding communities.

Satisfaction

There are too many factors. People are keys. People who involved in the project, either designers, clients, researchers, workers, investors, etc.

The coherent and consistent thinking on design concept and strategy.

Use design as a tool to address as much as micro concerns and provide design strategy for the specific place or communities. I believe address any micro concerns would help ameliorate the macro concerns eventually.

Design is always diverse. The traditional way of design will never disappear, like hand drawings, but at the same time, technology brings changes on materials, design tool and construction ways. Design inspiration is always coming from nature environment. In the old time, it is hard for the design to truly mimic natural object but taking sort of the logic extracted from the laws of nature. Accompanied by technological progress, scientist will decipher more natural code that would be used in design and design could be more and more close to nature object.

From the understanding of local culture and inspiration of art piece or images on any website.

My design style is contemporary with unique parametric character that cooperated on façade

I am currently live in America but was grow up in Beijing. Beijing is a rapid changing and hybrid city that has both amazing heritage buildings like Forbidden City and modern buildings like Galaxy Soho, which give me a broad vision of understanding different building types and how it influence environment. After I move to American, I have been lived in Los Angeles and Dallas, and visited few other American cities. They are normally not as dense as Beijing and more vehicle driving city planning. This experience helped me deeply understanding how different culture and city planning develops different lifestyle.

Working in a big company is great because there are a lot of different people with unique skills that could help each other to achieve better design. Normally at the beginning of the project, there will be a design charette to hear voice from different perspectives than one or two main designers would lead the rest of the design process.

I would encourage company to give more opportunity to young designer with talent.

I would firstly dig into client requirements and site conditions and do a research about local culture and local lifestyle. Then according to each unique conditions to generate a bubble diagram and sum up few design principles. Then use one most important concept or logic to guide all design elements.

There is never a wrong design, but to communicate with others and absorb more wisdom from other will always leverage your design abilities.

Positives of being a designer is you could provide creative idea to inspirate others and there are a lot of people could support you to make your design comes true. The negatives are not everybody would understand or support you; There is no easy answer for a designer when he/she need to decide what to give up and what to stick to.

"The whole is more than the sum of the parts."

Observation and comprehension

Rhino, Grasshopper

I will always act early and giving enough time for idea generation as well as design development

It depends

Who is your favorite architect?

One of the design type is hospitality project, because it is a building type that close to everyday life, where people feel most relaxed. The other type is healthcare project, which is very complicated on medical planning but so important that could influence patient’s recovery and medical personnel’s day-to-day operations.

Short-term plan will be continuing to design good architectural pieces.

Normally work as a team

By email: Jun.ding.01@gmail.com