In 2003 the Guangzhou design curator Ou Ning organised the most substantial showing ever of contemporary Chinese design. Its title, Get it Louder, betrayed the fervent spirit with which young designers were producing, and Ou Ning’s determination to amplify their efforts. Ou Ning organised a sequel for 2007, inviting international designers from the UK, the Netherlands and Japan to participate in a grand spectacle in three cities that launched in Guangzhou in June.

Ou Ning’s curatorial brief was simply that he wanted the exhibition to demonstrate the blurring of boundaries between art, architecture and design. As co-Curators, with Newbetter (Shumon Bhasar and Joshua Bolchover) the British Council Design and Architecture team reacted in a number of ways. Most straightforwardly, we would look for artists and designers whose work hadn’t been seen in China; people who graduated from education within the last five or ten years, and whose practice has become noticed but certainly not at the level of either massive commercial or institutional visibility. It would be a genuinely diverse collection of creative people (including artists, furniture, interactive, graphic and product designers, as well as architects and people thinking at a larger scale) from a generation that Newbetter themselves belong to. Culture often shifts forwards because of the collective push caused by people working in close proximity to each other. London in the last ten years has been one of those places.

The idea of a 'critical practice' was another criterion. In simple terms, it happens when producers from a particular discipline question the traditional limits of that discipline, and experiment with ways out of the expected into the unexpected. Sometimes this means doing something other than what you were trained to do; using your skills in a different way. For others, it manifests in a plural and collaborative practice with people from other backgrounds. With respect to industrial design, we sought designers whose work signifies the extent to which design has strayed from the manipulation of material form into light, sound and digital interaction. That is, not only designers investigating form, but also the disquieting of form by technology, like TROIKA; by information, like Assa Ashuach;  and by alien materials, like WokMedia or Martino Gamper.

Creative people look for short and long term tactics to re-define their freedom. Shezad Dawood, an artist by trade, has been getting movie-poster painters in Pakistan to produce his ideas. Celine Condorelli, an architect, has been working with Gavin Wade, a curator, in a series of interventions that provoke social interactions between local 'users' and 'communities'. Marloes Ten Bhomer's incredible footwear designs often don’t even look like shoes but weird, sci-fi mutations of the foot. Newbetter themselves use their architectural background to curate shows and produce collaborative installations like the horror-inspired project with Neal Rock.

Get it Louder opened in Guangzhou in June 2007 and toured to Shanghai and Beijing