Liao Ke, the head of design firm Xiamen Joyatech Co. Ltd., said industrial design still occupies an uncertain position with many cost-conscious Chinese manufacturers.

Or at least that’s how Liao Ke, the head of design firm Xiamen Joyatech Co. Ltd., sees it.

The conventional wisdom is that design can help some of the country’s struggling manufacturers develop more of their own products and move up the value chain, into higher-profit products.

It’s a point Liao agrees with. His firm, based in Xiamen, has certainly benefited from China’s plans to push design and from greater design interest from local manufacturers. Joyatech has doubled staff since 2007 to more than 70, and now operates offices in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

But he said industrial design still occupies an uncertain position with many cost-conscious Chinese manufacturers.

His company, for example, finds it much harder to operate strictly as a design house, and has seen much of its growth come from project management, handling tooling, sourcing and manufacturing issues for local firms that want design-oriented supply chain management.

“The environment for a design company in China is different than overseas,” said Liao. “We are trying to find the best model for us.”

Eric Johan Djie, a Dutch industrial designer who lives in Xiamen and is a consultant to Joyatech, said Chinese design is in the same place Western design was in its early days, when it was also hard to make money strictly as a design shop.

“In China, manufacturers have no budget for design,” Djie said. “Only companies like Haier and Lenovo that want to make a move in the West put enough money in.”

On a tour of his company’s Xiamen offices in early April, Liao said Joyatech, the largest industrial design firm in Fujian province, has developed expertise in designing extremely durable products that are waterproof, shockproof or dustproof.

Liao, who headed industrial design at Lenovo’s mobile phone manufacturing unit in Xiamen before starting Joyatech in 2003, showed off a mobile phone his company developed for the Chinese army that can be submerged in water and run over by a car, yet still make a phone call.

Today the company works for some of China’s largest manufacturers, including Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE, and Haier, and last year won two Red Star awards from the Chinese Industrial Design Association, for a pen-shaped Bluetooth device and an easy-to-use phone designed for older people.

Beyond working for large Chinese firms, it also does work for small Chinese companies of 10 or 20 people that make mobile phones or other products for the local market. Those companies basically outsource everything, he said.

Large domestic firms like Lenovo are increasingly doing that as well, leaving more tasks to firms like Joyatech, Liao said.

Liao said he is trying to forge stronger links with overseas designers, and there’s a lot of interest on both sides. Liao is also one of the founders of the Fujian Industrial Design Promotion Center, which plans to open this summer with support from the local government, to bolster local design.

One of the challenges for Chinese designers, though, is lack of knowledge of overseas markets, Liao said, which is why he said he started working with Djie.

Djie has been in Asia since 1998, working in Taiwan for Dutch design firm Well Design and then for ERA Design Technology Co. Ltd., Taiwan’s first publicly traded design firm. Today, he lives in Xiamen and works linking Western companies to Chinese firms.

Liao said that in spite of the cost consciousness of some Chinese firms when it comes to design, he thinks industrial design in the country has a good future, as Chinese companies increasingly realize they can no longer compete strictly on low-cost.

“I think there is a big chance here because China is a big market,” he said. “There are so many manufacturers, [and] designers can be close to manufacturing, which is an advantage.”