First Time in Hangzhou
First time in Hangzhou, I am very impressed by how nice the people are and how convenient everything is. The first 2 days was more admin related where we set up our phone cards and bank account in school. I was blown away by how cashless Zhejiang is and how much more convenient everything gets when everyone uses cashless payment/services. The size of Zhejiang University also blew me away, where it takes more than 45min by bike to go from one end to the other end of the university. I thought it was interesting that the school works together with Hello Bicycle to provide lots of good quality bicycle for the students to use to travel around.
School tours
The next few days we went around exploring Zhejiang. The school organized 2 educational tours for us. One is to bring us around Liangzhu Dream Town, a town contain many designing firms and 3D modelling companies. It was quite the eye-opener to see how many different kinds of products they design and how quickly they can prototype using the current 3D modelling technologies that they have.
The second tour is within the school grounds where they brought us through Zhejiang University’s history museum and its Science and Technology museum. It is inspirational how they developed through the years even after the Japanese bombings and how they innovated new technologies based on current needs. One example is that at first they researched a more efficient turbine, after which due to a major fire, the school adapted their product into a more efficient fire extinguisher.
Theme Meeting
On Thursday, I met with the professor for my theme(AI Empowered Design), where he introduced us to the different researchers where they gave us a brief introduction on the research projects they are working on. This is to help us decide on a later date which research project we are more inclined to work on. Also, year 3 students in industrial design gave us a short introduction on their design projects where we are supposed to join a group and work together with them in producing their final prototype.
Buddy Day Tour
Saturday is buddy day tour where I went for a tour focused on Urban Culture. They brought us to visit 武林广场, which is a famous square in the city centre that has many beautiful statues. Then they brought us to 京杭 grand canal, which is built by humans before the technological advancement. Then we had a great hotpot for lunch, where it’s the first time I tried pig’s brain and coagulated duck’s blood.
We also went to the West Lake to experience the beautiful lake, the 雷峰塔, and lastly we went to Long Jing village for a tea experience.
