Jutta grabs front-row seats in designer paradise

SHANGHAI: German designer Jutta Friedrichs always had a feeling she would end up in Asia. Initially she thought she would live in Tokyo, but fate had other ideas.

When a product designer job offer in the China offices of a large Dutch company presented itself, she took the leap and found herself in bustling Shanghai.

Two years later she is more than happy to have taken her designs to China.

Since arriving the 28-year-old German has split her time between her three main passions.

Two days a week she works as product designer in the Dutch promotional and retail company where she started their design department.

The rest of the week she sets up her own line of design furniture; and aside from that she cooperates with other creative people from around the world in The Studio, a creative collective located in Shanghai's French Concession area in a renovated old building. Together with web designers, artists, producers and photographers she shares inspiration and workspace.

"In order to fuel a creative link we created The Studio to attract creative people of different backgrounds," Friedrich says while sitting in the old renovated house that oozes of atmosphere.

"One of the best aspects of being a designer in China is that so much is going on, and that I have easy access to materials," Friedrichs says. "Unlike Cologne, where I come from, here it is possible to walk down the street and find real industrial materials."

Showing her newest furniture rendering on her hip Vaio computer placed on a large wooden craftman's table with a rough welded frame, Friedrichs points to how this table, one of her own designs made specifically for The Studio, was welded at a small shop just down street from The Studio.

Though Friedrichs does not explicitly incorporate Chinese aesthetics in her designs, she still finds herself inspired by the many experiences she has had since moving to Shanghai two years ago.

But, as she philosophizes, it is always difficult to know for certain how much inspiration comes from outside sources, and how much comes from inside.

"Here, I don't need to go away to experience change. On the contrary, I actually need to do something in order to escape change," the furniture designer says about leaving city life for a while.

No newcomer to big city life, Friedrichs grew up in Cologne, moved to Berlin for her bachelor degree in design at The School of Art and Design, and ventured to London in order to pursue her master degree at the renowned Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

She backpacked around South and Central America, and for a while she also took up life in Portugal, explaining why she is able to speak Portuguese as well as several European languages, such as English and French.

"Shanghai is special in the sense that it is possible to come here as a foreigner and either live as cheap or as expensive as you wish. In that sense, it gives people the unique opportunity to pursue dreams that they might not have been able to in their home country," she says.

(China Daily 08/10/2007 page19)