The character 可 can be used to emphasize, the character 爱 means: to love.
Together they form kě ài, which in Chinese means cute.

(and here I get a little sidetracked, sorry! – initially I wrote: Together they spell kě ài, which is the chinese word for cute. But can you say that you spell when you use characters instead of letters? And is 可爱 a word or is it an idea? a notion? a symbol?)

Ok, to continue:
Living on a university filled island surrounded by twenty-something year olds, the level of cute-ness, predominant in (popular) visual culture in China anyway, is almost unbearable. Well, I exaggerate, it’s not so much unbearable, as much as completely alien to me. I feel little or no connection with it. Although admittedly, I’m sometimes amused by it. For instance at the campus printshop, the USB ports are all decorative, transformed into toys:

And when I’m uploading my files onto their computers, the screen is inundated with cute animations while I wait. A little cartoon penguin waddles across desktop as the file is busy transferring:

That children and young people have a taste for all this cute-ness, is one thing.
But the design of the visual identities for some major public and international events in China such as the upcoming Asian Games here in Guangzhou, the Olympics of 2008 and the upcoming Worldexpo in Shanghai, is also pervaded by cuteness.

Coming from the Netherlands, where, not for nothing, one of the internationally reknowned design companies is named Droog Design (Dry Design), all this cute-ness conflicts with my notions of what good, grown-up design should be. And that makes me curious. What is the idea that people have here about cute-ness? Why do cartoonish characters have such enormous appeal? What is this compulsion to animate all kinds of objects by giving them faces? I’m sure there are some interesting a theories to be imagined…and I might give that a try sometime on this blog. Keep an eye on the 可爱-ness tag.